ENGLAND FACING PERIL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 19163, 31 October 1925, Page 16

ENGLAND FACING PERIL.

FOLLY OF LABOUR EXTREMISTS.

TEACHING REVOLUTION.

NEED OF GREAT LEADERSHIP.

SIR PHILIP GIBBS' SURVEY. Is England done ? A frightful question, which one hesitates to put down in bi!ick-and-white. Yet it is being asked by thoughtful men and women in thousands of English homes after dinner, when the cigarettes are lighted, in quiet rooms. Worse still, it is being asked by foreigners who come over here on summer holidays —Americans mostly—with keen eyes, which draw rapid and perhaps false conclusions. They see the beggars in our streets; hear hard-luck stories on the tops of buses; stare at the crowds of young men hanging round the labour exchanges in provincial cities and London; see, or think they see, a dwindling of effort and vitality, a creeping up of pessimists, a spreading pauperdom which shocks them, says Sir Philip Gibbs, in the Sunday Times. The danger is hidden. The people are still unaware of it, in spite of warning voices here and there. There is no attempt at unity rising above political parties and cries, but a very steady drift into class antagonisms and class hatreds. The employers of labour ha v e been asking for trouble as well as getting it-. There ,is no generosity or pity in them for the men whose wages they want to cut down. They manoeuvre for position, as in warfare. One cannot help suspecting that. And from middle-class homes young men. and middle-aged men, are enrolling themselves quietly in Fascist bodies, which mean, if they mean anything, a preparation for civil, conflicts against men who were their comrades in the war—many of them at least. On the other side are groups of young men —and women enrolled in other bodies and societies, flaunting the Red Flag, as Communists, eager to make cheap martyrs of themselves, cursing capitalism, ready for the "lark" of revolution, whose terrors and consequences—for themselves—they have never seen and cannot guess. That does not seem like sanity in good old England. Trades Unions and Revolution. But what has most shaken the hope of the ordinary man and woman in the recovery of England is, of course, the recent Trade Union Congress with its avowed purpose of revolutionary action. There can be no doubt whatever that, resolutions passed by that congress will be devastating in their eftect upon lish opinion, although I am convinced the main body of the men do not go as far as their 'leaders, or anywhere near it. They will lead—and are leading rapidly—to a reaction among people of conservative minds, hardening opinion against the labouring classes and the trade unions, killing "liberalism and generosity ot thought, putting fear, and therefore cruelty, into the minds of people who have property to defend, and who believe in the old traditions of English life. Sir Philip Gibbs says that nine-tenths of his sympathy is with the working classes and their desire to maintain a decent standard of life. Where one s sympathy slumps and all one's optimism fails is in face of two depressing facts, he continues. One is the demoralisation of men and women who do not want to work, and who refuse to work as long as they draw the dole. ignorant or Liars.

The other depressing fact is the insane folly, or the deliberate wickedness, of the Trade Union leaders who profess to believe that they can improve the lot of the working classes by revolutionary action of the Russian type to the "dictatorship of the proletariat, the downfall of the capitalistic system, and the ideal of Communism. Either they are grotesquely ignorant of what has happened in Russia and of what would kill us quickly as a nation dependent for our life on export trade, or they are liars. Their lying, I think, is more likely than their ignorance; for they must surely know that Russia had abandoned Communism — all but a few rags and tatters of its creed —because of its hopeless breakdown after years of misery, when the industrial classes almost starved to death, and has long gone back to the rights of private property and privale trading, still in wretched state because of the utter lack of credit and capital. I saw Russia in time of Communism, and it was diseased and famine-stricken. This country would be worse in quicker time if revolution broke out or Communism prevailed. In Russia ninety million peasants could scrape some kind of living out of the earth unless droughts blasted their fields, as in the region of the Volga. But in London, Liverpool, and other great cities our populations would get nothing out of the pavements except stones to kill those who had led the way to ruin.

What England Stands For. If our working folk are pauperised until they lose the will to work, or if they follow revolutionary leaders into ways jf violence and destruction—l do not believe they will—then, indeed, we shall see the passing of England® and all that was good and gracious in its life. Our Oriental Empire will be a flaming anarchy in which the weak and innocent will perish. The world will lose its strongest rock of defence against brutality and tyranny and the ethics of the jungle. For even our enemies look to us, not as people of great virtue, perhaps, but o,s strong guardians of law and order. If we give way the outposts of civilisation will be driven in. Is such a thing possible? Yes, in my belief, now, it is possible. But only if forces of revolt on one side come to an absolute clash with froces of fear and cruelty on the other side. Only if there is no statesmanship, no sanity, no spirit of compromise and common sense on all sides. I believe, as thousands of moderate men bolieve, that there is still time—but not much time—to stop the rot in our social state. How To Stop the Eot. It will not be done by a policy of drift. Still less by forcing Labour <o its knees by a general assault of lock-outs and wage-cuttings. It can only be done by the willing and generous sacrifice of ail classes, not asking Labour to get back below the poverty lino while we keep all our luxury, but reducing our standard of life from top to bottom. It can only be done by desperate economies in national expenditure which would easo the burden of taxation and release capital for business enterprise. It can only be done by withdrawing the dole from work-shy men; by abolishing the restriction of output under tradtf union rules and substituting piecework and profit-sharing; by getting a million people out of Britain into the overseas Dominions; and by getting many other people out of the cities of England, Scotland and Wales into the fields as a new peasantry producing some of the food which we now import. We need above all the call of great leadership to the old spirit of a race which is by no means done, but needs only some shock of fate, some strong emotional impulse, some honest and fearless truth-telling, to reassert its old courage, to unite its classes as in time of war, to make heroic effort by common sacrifice to recapture its old spirit of adventure and enterprise. We are not done yet: nor, by the instinctive common sense of the common man, shall be. The only thine we can bank on now, is the sense of humour, the hatred of hot air, the underlying steadiness, of that average man who showed his quality in the last war, and won it for us. It is the last hopo of optimism, and still a good one.