AS OTHERS SEE US.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 200, 24 August 1929, Page 7 (Supplement)

AS OTHERS SEE US.

STRIKING GERMAN STUDY.

PORTKAIT OP LABOUR PARTT.

BRITISH GENIUS FOR POLITICS.

(By E.L.C.W.)

LONDON, June 28,

We owe some gratitude to Messrs. Putnam for publishing "Portrait of the Labour Party" at the price of five shillings, for this book by Dr. Egon Wertheimer, who for some years past has been the London correspondent of "Vorwaerts" and the associated newspapers of the German Social Democratic party, is a brilliant study of the party which, since it was published, has come into office. It is a book which everyone ought to read who takes the faintest interest in the national welfare, for it is not only a brilliant analysis of the developments which have so greatly modified Labour policy since 1924, but also because it gives the most interesting comparisons between England and Continental Labour parties, enlightening to many both here -and in European countries, where the book appeared in German before our general election, and to that extent was extremely useful in. enlightening the public abroad on little understood differences which often play a part in creating international misunderstand-

The author is no uncritical admirer of everything British, but the spirit which informs this important book can be made clear by his preface where he says: "But it is not the intention of this book to meddle with the internal politics of a country whose guest for live years the author is grateful to have been. Grateful because, in spite of censorship, puritanism, and D.0.R.A., he has learned there to enjoy a spiritual freedom such as no other European country offers; grateful, above all, because he has obtained an insight into the eoul of a people that, although superlative in the praise of the qualities it imagines itself to possess, scarcely seems to be aware that, because of its political instinct, its inborn readiness to compromise, its capacity to humanise public life, it is the political nation par excellence, and that to-day, as ever, it is in this excelled by no other people in the world. "This political genius of the British nation gives the author ground for hope that Great Britain will succeed more rapidly than any other great industrial State in overcoming the difficulties that must arise on the advent of a Socialist party to power, and that she will solve the political problems of economic democracy in a manner that will be a, model for the other nations of Europe. For this reason, Great Britain's importance in the comity of nations has never before been so great as in this age of the struggle of the Labour party for a Parliamentary majority, and, with it, power."

Differences in Outlook. Space forbids our tracing out his main argument, but some of his comparisons between Marxian socialism and that of the British brand, deserve quotation. "There are certain differences in their intellectual outlook that are unmistakable. The German trade union leader as a rule has had a Marxist training. It is true that often his Marxism has become mere lip-service, but he has learned from it to think thoroughly and to see beyond the immediately practical in the problems that confront him. His British brother, whose mind is unburdened by theoretical conviction, has a far greater appreciation of immediate realities. Marxist training has given the German leader ability to counteract in his union those medieval craft tendencies that have hampered the British trade union movement even to this day, and to approve rationalisation as an inevitable process in capitalist development at a time when to the Englishmen, with the exception of men like Citrine and Bevin, not only the concept but the process itself seemed more than suspicious." He notes too the words of a young American Socialist writer, that "the average English Labour party member would be no less indignant at the attitude of the Continental Socialist towards religious questions than the average Anglican Bishop."

Labour Personalities. For the rest, there is only space to indicate that this Look contains pungent descriptions of the Labour party's personalities. In the Prime Minister Dr. Wertheimer notes "his inaccessibility, his deliberate isolation from those on whose loyalty and devotion the success of any future Labour Government depends, and of his schoolmasteiish condescension, his hypersensitiveness and vanity. He moves to-day in a personal vacuum that is almost painful to behold. Those who have grouped themselves round him of late years are not always disinterested friends, but often men and women who hope to see their loyalty solidly rewarded with Ministerial posts in the next Cabinet."

. . . . "His 'come-back , from the isolation of the war period is attributed to the circumstance that 'however little else he may resemble Lenin, this he has in common with the great Russian revolutionary—in the slums of the manufacturing towns and in the hovels of the countryside he has become a legendary being, the personification of air that thousands of down-trodden men and women hope and dream and desire."

Dr. Wertheimer finds Mr. Thomas one of the queerest figures in international labour movement. "He has created round him an atmosphere of vulgar cordiality and a hail-fellow-well-met manner which appears to have taken in the whole British Empire with the exception of about a dozen Communist , :. He possesses the extremely rare quality of civil courage, the one extenuating featuro in the character of this painful but disarming personality. .. . No tribute of the nations' to the British constitution is complete without his signature, no organisation rising above party and condemning warfare is conceivable without the Rt. Hon. J. H. Thomas among its honorary members. In any other country he would sit between two stools, distrusted, perhaps even despieed. His rise to tjie status of a national figure may be but another proof of the political genius of the British nation, of ite ability to pick the right man and of its power to assimilate new types and classes. . . . Among the rising men Sir Oswald Mosley is foremost. He not oil desires power; he is Milling to earn it by unsparing energy 'and sleepless devotion to the task in hand."

But I must stop, this is a book you must read for yourself, if you would understand aright the movement which is most pregnant of influence on world affairs.