PACIFIC AFFAIRS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 231, 1 October 1935, Page 6

PACIFIC AFFAIRS.

AMERICAN INFLUENCE.

INEFFECTUAL IDEALISM,

(By H. F. M. HAAST.)

It is an American, Nathaniel Pcffcr, lccturer on the Far East at Columbia University, who, in the September number of "Pacific Affairs," the quarterly journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations, satirically describes the United States in an article entitled, "America: The Jellyfish of the Pacific." While class divisions are hardening, American socicty is still a classless society in social operation. There is no aristocracy, no peasantry or proletariat. There is a middle class whose only distinguishing mark is an income in the middle ranges, but which is without ; a basis, ideas, purposes or programmer The 1 liberalism of the middle class is "flatulent, for all its grandiloquence." The American i middle class was never so ineffectual. In coni sequence America has met the economic ■ depression more helplessly than Europe. Had 1 the intellectual and liberal middle class been resolute, the New Deal could have been a point of departure for advance to a new social and economic position —to that middle ground between pre-war Wall Street and Moscow that all Liberals profess to seek. But the intellectual liberal middle class whooped paeans to the phrases in which the New Deal was announced, and let the purposes of the New Deal be quietly and primly nullified. The American intellectual liberal is captivated by words and by the enunciation of grand ideals. And so he claniourcd for official measures ■to stop Japan in Manchuria. Ho did not want war, of course; ho only wanted the American Government to bring about that whidi can bo achieved only by force, namely, to impose its will on another Government. At the time when Chinese nationalism was accelerating the movement of the Far Eastern conflict to a crisis, he did not insist on a •multilateral withdrawal of infi*igcnients on China's sovereignty, thus putting all foreign Powers on tho samo plane vis-a-vis China, and giving Japan no legitimate motive for advancing its own interests over those of other Powers while it could. Ho contented himself with ringing declarations of America's traditional "friendship" for China —not even demanding that cxtraterritorialty be renounced as a token of friendship. He was unaware that such elements as economic rivalries entered into the Far Eastern conflict, or that the issue turned on any other consideration than that of idealism or lack of idealism. | He is still unaware that America's interest

ill the Far East has any other motivation than its desire to see justice prevail, and that the Open Door doctrine has any relation to America's economic advantage.

Nowhere else in the world is the peacc movement so widespread, so devoted and so vocal as in the United States, says Mr. Teffcr. Xowhcrc el«c is it so futile. Sense of Responsibility Lacking. America has now neither the advantage of classless society nor the advantage of a directed society—one in which power and authority are vested in a single group. The financial and industrial oligarchy has 110 sense of responsibility outside the realm of actively conducting a profitable business. It would not know how to excrcise responsibility if responsibility were vested in it. Abolish the forms of democracy to-morrow, and give all power to those who make up the directorate of large banks and corporations—they would not know what to do with it once they had given attention to such matters as lowering taxes for high incomes, reducing wages, eliminating restraints in monopoly, and so 011. If the working class, after five years of I

unemployment oil subsistence wages or charity, is still psychologically unprepared to demand unionisation and collective 'bargaining, it cannot be counted a factor of importance in any measurable time. It is only a number of individuals sharing the common characteristics of poverty. Passion for Organisations. The ( middle class also is not a class. It does not know what to have convictions about or what its interest is or that it has any interests. Its grasping at movements and cruwades and grandiloquent idealism signifies its inner discontent. The lack of organisation bespeaks itself in the passion for organisations, and for organised activities, the result of which is nil.

So far as there is any purposive direction in American life, it comes from those who control great aggregates of wealth, and is confined to forwarding the immediate superficial interests of enterprises in which great ""J? 1 elates of wealth are concentrated.

Mr. Peffer might have said that Japan is aiming at becoming the octopus of the Pacific spreading its tentacles in many directions, and if the jellyfish conies into contact with the octopus, grandiloquent idealism will stand a poor chance against stark realism.