WHITHER BRITAIN?

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume LV, Issue 37, 11 May 1934, Page 2

WHITHER BRITAIN?

A SHAW'S BRILLIANT LECTURE. FUTURE OF THE EMPIRE. WAR WILL END IN RIDICULE. The following lecture, originally given by Mr G. Bernard Shaw over the British broadcasting system, was repeated over the New Zealand Friendly Road Station (Auckland) by Mr i. Meltzer. It is a brilliant exposition of the future of the British Empire and'the problem as the white and coloured races, as viewed by the noted'author and dramatist: N Whither Britain? What a question! Even if I knew, and you all know very weir that I do not know, could I tell you, in half an hour? Now put a reasonable question, say a little bit of the big question: Is Britain heading straight for war ? That's what you want to know, isn't it? Well, at present Britain- is not heading straight for anywhere. She is a ship without a pilot, driving before the winds of circumstance; and as such she is as likely to drift into war as into anything else, provided somebody else starts the war. All the statesmen in Europe agree that another war would be a deplorable catastrophe; and every country in the world iis willing to disarm if all the others will disarm first, very much as I might safely offer to subscribe one hundred million pounds to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children if twelve other philanthropists would do the same;, and so the' League of Nations has set up a Disarmament Conference, which, after two years of fooling, has virtually ended in the confession of the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, a clear-headed lawyer, that| the Disarmament Conference is really an Armament Conference, vainly trying to regulate armaments; and the chairman of the Conference, Mr Arthur Henderson, has threatened to resign because not one of the Powers has, or ever had, the slightest intention either of disarming or of refraining from pursuing its researches into the newest and most frightful methods of slaughter with all the diligence that terror can inspire. Only, they .would all like to do it as cheaply as possible, for the war taxation is very heavy. So they spent months discussing whether, if England promises never to kill a German with a sixteen-inch shell, but always to do it with a ten-inch one, Germany will make the same promise as to killing Englishmen, I .cannot bring myself to take an interest in this. If lamto be killed by a shell, I prefer it to be as big as possible, as it will give the occasion import-1 ance and make a bigger noise. Be-1 sides, I am still of the opinion T expressed in 1914, that the slaughter of a German lad by an English lad is just as much a loss to England as to Germany. The notion that what iis devilment for one army is heroism in another won't wash. That is why many of you—shall I say the most amiable of you?—want to prevent war altogether. Well, so do I. But we must not allow ourselves to be put off by humbug about disarmament.

DISARMAMENT WILL NOT , PREVENT WAR. Disarmament will not prevent war. Men fought just as fiercely as they do now before a single one of our modern weapons was invented; and! some of the greatest naval battles! were fought when fleets were moved by oars instead of by turbine en-j gines., I have no doubt that, in the ■ African tribes, when it was first proposed to use poisoned arrows instead of plain ones, there was just the same cry of horror about it as we had in England when the Germans attacked us with poison gas. Only fiends, we, said, would use such a weapon! But at the end of a fortnight, when Lord Kitchener told us not to fuss, as we were going to use it ourselves, we settled down to it just as the African tribes settled down to the poisoned arrows; and we may as well settle down to the fact that in the next war all the most diabolical means of spreading death and destruction will be ready for use. We are at present working hard at them, and so are all the other Powers; so let us face it. We have got to, whether we like it or not. Are we, then, to be exterminated by fleets of bombing aeroplanes which will smash our water mains, cut our electric cables, turn our gas supplies into flame-throwers, and bathe us and our babies in liquid mustard gas from which no masks can save us ? Well, if we are, it will serve us right, for it will be our own doing. But let us keep our heads. It may not work out in that way. For what is it that happens when a single soldier! finds himself face to

face with a dozen of the enemy? He puts up his hands and demands quarter. What is it that hapepns when a body of troops finds itself aope r le'ssly out-numbered and surrounded? It surrenders. What will London dp when it finds itself approached yb, a crowd of aeroplanes capable of destroying it in half an hour? London will surrender. White flags and wireless messages, "Don't drop your bombs; we give in," will fill the air. But our own air squadrons will have already started to make the enemies' capitals surrender. From Paris to Moscow, from Stockholm to Rome, the white flags will go up in every city. All the navies will strike their colours; ransoms and reparations and indemnities will cancel each other after a squabble in Geneva; and the most disgraceful and inglorious war on record will peter out in general, ridicule. Therefore let us not join with present foolish protests against the- multiplication of bombing aeroplanes.; They are angels of peace. If the airmen gas the earth there will be no place for them to land and get their dinners. If you are a humanitarian, like myself, appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly; in short, a gentlemanly gas, deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel. Even if we have to stop fighting we shall find a us 6 for it at home. POST-WAR MONEY MUDDLE. | There is another snag in war. It gets us into money troubles. Now this is curious, because wars cannot be fought on credit; they must be paid for on the nail. Englishmen j and Germans cannot kill one another with Exchequer bills and War Loan scrip; nothing but hard shot and j shell and high explosive, handled by real men, wearing real boots and clothes, and eating real meals, are of any use on the battlefield. The men and women who are making the boots and the guns and the explosives must be fed and clothed and housed; and this also cannot be done on credit. Promises of next year's boots and of food to be grown twenty years hence will not keep a war going five minutes, much less five years. By hook or by crook, Governments which go to war must be able to lay their hands- on actual provisions and munitions. When the war is over, there is nothing of them left: they are all consumed, or worn out, or fired off; and all that there is to show for it, even by the victors, is a little glory and a great deal of death and destruction and disablement and desolation. But it is then discovered that the belligerent States obtained a great deal of their supplies and munitions, not by paying for them, but by promising to let the owners and their heirs five freely on the labour of their countries until the Governments of the States buy back their promises or cancel them by taxing free incomes. They also try to repay the owners and enrich themselves by plundering: the defeated enemies; but this does | not work, because enemies are not defeated nowadays by old-fashioned decisive battles, but by blockade and starvation. Battles are useless; they i last for months, and then peter out as the last waves of the offensive are shot down by machine-guns on the barbed-wire entanglements. Consequently, when the enemy is starved out, there is nothing to plunder. All that can be done is to make the defeated enemy pay an annual tribute year by year out of his earnings,/' and calling it reparations and indemnities. It sounds all right; but when we tried it on Germany it nearly ruined us; You see, there are no gold mines in Germany, so^hat when the Germans began paying us the tributes they could not pay in gold money, they could do it only by supplying us with ships and steel and coal and the like. "NOTHING TO DO BUT WIPE THE SLATE. ..." Now, before letting them do this, we should have turned all our shipbuilders and steel smelters and coal miners into makers of chocolate creams and Christmas crackers, our shipyards into lawn tennis courts, our steel works into palace hotels, besides closing down all the coal mines. But our statesmen had never thought of this; and when they found that living on German labour meant that all our own labour was thrown out'of work, they had to put on tariffs to keep the German goods out. This meant refusing to let the Germans pay in the only way they could pay; that is, refusing to, let them pay at all. Of course, our statesmen didn't say so, because they didn't understand what they were doing. They said that the Germans must pay in gold, and get it by selling their goods to other nations for gold. But "the other nations did just what we did, and for the same reason. They put on prohibitive tariffs and refused to admit German goods. The Germans could get no gold and had to keep

their goods to themselves; it was a complete deadlock. Yet we managed to make it worse. To carry on the war, all the victorious allies had borrowed their supplies recklessly from America; and England had not only borrowed largely herself, but guaranteed the borrowings of several of the others. When the war was over, the borrowers defaulted or repudiated in all directions, leaving England owing an enormous tribute to the United States to pay for what they borrowed, in addition to what she herself had borrowed. But the United States would not ruin their industries by accepting English goods in payment.; they, too, wanted gold. Well, Eng. land has no gold mines and when she tried to buy gold for her goods from other nations, up went their, tariff walls to keep her goods out. When England and France had scraped together all the gold they could lay hands on and sent it to America, America was bursting with gold that it would not sell for goods, and Europe was bursting with goods that it could not sell for gold. So trade in gold was brought to a standstill. Yet both Continents were perfectly solvent and had nothing to do but wipe the slate and be happy. ON AND OFF THE GOLD STANDARD. Unfortunately, this simple solution got muddled up with the money question. Money is nothing but a title deed to goods. A penny is exchangeable for a pennyworth of goods. A. pound is a title deed to a pound's worth of goods. There is only one sort of goods that is both handy and readily exchangeable for any sort of goods that its owners prefer to have, and that is gold. Accordingly, all the nations had to, make their money entitle the owner to its value in-gold. Anybody who had an English five-pound note could gointo the Bank of England and demand and receive five golden sovereigns for it. This was called being on the gold standard. But when the war tributes drained all the gold in Germany into England and France, and then drained all the gold in England and France into the United States, the gold standard became impossible in Europe. When you presented your five-pound note at the Bank of England, the bank had to say: "Sorry, no gold to-day. You can have it in British coal or steel, or in British fried fish and chips, or would you like a British bicycle? You will not be allowed to take the bicycle into the United States, but it will be all right here." Now, this meant that England had gone off the gold standard. It was a great surprise to our voters, because the Government had just won an election by an impassioned appeal to the voters to save the country from utter dishonour and bankruptcy by saving the gold standard at all costs. The truth is, neither the voters nor the statesmen understood a thing about it. If they had, some voter would have asked the Prime Minister: "Have you any gold to back our money with, or, if not, can you buy any? Because, if not, we must go off the gold standard whether we like it or not; and the only thing that can happen will be that, if the United States will not take their tribute in goods, they must go and whistle for it, just as we have had to go and whistle for our tribute from Germany." But' nobody said anything of the sort, because nobody knew what the gold standard meant. So democracy, through its voters, swore to maintain the gold standard to the last drop of its blood; and its political leaders promised to die rather than haul down that sacred emblem. But the first man who presented a five-pound note at the Bank of England brought all that nonsense down with a crash. The election shouting was hardly over when we came off the gold standard like a hen off a hot griddle.

FUDDLED FINANCIERS. When we found out that the plun-' dering of Germany, ordained by the Treaty of Versailles, had ended in one-pound notes being worth only twelve and sixpence, we should have stopped it, and wiped the slate all round, but for the financiers. How did they prevent us? Very simply. They said: "All your difficulties arise from the fact that you think that. Germany cannot pay her tribute to you. But you forget that she can if you lend her the money. We can arrange that quite easily." Instead of sending them to the nearest lunatic asylum, the British Government said, "Splendid! Why didn't we think of that before?" Of course, the German industrialists eagerly borrowed all the money they were offered, and used it to try to flood the markets of their creditors with German goods. Then up went all the tariffs again higher than ever, to

keep out.the German goods, and the old deadlock was worse than ever. Practically all the States stopped paying war debts. We were too honest to repudiate our debt to the United States; -we acknowledged it handsomely and fully, but as we send only a few pounds now and then, to show^ our good faith by what is politely called a "token payment," the United States will lose nothing worth mentioning when she takes the advice I gave her last April in New York and magnanimously writes "off her unpayable debt. The likelihood of another war is all the less because the last one, instead of doing all the glorious things it promised to do, only smashed up the three Empires that began it, broke the Bank of England, and left the European belligerents, victors and vanquished alike, in the position of undischarged bankrupts, whilst their American creditor, with her banks broken in all directions, is cursing her system more heartily than any of them. POSSIBLE DANGERS OF PEACE. And now what will the United States do to us in England when they realise that we canont pay them in gold and that payment in commercial goods will ruin their industries? Will they ask for payment in territory; say, by handing over Jamaica to then*? Will they offer to take the Codex Sinaiticus, the Elgin Marbles, and their pick of the choicest works in the British Museum Library and the National Gallery? We should reply that we will pay only what we borrowed; and what we borrowed was not territory, nor art treasures of incalculable value, buti food and.munitions. There is, no job that we could 'do for the United States that her millions of unemployed would not clamour for if it were proposed to let us do it; and so the deadlock would come again as hopeless as ever. There is really nothing for it but to wipe the. slate, the sooner the better.

WHAT ABOUT THE EMPIRE? But there remains a very important point which I have not. touched. When you ask, "Whither Britain?" what exactly do you mean by Britain? Do you mean the British Isles or the British Empire, for there is all the difference in the world ? Ask a Cockney soldier to die for Camberwell and he will think the demand a very proper one, though he won't .die if he can help it. But ask him to die for Calcutta, and his reply will be unprintable. Therefore, we shall have to be very careful about this Empire business. I should be very glad indeed to see our Imperialist Englishmen regarding the Hong Kong Chinese and the Singalese and the Malays, the Maoris, the Hindus and Zulus and Bantus as their compatriots, their fellow-Britons, their own Imperial flesh and blood, instead of lumping them all contemptuously together as niggers and.Chinks. Ii we are to preserve the connexion, v*e must make it appear flattering and advantageous to all parts of the Empire, giving them home rule, calling them dominions instead of colonies, and putting them on the same footing as what we call the Mother Country, or even a better one. But think what that may lead to. There is only a handful of English-speaking people with pink skins in the dominions. The Indians out-number the rest of the Empire,' including England, five to one. Consequently, the effect of making India a dominion, in the Canadian sense, would be that England would become, in effect, a dominion of India, and England might not like that. England might break off from the Empire, as the United States did. Now think over this. I cannot feel sure of the permanence of any intimate political combination that is not based on homogeneity; that is, on the people in the combination being reasonably 'like one another in their tastes and religious faiths, their traditions and hopes. Now it is as plain as a pikestaff that a combination of the northern States of Europe with the United States of America, and with Australia and New Zealand, would be far more homogeneous than any possible combination of Europeans with Asiatics. In the war, when the French let loose their negro soldiers and the British their Asiatic soldiers to slaughter .our German neighbours, I felt, and I hope you did too, that this was not playing the game of Western civilisation. When the question "Whither Britain?" is put to me, I am quite prepared to make cheerful guesses as far as "Britain" means British ideas and British stock; but if it means a miscellaneous crowd of Chinese, millions of different sorts of Indians, a handful of Malay headhunters and Fijian cannibals, and masses of dark-coloured native contingents from North and South Africa, then I can only shake my head. If I were a stranger from another planet I should say that an attempt to combine England with India before England was combined

with the United States on the one side, and with all her Western European neighbours on the other, is a crazy reversal of the natural order of things and cannot possibly last. I could understand an Asiatic combination with Japan as its most aggressive organiser, frightening the West into a European and American combination; but I could not back the permanency of the present combinations. I repeat, if we do not make the constituents of the Empire so independent of England that England will have nothing to do but support an enormously expensive navy to protect them, they will break off as the American colonies did; yet if we grant them that independence, the tail will wag the dog, as it did very vigorously at the Ottawa Conference. As between the present arrangement of forty-five million pink men sitting on the heads of three hundred million brown and yellow men, and the international co-operation insisted on by Mr Wells, I am on the side of Mr Wells; and Wells and I are both much more clever and more disinterested than the Boss Syndicalists. It is true that the Parliamentary gentlemen pay no attention to us, just as their grandfathers paid on attention to Dickens and Ruskin, Carlyle and Marx, and the Fabians of the nineteenth century, but that did not in the least prevent things turning out So look out, dear listeners, look as Dickens and the rest said they would, and as the Parliamentary gentlemen said they would not. out. So long. [The reference in the last paragraph to international co-operation and Mr Wells is an allusion to the views expressed in Mr H. G. Wells's latest book, "The Shape of Things to Come." The author forecasts an international air council taking charge and setting up a world government.]