Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1937. THE DECAY OF TRUTH

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 57, 4 September 1937, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1937. THE DECAY OF TRUTH

To the plain citizen in a democratic country no aspect of • the troubled world of the last few years has been so disturbing as what might be called the decay of truth. Never in international affairs has it been so difficult to pierce the smokescreen of propaganda flung out by interested parties and penetrate to the real facts of any situation. In such an atmosphere falsehood may well flourish and truth decay. At the best, the plain citizen, unable to believe either side, will end in believing nobody and nothing. This is a state favourable to every form of secrecy and intrigue, and, if truth decays, faith will follow and falsehood extend from words to actions. No international treaty or agreement will be safe, however solemn the terms, once the sense of honour —truth in action—is lost. How some signatory Powers have observed the Covenant of the League, of Nations, the Kellogg Peace Pact (,to outlaw war), the Nine-Power Treaty (to safeguard China) the Locarno Treaty (for the peace of Western.Europe) and the Non-intervention Treaties (to abstain- from interference in Spain) has been only too patent in the final exposure of events. Mr. Lloyd George, in the debate on foreign policy in the House of Commons on July 19 last, was in accord with public opinion when he urged that what was needed was a restoration of international good faith before making any more pacts. Then he added, with epigrammatic touch:

A treaty without faith is no more use than concrete without cement. That is what keeps it together. Here you have within twelve months treaty after.treaty broken. Worse than that, international perfidy has become a habit, a policy, a boast. ... All Europe praising and trusting us—trusting that they can take us in for the fourth time.

Thus the situation, as Mr. Lloyd George sees it, is that of an honest man fallen among rogues. Such is the effect of the decay of truth. The phenomenon is deplorable enough, but not unique, if rare, in history, a study of which will reveal that a decline in international morality is almost invariably associated with periods of great instability in j political institutions during the interim when an old established order of things is! crumbling, life is insecure sand the future uncertain— salient features of the world today. Such a previous period, for instance, was'the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-j turies in Europe, and, above all, in Italy after the Renaissance. Here was a struggle for power between ambitious men in the Italian CityStates and between the States themselves, with external nations ever on the alert to pounce upon divided Italy and add her to their dominions. This was the age of the Borgias and the Medici, and Machiavelli, who immortalised, them in his "History" and "The Prince," which became a handbook of statecraft to subsequent generations and is believed to guide the policy of dictators of today. There is no thought in Machiavelli. that government should be "elevated into a living moral force, capable of inspiring the people with a just recognition of the fundamental principles of society," as one writer has put it. Machiavelli wfote of men and Governments as he found them, and his only criterion of statecmi was that of his contemporaries' —success. What he says, particularly in his famous Eighteenth Chapter— "Concerning the Way in which Princes Should Keep Faith"—may well have been taken to heart, as a text, by some of our modern dictators:

Everyone admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to, keep ■ faith, and to live with integrity and not with craft. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word. . . .

Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer.' If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them. Nor will there ever be wanting to a prince legitimate reasons to excuse this non-observance. Of this endless modern examples could be given, gbowing how. manjr treaties and en-,

gagements have been made void and of no effect through the faithlessness of princes.

Such was the doctrine of Machiavelli enunciated over four hundred years ago, sincerely, it rs held, in an effort to promote the salvation of Italy, just as modern "princes" or dictators, perhaps, might justify Machiavellian principles in their national policy on the maxim, Salus reipublicae suprema lex ("the welfare of the State overrides all else"). Yet when the well of truth is defiled and faith destroyed, the advantage to the unscrupulous dwindles with the growth of distrust created among all who have dealings. On parties within the* 1 State and on the comity of nations the effect of distrust is disastrous. The glory of Athens soon faded from its zenith when the foundations of belief in the order of things and of mutual trust between classes were undermined by.the rhetoric of the Sophists, skilled to prove the', worse the better cause. Socrates strove in vain to restore truth as the only safe basis on which democracy could work, for doctrines strangely kin to some that are heard today brought about the ruin of the greatest of the ancient City-States. Such doctrines are usually preached, and practised in periods of prolonged external war or civil strife. Rome never really recovered from the combination of both evils which lasted, with brief intervals, throughout the century before the final pacification by the first of the Emperors, Augustus. The Great War of 1914-18 in its later stages, was beginning to show the evils of propaganda and a foreshadowing of the embitterment of international relations now so acute.

On the whole, however, Britain has been extremely lucky in her freedom from devastating and lasting wars, foreign or domestic, and their grievous consequences. It is a question the earnest searcher after truth might well study whether the proverbial British good faith, reputation for honesty in business, and love of fair play are not as much due to long security of environment as- to racial heredity. If these qualities make for the continuance of peace abroad and law and order at home, conversely they benefit themselves by such conditions. If the phrase "palabra Inglese" ("the word of an Englishman"), a synonym in South America for word of honour, is a tribute to the fundamental honesty of the race, is it not-also a reflection on the unhappy instability of life for so long in that large continent that men should look to a stabler civilisation for a symbol of faith? And yet to the Old World, while nations might respect individuals for a characteristic integrity, Britain for many years was "la perfide Albion" ("perfidious Albion"), outwitting all Europe by a statecraft the secret of which to Europeans, in default of any other conceivable explanation, must be, they felt, a consummate hypocrisy, surpassing all the arts of traditional diplomacy. History affords no grounds whatever for such a belief. Britain's greatest Foreign Ministers were direct-dealing men, whose success was due in the main to the very simplicity of their methods, deceptive, perhaps, to the subtler European mind. They exemplified the truth of the motto that honesty is the best policy, even when it is a foreign policy. For the moment such a doctrine may be under a cloud on the Continent with Machiavellianism in the ascendant. But treaties can be broken once too often and truth, trodden in the mire, has been known to take root and flower again. The "scrrap of paper" is not forgotten.