Chapter LV: After a Year of Journalism: an Outbreak of Auto-Obituary 347 (5)

Wet or fine, the air of Portugal has a natural happiness in it, and the people of the country should be as happy and prosperous as any people in the world. The country has a magnificent position, and great overseas possessions. Lisbon is the natural port of Europe for South America and West Africa. The olive and the orange and such-like things can be grown here under the best conditions. The very various and great, though largely undeveloped, mineral wealth includes radioactive deposits of world-wide importance. And so forth. There is indeed all the material here for great prosperity. As a matter of fact, I have never seen a less prosperous-looking nation. Great poverty prevails throughout this land. I have never seen anywhere, not even in Russia, working people so ill-clad, so patched and ragged, so manifestly neglected and under-nourished. And there is also a vast amount of preventable disease. The women are old at thirty, bearing children to die; the men are bent at fifty. The poorer houses are hovels, and half the population is illiterate. And yet it is not a low-grade population. It is varied in type and complexion, but there is a conspicuously high proportion of intelligent and interesting faces, and the manners of the people have much of that geniality of the air they breathe.

Why is this country so conspicuously poor? Why are its roads so abominable that even between this prosperous pleasure resort of Estoril and Lisbon, a dozen miles away, an automobile journey is a dangerous adventure? Why are my letters and cables decaying in the Lisbon post-office, and why does everyone say that things are going from bad to worse, and hope for such violent remedies as a dictatorship? In no part of Europe is the riddle of European decay posed so plainly as it is here in this setting of windy sunshine and gay colour and natural wealth.

The full answer to that riddle so far as it concerns Portugal would involve a long history. But certain broad operating causes may be noted. All Europe suffers from division, but it is in the smaller countries that the evils of division are most apparent. The smaller the country the nearer the Custom House and the more hampered the trade. Lisbon might be one of the greatest ports of Europe as Beira in Portuguese Africa might be the chief port of South Africa, but for this, that a little way behind each is a national frontier with a strangulating Custom House. No goods or passengers will endure the present railway journey through Spain and Portugal if they can find another way to the high seas. The railways are necessarily short little railways and they are inefficient. And every sort of transport, and indeed every concern depending upon organised labour, is further troubled by another consequence of the sub-division of Europe. The money is unstable. Portugal, like every proud little sovereign State, must, of course, have its own currency. Anything else would be unthinkable to the patriotic Portuguese. But the currency of so small a country is at the mercy of big speculative interests abroad. The recent postal strike turned entirely upon the readjustment of wages to rising prices. That is the common issue in nearly all European labour struggles now, but it produces its acutest conflicts in the weaker countries.

The railways of Portugal are in a very bad condition and the roads are frightful. Everywhere there are the visible evidences of incompetent or corrupt administration. A little country like this, with an unstable currency, cannot keep its popular education up to date; there is not a sufficient reading public therefore to sustain an authoritative Press and literature of political criticism. Ministers are not sufficiently watched. And as to the things that happen in the overseas possessions of Portugal one can hardly learn anything at all from the Portuguese Press. No “public opinion” seems to be watching them at all. There is a distraction of interest to other centres. Portuguese who grow rich in the Portuguese possessions bank and invest their money abroad, chiefly in London; there is a perpetual outgoing of this tribute from the Portuguese empire to the stabler, greater States. Nowhere else in Europe has one so strong a feeling of a country in pawn to capital held abroad.

It seems to me that the full exercise of national sovereignty in Portugal lies at the root of all its present troubles. It is a convenient specimen, so to speak, of the universal European disease: the attempt to treat what are now only parts of a system as though they were still complete wholes. Its absolute independence, instead of securing its people the full benefits of freedom and all the material possibilities of the land, is the very thing that keeps the country dependent upon big international financial and business interests. If Portugal, instead of standing alone with its colonies to fight the financial and economic forces of the world, were part of a combine of States, acting together politically, financially, and economically, it would be in a far better case than it is at the present time. I have no doubt in my own mind that if Portugal were a free State in a larger union in which sovereignty was sufficiently merged to ensure a common currency, a common inter-State traffic control, free trade at least within the union, common labour conditions, and a common front to the speculative forces that are destroying Europe, her outlook would be vastly different from what it is to-day. She would very speedily cease to be a land of slovenly and increasingly inaccessible loveliness, and her people would no longer be the most lamentably wasted nation in Europe.

And I do not see that such a union is a very remote or improbable thing. A congress of Latin Pressmen has recently been held in Lisbon, and beneath a turbid flow of compliments and flatteries there were many signs of a real and practical recognition of the possibility of, and the enormous material advantages of, a federation of Latin Europe and Latin America. There seems to be a growing recognition in Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America of the essential similarity of the Latin civilisation in all this wide patchwork of States. It may lead sooner than English-speaking people expect to practical political co-operation. From the point of view of world civilisation all such agglomerations of States, that will gradually relax the intensity of nationalist concentration, are desirable and welcome developments.

XXVI

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM

8.3.24

If the world had suddenly become rational in November 1918, I suppose there would have been a conference of all the Powers of the world to atone for their common sins and restore their common welfare. But as the world is some thousands of years yet from rational collective conduct we have the treaty of the Victors, the Demi-League of Nations, and all the post-war disorder, waste, and misery that still unfold upon us. The League is unsoundly planned; it stands on rotten foundations; it is poisoned by the delusion that sovereign States are real enduring human things instead of being arrangements entirely provisional and largely hallucinatory, and it does not represent more than a portion of mankind. Still, there is talk of at last bringing in Russia and Germany, and it will be interesting to see how the people who have got hold of it will set about tinkering up an arrangement with the German people and the Russian Soviet States.

In Britain and America there are considerable organisations for the glorification of the League of Nations. In Britain, in the countryside especially, the League of Nations Union has become a social feature, rather like a more liberal Primrose League; it has pleasant meetings, parties, bazaars, tennis tournaments, fêtes with sack races, and so forth, and no parliamentary candidate can afford to neglect it; but it has no ideas worth speaking about of how the problems of a world organisation are to be approached. It just glorifies, simply and loyally. At the beginning of the League of Nations Union a few of us made a desperate attempt to establish a Research Department in the organisation. We felt there were a lot of things we didn’t know and that had to be known about the psychology of international co-operation, a lot of questions about scope and method that wanted hammering out, and that the time was short before action was thrust upon us. It was, however, impossible to get anything effective done. Few of our colleagues realised that there was anything in the business that could not be settled at once by anyone with a good heart and a clear, loud voice; that Research Department faded out in the platitudinous blaze of Lord Grey’s great meeting in Westminster; and then Mr. and Mrs. Wilson came to Europe, and upon the wave of their coming this present League of Nations, such as it is, a ramshackle raft of political misconceptions, achieved its magnificent launch. Future generations will study its incredible constitution in a desperate attempt to realise the full mental slovenliness of our times. Personally, I am for a world conference to take it down and build something better, but that is because I have a simple, straightforward mind. What everyone will consider more practicable and more politic will be to alter it bit by bit and worry it round, tortuously and expensively, towards the form of a League of Mankind against Nations, that it ought to have been from the beginning.

Now how are Germany and the Union of Soviet States coming into the League? Are they to come in as Boss States, like the British Empire, with a parcel of accessory faggot votes representing Dominions and Possessions, or are they to come in on a footing with Hayti, the Hedjaz, Abyssinia, and so forth? Will they come in as the equals of Abyssinia? I would like to know the ideas of the Prime Minister upon this question. I do not think the present constitution of the League of Nations allows them to come in on any tolerable terms at all. That being so, it follows that any attempt to bring in either or both of these great masses of people will involve a special conference to reconstruct the League; the League will have to liquidate and reconstruct itself. Both Germany and Russia, that land of new ideas, may have some bold proposals to make. In Britain we have had little but fulsome praise or angry exposure of the League since it was set up at Geneva. In America it has been talked about endlessly, but I do not know if it has been thought about at all. In France there are signs of an awakening to the needs of a reconstructed League. M. Bertrand, of the _Quotidien_, calls for a League that shall represent peoples and not Governments, and proclaims that the first article of the Republican Credo. The time is at hand when the League might be very beneficially altered, given a better balance, and made more serviceable to mankind.

One cardinal evil could be attacked and at least minimised: the absurd pretence that anything with the legal status of a sovereign State is a nation, a people, a thing with a distinctive soul and an individuality, entitled to full and equal consideration in the counsels of mankind. It is to this we owe the intolerable absurdity that while such highly individualised people as the Scotch and Welsh have no voice as such in the world’s affairs, a trumped-up State like the Hedjaz votes and speaks on an equality with Holland or Denmark, and that while one group of black barbarians is solemnly welcomed as Abyssinia (that age-long friend of Poland) the far better educated and altogether more civilised Zulu and Basuto peoples must be represented by a tenth of the coat-tails--it works out at about that, I believe--of Lord Cecil. If nations and races are all to be represented, then India is full of them, from the Veddahs upward; if sovereign independence is the standard, then India has no rightful place at Geneva. But if we recognise fully that the League we need is to serve the purposes not of nations but of mankind, then we shall cease to be embarrassed either logically or practically by political oddities or ethnological rarities.

Let us consider in its crudest form a possible alternative. Should the League of Nations be put upon a population basis and should its members have a card vote after the pattern of a British Trade Union Congress, in which each representative has votes in proportion to the number of workers he represents? This would give an undesirably heavy voting power to the quasi-representatives of great barbaric illiterate populations. In world affairs an illiterate population can have no will because it can have no knowledge. But supposing voting power were given in proportion to the number of literates in a population or to the number of University students. Then we should at least get some sort of approximation to the relative intelligence and power of the various States. And suppose that subject to this definition of voting power every State sent just as few or just as many representatives to the Assembly and appointed them or selected them and distributed its votes among them as it thought fit. And suppose the council were appointed, not by nations, but indifferently by the vote of the Assembly. Then at Geneva we should really be getting towards something like a representation of the civilisation of the world or of the civilisation of as much of the world as took part in it. We really should have a body with authority behind it, capable of handling something more than the petty arbitrations and the necessary small arrangements of international affairs, of which the present propagandists of the League of Nations make such boasts.

It is amazing how unable people seem to be to realise the full danger of an assembly entirely dominated by the idea of competitive nationalism, and the urgent necessity of getting away from that idea, however great the mental exertion required. For suppose presently Mr. MacDonald is successful in getting in Russia and Germany, and suppose the League begins to handle such larger questions as disarmament, European currency, tariffs, and so forth, then just as the interests involved become greater, so much the more nationalist will the spirit of the delegates and representatives become. The League gatherings under the present constitution will certainly become battlegrounds of great nationalist interests. The dear little smaller States will be drawn into groups and alliances about the greater States. They will not be able to help themselves. Their votes will be cowed and bullied or bribed votes. So long as the members go to Geneva to represent not mankind but national Governments they will go there in a diplomatic, bargaining, and competitive spirit. There will develop a pro-French or pro-British group, and an anti-French or anti-British group; the alliances and antagonisms of another great war may easily work themselves out upon the floor of the League gatherings. That all the nations of Europe and under European influence may have been got to meet in Geneva will in itself be no more a guarantee of peace than was the meeting of the United States Congress before the election of President Lincoln a guarantee of peace in America. It is a matter of supreme importance to the whole world that before it is too late this body which we now call the League of Nations should be denationalised and put upon a cosmopolitan basis.

XXVII

THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL: THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS

15.3.24

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.

Let us consider first the justice of this. Think what we thrust upon the youth of eighteen in our communities. We voters, a good third of us above military age, will treat him as citizen enough to undergo the utmost fatigues and horrors of war, and to be maimed and to die for us, and the girl of fourteen (is it?) may marry, and the girl of sixteen may commit herself to dishonour, and either man or girl may toil in factory or foundry. All that we put upon them. We force them by need and circumstance to forgo the better part of their education, to subdue all the wide and wonderful imaginations of these opening years, and we oblige them to contribute to the wealth of the State in unattractive work. But they may have no voice in matters in general until they are thoroughly broken in. I can see a sort of expediency in disenfranchising unsuccessful people after forty or so, they are dull and cowed by that time and will bring little to the polls but their fears and inferiorities. But why gag the young for three of their most vivid years?

And next there is to be considered the benefit to the individual citizen of stepping straight from learning to responsibility. He will be brought into conscious and effective relationship with political and industrial institutions at the same time; he will face them as two aspects of one thing just when the spirit of inquiry is strongest in him. And such of the younger women who are waking up to what Sir Martin Conway calls the “glory of life” will realise that childbearing is a thing of issues wider than the fireside; they will be called upon to think of war and education and the whole future in the very time when the continuity of life is brought most effectively before their minds. What sort of a world, what sort of political process can Sir Martin be thinking about when he suggests that a vision of the glory of life ought to disqualify a voter?

And finally let us consider the benefit to the country and the world at large of a more youthful electorate. To bring in voters in their nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first years will be to bring in three million and more fresh minds, all unsettled as yet, all facing the world adventurously. They will be a wholesome counterweight to the grudging rate-payer, the small shopkeeper, the _rentier_, the anxious and hopeless and fearful multitude of the unsuccessful and defensive middle-aged, the great supporters of “Anti-Waste” campaigns, “safety” armaments, policies of “security,” and all sorts of patriotic cowardice. These elder folk think of the next quarter day or the next year; it is all that interests them; they will be dead soon and they want to shuffle along as comfortably and with as little troublesome novelty as possible until then. The interests of the youth of eighteen reach forward half a century and they may work with a reasonable hope of a better world for themselves as well as their children. They may have the more wisdom for the very reason that they have acquired less worldly discretion. And for all of us who believe that education is already touched by a new spirit and that it is surely being made better, the younger the age of enfranchisement the greater our hopes of an early effect of the new education upon the affairs of mankind.

“Universal education up to eighteen, universal enfranchisement at eighteen”; along that line lies our path to a real civilisation. Along that path we shall go as the breath of a new generation blows into Congress and Parliament and these assemblies cease to be the gatherings of political botchers and tinkers representing the broken spirit and curtailed desires of a forty-year-old electorate. For round about forty must be the average age of the present-day British elector.

XXX

OLIVE BRANCHES OF STEEL: SHOULD THE ANGELS OF PEACE CARRY BOMBS?

5.4.24

_The will for peace is futile without the courage to disarm._ I would like to have that proposition printed in large letters and put up at all the meetings of the British League of Nations Union, just to see what the worthy practitioners in easy optimism who fill these gatherings would make of it. I doubt if half the kindly idealists who support the League of Nations in Britain and America are prepared for any effectual disarmament of their own countries. For others--yes; but not for their own dear land.

Since the refusal of France even to discuss land disarmament or the question of submarines at Washington I have kept up a pretty steady fire of disagreeable allusions to France. I have sung and sung again, with variations and amplifications, my little refrain about Senegalese and Submarines in--quite a number of journals. But France has her excuses, the next election may release her from the Bloc National and the Armament firms to the free exercise of international virtue, and after all virtue should begin at home. Are not both the United States and the British Empire, considered in the rôle of peace-seeking States, overarmed? The general will of all the English-speaking communities is, we all know and say and repeat, for an enduring world peace. But even a savage understands that he must drop and leave his weapons and hold up innocent hands before he can get to honest peace talk.

Consider a crude form of the issue. Suppose the United States and the British Empire got together and disarmed completely, suppose they retained the merest police force and placed all the rest of their joint navies at the disposal of an international council, on which they would have an adequate representation of course, what would happen? There would be an immediate reduction of public expenditure and so much relief of economic life from taxation. Would anything else happen? Would Japan suddenly fling herself upon California, Italy seize Malta and Egypt, the Red Army pour down into India, or France destroy London? Does anyone--unless it be my dear old friends Mr. Henry Arthur Jones and Mr. Leo Maxse--believe any of these things would happen? Or anything of the sort?

As a matter of fact we have France now, at the present time, so much more powerfully equipped in the air than Britain and with the British anti-aircraft establishment so reduced, that she could, if she wished to do so and dared to do so, smash up London and put most of the English naval and commercial ports out of action before any really effective counterstroke could be made. There has been a powerful Press campaign in France against Britain, and there is plenty of hostile feeling there. Led by a propagandist Press a great multitude of Frenchmen really believe that the favourite occupation of the English-speaking peoples is buying francs at one price in order to sell them at a lower one. Nevertheless, that attack doesn’t come and it never will come. The temporary satisfaction would be so poor that it would not balance the disagreeable anticipation of an ultimate revenge. Moreover, the immediate financial and economic collapse both of France and Britain would manifestly ensue. Air warfare and poison gas have so enhanced the destructiveness of war and made it so inconclusive, and France and Britain are so close together now and so accessible one to the other, that they have to face the fact--an annoying fact for every true patriot--that they can no longer regard war as a means of settling even their worst differences. As well think of settling a dispute between two next-door neighbours by burning both their houses and massacring all the inmates. It really does not matter now which of the two Powers is the stronger on land or sea. It is a consideration of no practical value whatever between them.

And just as an attack of France upon Britain is unthinkable at the present time, although all the military advantage lies at present with France, so, too, any attack upon the vast joint territories of the United States and the British Empire, though they neither of them had a battleship in commission nor a ton of explosive ready, would be an absurd proposition. There is no other Power on earth that could do it to any profit at all, and without the ultimate certainty of a crushing rearmament and revenge. It would be like a tiger-cat trying to kill and eat an elephant. In all the world now there are only four countries capable of starting-in at complete first-class modern warfare: Britain, France, Japan, and the United States. Italy has neither the coal nor the ore necessary for so heavy an enterprise; the hairiest, loudest Fascisti in the world will not make up for that; and Russia has not the industrial plant for the necessary munitions of aggression. She has vast resisting power, as ever, but no attacking power. All the other countries of the world, if they fight nowadays, must fight with the munitions and loans the four possible belligerents grant them. These four countries therefore, of themselves, could inaugurate a world peace; and the interests of their peoples, as distinguished from the armament interests, urgently demand a secure world peace. The difficulty is to begin. The Press of each of the armament-capable four is closely interwoven with the armament profiteers, and the Press of either country will begin a campaign of panic about what the other three are doing directly there is any serious possibility of relaxed armament anywhere. Since the United States and Britain are easily first in preaching peace and arbitration to the world, I suggest that it is for them to set the example and begin. But at the first intimations of a serious abandonment of “preparedness” Lord Rothermere and his American equivalents--if there are equivalents of Lord Rothermere in America--will see to it that the nervous householder dreams of aeroplanes coming down the chimney and submarines coming up the sink, and wakes gibbering of “security” like a _Matin_-soaked French patriot.

And most of the tremendous outfit we English-speaking peoples carry isn’t even good for war. It is like a battle-axe in a tramcar, a terrifying offensive affair, but not really effective in a fight at close quarters. The time when war was a generalised thing is past. You can no longer have an army or navy that goes anywhere and does everything. For Britain to fight France, or Japan, or the United States, or Russia, or Italy, demands in each case a different sort of warfare, with different methods and different appliances. British battleships camouflaged as cruisers and docks for them half-way round the earth would be no good against Russia or Italy, and very little use against France. Against Japan they would be good for her submarines to chase and blockade while our submarines chased and blockaded the Japanese warships. A big air force, again, would be little use against the United States or Japan. Considered in relation to any possible specific war they may have to wage, the present war establishments of the great belligerent Powers, the miscellaneous elaborate material that the armament people and their unimaginative army traditions have induced them to buy are as likely to be efficient as the equipment of the White Knight in _Alice in Wonderland_. The methods and objectives and so forth of any next war that may surprise the politicians (just as children are surprised by fires when they play with matches), conducted by the sort of soldiers we possess and with the stuff they will handle as “equipment,” will certainly be more discursive and silly and ineffective even than those great pushes and counter-attacks and raids and bombings and so forth of the last great war, and in their inconclusive way infinitely more destructive.

But if these preposterous armaments are unlikely to be conclusive in warfare, they do at any rate block the way very effectively to any reorganisation of the world for peace. You can’t make love in armour. All this lumpish preparedness keeps the atmosphere of human life unwholesome; it prevents the settlement by any frank concerted action of the tariff conflicts, financial squabbles, currency annoyance, and mutual economic injuries that are rapidly destroying the present social system. Every big nation comes into such discussions an implicit bully. The nations have to learn the same lessons that individuals learnt in the middle ages, they have to learn not to bear arms even in the company of those who do. In the middle ages, when the loving-cup went round, one’s neighbour stood as one drank to protect one’s back from the assassin’s knife. At last some reckless souls took heart to sit and drink and trust their fellow men. Other desperate spirits left their weapons at home--and survived. But the nations are still half-way back to barbarism. Our cartoonists draw Uncle Sam and John Bull as decent peaceable everyday citizens. They flatter our countries. Really the Great Powers should be drawn as completely canned warriors with their wary eyes and noses just peeping out of their preparedness. And this in spite of the fact that the only serious danger to either is that the weight and clumsiness of this silly equipment and of the world-wide distrust it produces will undermine his business and his national health altogether.

XXXI

THE CASE OF UNAMUNO: THE FEEBLE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

12.4.24

There is nothing greater in the world of men than thought. Science, literature, and art; what other glories has man? And yet the company of men of science and letters and art forms but the feeblest of republic throughout the world, is insignificant socially and politically, and wins only posthumous respect.