Chicago Lawyer Has Five-point Plan for Peace

On the sixth anniversary of the signing of the Briand-Kellogg treaty for the outlawry of war, Salmon O. Levinson, Chicago attorney who is chairman of the Chicago Committee for the Defense of Human Rights Against Nazism, and who was called by the late Aristide Briand “the real father of the Pact of Paris,” declared that, as nations lived for centuries under the regime of war, “we must be a little patient and tolerant if the shadow of war has not been altogether dispelled in the short space of six years.”

Levinson, in auditing the six-year balance sheet of peace, submits five recommendations which he believes will help make the pact a more living instrument of peace:

1. The League of Nations should incorporate the Pact of Paris into its covenant and make it the paramount and controlling principle of the Covenant.

2. The United States should justly and deservedly take the lead in cleaning up the economic mess of the World War.

3. War debts should be compromised on a basis fairly in line with world financial conditions, but only if the nations will effectively agree upon a five-year holiday in arms construction, to be followed by drastic but equitable reduction in all armaments.

4. The United States should enter the World Court.

5. An international agreement should be made, fixing and stabilizing the relative values of currencies.

“These things,” Levinson avers, “will bring confidence to business, reopen the channels of international trade, remove many of the causes of international friction, and thus make tremendously for peace.”

In conclusion Levinson says:

“Now I contend that the antiwar treaty, suddenly adopted by a world dominated by war and its traditions, has made giant circles. Perhaps the outlawry of war had a premature birth. Certainly I did not expect to see it flower before at least twenty-five years of campaigning and education away from the glories of war.”