POLITICAL CONNOTATIONS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21865, 19 August 1936, Page 7

POLITICAL CONNOTATIONS

TO THE EDITOB OE THE PRESS. Sir, —Economic democracy has practically gone, democratic social relationships seem to be going, and only political democracy remains. Probably because democracy has not offered an automatic device for good government, old forms of tyranny under new labels, sponsored with blood-and-thunder oratory, have made progress as a vehicle for the focus of envy and revenge. Politics being the free exchange of opinion regarding the best policy for the life of a society, must have flexibility, and human nature, being what it is, the attempt of democracy to enforce the necessary limitation as well as guarantee the right of freedom is the weakest joint in its armour, at which the dart of dictatorship, which means the prohibition of politics, is aimed. It is admitted that, under dictatorships the administration of justice, outside political sins, has made progress. For instance, the outworn maximum of no punishment unless the law has been infringed is replaced by the more efficacious, no crime left unpunished. The incidence of such scandals as the de Clifford, Hatrey, Stavisky, and Insull, are not important in themselves, for such types exist from Chicago to Canton,_from Elsinoi’e to our own fai- city; but it is a. study under democracy of the relative infliction of penalties which is significant. ijnderlying political connotations can occasionally be glimpsed realities affectting the bemused human components of any ritua'-'tic political creed. "What this influence is exactly, cannot be argued arbitrarily. It appears as a collective je ne sais quoi noticed in the parts played by the middle classes in the English Rebellion of the 1640’s down to our own times, somewhat accentuated by the influx of the machine age, and nurtured along the corridors of shady finance. Its influence produces variations in the anthems of political faiths. Mussolini, while preparing for his statistically self-evident foe on which his demographic theory is based, offsets such preparation by fomenting dissatisfaction among the coloured people, even when hje l has a war of pacification to accomplish in

Abyssinia, He evidently uiscounts the fact that Sir Aldo Castellani, late of Harley street, London, who, ~won _ the preliminary war for him in Abyssinia, has not devised a national, vaccine to counteract the poisonous virus he has been instilling into the minds of his coloured brothers. Its converse influence can be observed in the reactions of Hitler, who has said everything backward as well as forward in alternate moods, and yet dares not bring Ernest Thalmann to trial.

This stress of loyalty is often necessary, and politics being' an art, the artist’s intuition is essential. Trotsky s is obvious. Mussolini’s conception would do justice to the trecento period, and Hitler rivals von Papen s, and is his trump card with the career diplomats of the Wilhelmstrasse. , In the present international situation any action by the Second International has lost its initial effectiveness as regards transportation, on account of popular diplomacy and military foresight resulting in the self-sufficiency of, revisionist countries; the sanctions against Italy being analogous to the naval bombardment of the Dardanelles in its effect. However, dictatorships must ultimately destroy themselyes by drawing together the gregarious instinct of common self-respect in humanity, and when the peoples of the world are on the march the reactionary only exemplifies the tragic futility of revolution.—Yours, etc., WHITE WATERS. August 16, 1936.