Part 11

I have recently been watching British politics from a rather interesting angle; I have been seeing Britain through Latin eyes from the Portuguese corner of Europe. Events come to me generally in this order. First the Lisbon _Diario des Noticias_ comes in with my coffee; next day the French _Quotidien_ arrives before lunch and the Italian _Secolo_ at dinner, and there is usually another twenty-four hours before a bundle of London papers comes to hand. The Paris _Daily Mail_ or the _Action Française_ may come in neck and neck with the _Quotidien_, but I don’t go out of my way to see them. I get no American papers at all. In this perspective the death of Dr. Theophilo Braga, a sort of Frederic Harrison, who was the first President of the Portuguese Republic, and a congress of Latin Pressmen in Lisbon take on the importance of considerable international events, and all that looms largest in the London _Times_ or the American Press undergoes a compression that amounts at times to complete effacement. That stupid outrage upon civilisation, the deportation of Miguel de Unamuno, the great rector of the University of Salamanca, to the Canary Islands because of his disrespect for the Spanish monarchy and dictatorship gets a large Press in all these Latin countries. It matters to them. It ought to matter to every civilised man. The petroleum scandals in the United States get a rather muddled attention; every country has the oil scandals it deserves; and there were important articles upon the death of President Wilson. In its day the coming of the League of Nations was a great event. Otherwise there has been very little notice either of the United States or the overseas Empire of Britain. America means Brazil, and “overseas” Angola.

The Latin mind has always inclined to be sceptical and cynical about the League of Nations. Was it Anglo-Saxon practicality or Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy behind this new thing? Did the Americans and British mean what the League seemed to mean, or was it just another of their deep inexplicable manœuvres? The doubts have long since carried the day. The Paris _Quotidien_ supports the League, indeed, but it concerns itself very little about the criticism or creative reconstruction of the League, as it would do if it regarded the concern as a working reality. It treats the whole business as a sort of ethical deep breathing--good chiefly for the soul. When it refers to it, a note of piety comes into its style.

The arrival of a Labour Government in Britain was a matter for lively attention in all these Latin lands. Liberal thinkers everywhere welcomed it with a hopefulness that was only very faintly tainted by suspicion. Here, perhaps, was a new thing, a break in the age-long British tradition of heavy national selfishness and overbearing self-righteousness. Bits of election addresses, Labour manifestos, and so forth, had filled up columns and carried headlines in every paper from Oporto to Fiume and from Mexico to Buenos Aires. This Labour stood for a reconstituted League of Nations, with wider powers; it stood for a generous treatment of Russia and Germany; it stood for disarmament; it stood for a universal retrenchment of military and naval expenditure and a surcease of grabbing and exploitation. Once again, just as with the League of Nations, the Latin Press betrayed the peculiar power which the great English-speaking community might and could exercise, of putting over broad political ideas to the world at large. There is a natural reciprocity between the mind of the Latin community and ours; it is far more delicately critical and far less rudely creative. We can do much to sustain or destroy its faith. It can do much to clarify our ideas.

The first utterances of the new Government were scanned with exceptional closeness; the gestures of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald were watched with ten times the attention that was ever given to Mr. Baldwin’s. The prompt recognition of Russia was widely approved of; the rather empty politenesses towards M. Poincaré were taken as evidence of an essential goodness of heart and a desire to give him a fair chance--and then came this business of the cruisers. It would be hard to exaggerate its evil effect. The first I saw of it was in the Lisbon morning paper. The paragraph was headed “Signor MacDonald, Militarist,” and the statement was made without any qualification that the Labour Government was to lay down the keels of five new cruisers forthwith. It seemed incredible. Followed the French and Italian papers. The Italians were derisive at this footnote to the disarmament conference at Rome, and the French clamoured for six cruisers in reply to the British “challenge.” The _Quotidien_ was disappointed but not surprised. The caricaturists, who do so much in the Latin countries to personify the character of nations and peoples, got to work, and are still at work, rubbing in this last revelation of the British soul. One discerned the sensitive, the irritable Latin mind sick with disgust and bitterly ashamed of itself for its folly in supposing for a moment that the Labour programme was anything more than electioneering flummery. “Labour” was just a fine name for a group of British politicians as dishonest, as basely “patriotic,” as dangerous to the welfare of Europe as any other group.

Never has there been so gross, so stupid and needless a sacrifice of moral capital in international relations. I do not see how Mr. Ramsay MacDonald can ever restore the provisional credit the liberal thought of the Latin States had accorded him. The guns of those five cruisers, though not one of them ever materialise and though they will certainly prove obsolete weapons before they can ever be finished, will have blown the prestige of the British Labour Government as a possible European peacemaker to smithereens.

I will confess I shared this immense disillusionment. As one who had written and spoken to the text of the Labour programme at the last general election, as one who had explained that the Labour Party at least would have the courage for disarmament and a better use for the taxpayers’ money than battleship building, I did my best to suspend my judgment until the London newspapers came to hand with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s speech upon this issue. It seemed impossible that he could have gone the complete Amery he has done. I could not believe that he would not have realised that this thing his Government has done was not a mere parochial extravagance but an act of intense international significance. I expected to find some explanations, some palliations, some apology, that could be put before the foreign observer. I found a speech--the rottenest Old Parliamentary Hand could not have made a more parliamentary speech. It was in two parts: the first part was an ingenious quibble about these ships being merely the replacement of “wastage”--as though the naval equipment of a country was a constant thing that had to be kept up to a standard mark instead of being an incessantly variable thing--and the second was a scarcely veiled admission that the building of these unnecessary and provocative ships was a bribe to the labour in the dockyard constituencies. There was not a word to anticipate the inevitable interpretation of the act abroad; there was not an indication on the part of this astonishing Foreign Minister that the affair would even be observed abroad.

One does not buy a weapon without an enemy in view, and I am altogether at a loss to see what enemy Mr. MacDonald has in view--unless it is the Conservative candidates in the shipbuilding constituencies. Does he think he may have to fight France or Italy or Japan or the United States? Those five cruisers will be no good in a war with France; we should have to tuck them away somewhere and put patrols of submarine chasers to take care of them. In a war between France and Britain the mutual suicide, so to speak, would be achieved through the air. The cruisers would hardly be of more use against Italy. It is Italy, however, which is likely to be most estranged by the thought of them. Italy or Japan. Is there a ghost of a chance of a war with either the United States or Japan? It is our excellent custom to defer to the United States, and we always shall. This leaves Japan. Can anything but the blackest folly bring us into a conflict with Japan except on some issue which would put the United States on our side?

These cruisers are to cost five million pounds--or more if, failing the Capital Levy, Britain is forced to inflation--and they are to give employment to some few thousands of men. Meanwhile I gather that the educational clauses of that magnificent Labour programme which was to have kept the next generation at school (and off the crowded labour market) until it reached the age of sixteen are to be crippled--à la Fisher--for want of funds.

The more Parliament changes, I perceive, the more it is the same thing. It is organised for politicians by politicians; it is elected so stupidly that the statesman wilts into the politician so soon as he breathes its air. He ceases to see beyond the division lobby and the dockyard vote. If laying down cruisers is the chief business of government and the chief end of taxation, I would rather, on the whole, see Mr. Amery spending my money than Mr. Ammon.

XXVIII

DICTATORS OR POLITICIANS? THE DILEMMA OF CIVILISATION

22.3.24

The drift towards dictatorships in many of the European countries has been very marked in the last few years. The mental distress and physical discomforts arising out of the steady process of financial, social, and economic decay in the tangle of nationalist States in Europe, have liberated a lively and widespread discontent with the methods of representative government. The legal way and the parliamentary way has seemed too long, tedious, and disingenuous for the urgent needs of the times. In Italy and Spain, in Hungary and Germany, we have had the complete dictatorship; the shadow of a dictatorship has fallen upon the French outlook. There has been an outbreak of bosses, strong men, tyrants after the Greek pattern, statesmen with special powers, suspensions of the constitution and so forth, across the entire European stage.

To a certain small extent this may be due to a rebellion of ordinary common-sense people against the absurdity of committees doing one-man jobs. In America the disposition to give great powers to mayors and prominent public servants--a disposition which Mr. Belloc calls, absurdly enough, a disposition to “monarchy,” and makes out to be a fundamental difference between Americans and Europeans--is probably due mainly to the perception of the need for a single head and a free hand in many complicated jobs. But the job is defined, and the term of power is defined. That concentration of _ad hoc_ powers in a single competent responsible person is of course a legitimate and most hopeful development of democratic method. It is no more “monarchy” than the power of a judge is monarchy. But the drift in Europe, in Germany, and the Latin countries generally is to a general and not to a specific free hand. The man is there not to do this or that specified thing but to take the whole power of the State out of the hands of the politicians. Russia is a special case; the dictator there is the ghost of Karl Marx acting through the Communist Party. But Russia is as far from parliamentary democracy as any country in the world. Parliamentary democracy did for a brief interval appear in Russia, but it was as suitable wear for that country at its present phase of education as a silk hat for a whale.

Why have all these dictatorships sprung up? Why has there been this decline of faith throughout the world in the Anglo-Saxon device of parliamentary government? Every intelligent person must know that this is a world of men and not supermen, and every lapse to a dictatorship implies a belief in a superman. Every year of a dictatorship diminishes the autonomous vitality of a community, no dictatorship is proof against the degeneration of the dictator through impunity and presumption, and no dictator has ever provided an efficient successor. Yet we find the peoples of important European countries acquiescing in Mussolinis, Riveras, and the like, and powerful minorities in almost every European State asking for similar dictatorships. It is not that they are blind to the defects of dictatorships, but that they dislike parliamentary government more. A dictator may carry on a Government roughly and dangerously, but in many cases Parliaments have failed to carry on government at all.

English-speaking peoples are beginning to realise that what they call “democracy” may not be a universal panacea, and that Parliamentary and Congressional government as it flourished in the nineteenth century with two parties and a choice for the elector limited to two party hacks, instead of being a method of universal validity and altogether perfect, was a temporarily convenient method of government for a fairly homogeneous dominant middle class living under apparently stable conditions. Social developments in Western Europe evolved this class throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a national mentality was evolved concurrently. Transferred to alien soils, parliamentary institutions wilt or become weedy. And it is extremely doubtful whether in Britain, that mother of Parliaments, it is possible for the parliamentary machine to work now except in a very hectic and unsatisfactory way, unless it undergoes extensive adaptations to meet the great financial, economic, and social stresses that have still to try the British community.

In a previous paper I have discussed the electoral reforms whereby Parliament or Congress could be made really representative of the national mind, would cease to be an arena for a stupid and boring party conflict, and would become a smaller assembly, a working council, alive throughout, appointing and criticising the various Ministries. But a reform of representative methods is not in itself a sufficient solution to our problem. A graver and profounder weakness both of the American and British community at the present time is the incoherence and diffuseness of public opinion. Great changes in the range and material of economic life during the last quarter of a century and the financial earthquakes that have followed the war have shattered the old homogeneous and dominant middle-class stratum on both sides of the Atlantic. That was the reservoir of public opinion, and there is nothing equivalent on the new scale to replace it. There have been bold extensions of the franchise in Britain to great classes of inexperienced and inattentive voters; Mr. Adamson’s Bill has brought us within sight of universal suffrage for every man and woman over twenty-one; but there has been no development of political education upon the same scale. Probably a third of the British voting mass after these additions--seven millions, say--will be too indifferent to political issues to vote at all. A half, another ten or eleven millions, will vote for trivial or silly reasons, and will certainly never take the slightest trouble to sustain the Parliament it has elected. Politically they will accept anything they get. They have still to learn to consider politics seriously. There remains about a sixth of the British electorate; less than five millions, a miscellany of every sort of opinion and drawn from every class, with this much in common, that it cares enough about politics to fight about them if necessary. But it is not this sixth but the half that the vote-hunting politician need consider. And it is not the half but some sections of the sixth which may presently resort to illegal methods to achieve its ends.

Are we so remote and secure from the violent phase in Britain as people are apt to suppose? Can Britain go on indefinitely with a crazy electoral method that leaves masses of people thwarted and masses indifferent, and that leaves the mandate of any Government ambiguous? The present Government picks its precarious way amidst issues of the most inflammatory sort. The financial difficulty is not tackled; the Capital Levy is shelved for the time, and we do not know whether the method of taxing and more or less expropriating large bulks of property only, or the method of taxing every creditor, great or small, down to the penny of credit in the beggar woman’s hand, is to be followed. One or other it must be. The first course will evoke the prompt resistance of the Fascist element in the Tory Party. Since the great days of the gun-running by Carson and F. E. in Ulster and the Curragh Pronunciamento, the Tories have been infected with dreams of reactionary illegalities. Army people and so forth are drenched with such stuff. They lost Ireland by it, but they are quite capable of setting about to lose England by the same methods. But though the Tory elements in British life might easily attempt forcible resistance to parliamentary socialisation, they are far too unintelligent to face the alternative of inflation, which will certainly produce just such conditions as will promote a drift towards revolution from the Communist end.... Violence from either side means ultimately dictatorship and the opening phase of a process of disorder and collapse for the entire British system. Between the horns of this dilemma the existing British system has still a few years left in which to modernise, enlarge, and clean its parliamentary methods and to educate its masses to political efficiency.

XXIX

YOUTH AND THE VOTE: THE REJUVENESCENCE OF THE WORLD

29.3.24

The recent discussion of the extension of the British parliamentary suffrage has been an amusing and instructive display. The finer parts of the debate upon Mr. Adamson’s Bill were a little overshadowed in the Press by the Duchess of Atholl’s possibly exaggerated objection to the proposed enfranchisement of several hundred travelling tinkers, and her nightmare of all the women in the country voting down all the men in the country upon some unexpected issue. I must confess that I am not very much interested by the question whether there are to be slight traces of tinker in the next election or not, and the end of the world by collision with some other planet seems a far less remote possibility to me than the lining up of the two separate sexes in flat opposition to each other. But what did interest me was to note that everyone seemed to have caught up his or her opinion just anyhow, and worn it much as people wear false noses at a carnival, and that in the whole ridiculous fray there was no apparent perception of any general reason why some people should vote and not others. I could not find any evidence that a single member had asked himself why people had to vote at all, whether it was a privilege or a duty to vote, and what were the proper qualifications or just claims of a voter.

Mostly, I don’t think they had ever asked themselves any such questions. Members of Parliament don’t think about questions of that kind. They seem to think very little about anything of importance in the world, so much of their time is spent in division lobbies and loafing and gossiping about the House of Commons; but what attention they do give to franchise and electoral method is usually given in close consultation with a parliamentary agent, who is far from the spirit of scientific truth.

Let us try and put the question on rather broader foundations than the House succeeded in doing. And, to begin with, let us consider whether the age of twenty-one is a sensible age at which to graduate a citizen as voter. Sir Sydney Russell-Wells and Sir Martin Conway, two University members, very properly declared it was not. With that we can well agree. Twenty-one marks no natural epoch in the mental and moral life of either man or woman. It is too old for adolescence and too young for any other phase. Twenty-one is a magic compound of seven and three, but nowadays we do not believe very much in the magic of numbers. The reasons why twenty-one was made the “coming-of-age” are lost in the mists of antiquity. But why these two gentlemen should propose therefore to make five-and-twenty the minimum age for a voter of either sex is not very clear. Sir Martin Conway, indeed, warmed up to a luscious eloquence about “woman’s great flowering time.” The young woman between twenty-one and twenty-five “should have her eye upon the glory of life,” and so forth. Even if this were so, it is a little hard to understand the application of the limit to men. Apparently the young man is to undergo a sort of political “couvade” during these rich years, and think sympathetically about babies. As a matter of fact, lots of women far over twenty-five have not yet reached these preoccupations; it would, indeed, be highly improper for most of these below that limit to engage their minds in this fashion, since the majority do not marry until close upon twenty-five, and many much later. The twenty-fifth birthday is, indeed, no more a natural epoch for woman or man than the twenty-first, and Sir Martin Conway’s argument was just a sample of the careless nonsense people talk on these important questions.

But if neither twenty-five nor twenty-one is a real natural division line between the human being capable of citizenship and the junior, the natural minor, where shall we draw that line? I would suggest that we draw it at the age when the individual’s education comes to an end. Education, we are assured, is to prepare the individual for citizenship. When a State turns its young people out of its schools into the streets to seek employment and toil for the community, it tacitly declares that their preparation for citizenship is at an end. If they are not prepared for citizenship they should not be turned out. If they are, then they ought to go on at once to the most stimulating exercise of the rights of citizenship, and vote before they forget their lessons in history and geography and economics and so forth. Why should they have to wait for years, forgetting nearly every general idea they have learnt before the vote comes to rouse them? But the reader will object that this means giving the vote to children of fourteen or indeed in some American States to children even younger. I submit that is no disproof of the principle I have laid down, but only a disqualification of the shocking inefficiency of the educational systems of the English-speaking world. We have no right to cheat our young people out of their votes because we are defrauding them of the best part of their education.

I am one of those people who believe that the minimum age at which whole-time general education should cease is sixteen, and that for at least two years more education in some form, a technical or industrial training at least, associated perhaps with productive employment, and a continuation of the general intellectual work should be given. That would make eighteen the boundary between tutelage and complete responsible citizenship. And to that age I am willing and anxious to see the franchise extended. Education and the franchise are correlated questions, and I do not believe a community can be in a sound state of political organisation until education has moved up and the vote moved down the scale of age to this meeting-point.