SOME SEARCHING QUESTIONS

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 1, 3 January 1933, Page 6

SOME SEARCHING QUESTIONS

POLITICS AND MORALS.

Sometimes I wonder how young fellows —or for that matter young- women —arc to find their way through the thicket of incompatible notions in which older generations, seem to be caught (writes Mr. Wiokham Steed in the "Christian Science Monitor"). I am thinking chiefly of the boys in our great public schools like Eton and Harrow (without forgetting Winchester, Rugby and Westminster) with some of whom I have been and shall again bo in contact. They are being urged to take an interest in public and international affairs, and arc looking for guidance to men whom experience is supposed to have rendered competent to give it. Many of these boys show keen intelligence. They put searching questions. When I next meet them I may have to answer questions of this sort: "Prince Bulow was an experienced diplomatist and statesman. He rose to be German Imperial Chancellor. In the last volume of his 'Memoirs' (which deals with his earlier life) he says: Tolitics have almost nothing to do with morality.' Is he right or wrong?" "Is it any good to study moral philosophy or any kind of philosophy? The 'Life of Lord Oxford and Asquith,' just published, shows that the former Liberal Prime Minister looked upon metaphysics as 'the search of a blind man in a dark room for a. black hat which is not there.' Is it not better to study physics and leave the 'meta' alone?" "Germany claims the right to equality in armaments, and threatens to re-arm if her right is not recognised. What ought Great Britain to do about it?" "The spokesmen of China say that their country entered the League of Nations because the assurance was given that the League stood for a new order in the world and would settle all disputes according to right and justice. A year ago Japan began to take away from China the province of Manchuria. What has the League done to protect Chinese rights and to insure justice? If it cannot assert its authority over Japan, is there a new order in the world, or is the League a farce?" I fancy that Sir John Simon, the learned lawyer who presides over the British Foreign Office, would find these schoolboy questions harder to answer than those which members of the Opposition are likely to put to him in Parliament. He might talk round them —a fatal course witli schoolboys. They are very quick to see whether they are being humbugged or not. So I am still wondering what I shall say when these or similar questions are put to me this autumn, as they certainly will be. If "politics have almost nothing to do with morality" there is no way out. The fourth volume of Bulow's "Memoirs" is, to my mind, the most instructive of them all. He took Bismarck as his model; and the two points in Bismarck's statecraft which he most gushingly admired wore the falsification of the Ems dispatch and the tricking of the French Ambassador, Benedetti, in IS7O, so as to create, in Billow's words, "a united fighting front" in Germany against France by "rousing the furor tentonieus," and to blacken the face of the French in the eyes of England. Each of these dodges was successful. Does the end therefore justify the means? If so, there can be no "new order in the world,'" nor can the study of moral philosophy avail anything,