LITERATURE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19258, 23 August 1924, Page 4

LITERATURE.

DAWN OF A NEW DAY.t CAN LABOUR CONTRIBUTE? Bx Constant Reader. According to Mr Kellogg, American delegate to tho London Conference, the settlement reached between tho Allies and Germany is destined to mark lire dawning of a new day. In this M. Herriot concurred when ho declared: “A now era in history has boon inaugurated.’’ Certainly Mr Ramsay MacDonald was more cautious when he averred: “Wo shall go a long way before we reach the goal of European peace and security”—a remark all the more significant since it is largely owing to Mr MacDonald’s effort that so auspicious a start has been made. Bearing in mind the forebodings with which many people awaited the outcome of a Labour Government in Britain, it at least stands to the credit of that Government that during its brief existence it has done so much internationally towards the pacification of Europe. This circumstance lends weight to a recently-published work by Mr Philip Snowden. Chancellor of Exchequer in the British Labour Government. entitled "Labour and the New World.” _ Foremost in these pages stands tho principle that the new world will not come by w-ay of revolution, but that it must be built up patiently and carefully by a gradual evolution brought about by constitutional reforms. With this principle kept steadily in view, Mr Snowden is optimistic. Ho disdains pessimism, and his hope and his disdain are rooted in the lessons of history. As an antidote to the “dismal forebodings and prognostications” in which a certain school of pessimistic prophets positively wallow. Mr Snowden draws an historical parallel:— The literature of the time of the French Revolution, and of the years following the end cf • the long Napoleonic wars, is full of prophecies of the impending doom of civilisation. But the world has survived many cataclysms, and upon the ruins of each has built a new and on tho whole a better economic system and a higher civilisation. The old order pensheth, but humanity survives; and out of the chaos and ruin which exist to-day tho instinct of social preservation will, though perhaps painfully and laboriously, evolve a new world order, still imperfect and dynamical, but affording a happier and more abundant life for the great mass of the people. Mr Snowden argues that every social order contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction; each serves its destined purpose, and when it is once fulullod it gives place to a new order “in wdiioh social organisation more fittingly adapts itself to economic evolution.” Ho contends that there can be no permanency in any social system, and that as tribal communism gave place to slavery and out of slavery feudalism was evolved, replaced in its turn by tho capitalist system, so in due time will a new order be evolved. Ho combats the idea that the economic breakdown of Europe was wholly due to the Great War. “Before tho war the economic system wag being challenged everywhere over the whole civilised world”—the W onl y the inevitable breakdown. The collapse Mr Snowden traces meeHJ) Tffi e failure to effect a better distribution of wealth, and 19) the failure to exploit to the full the possibilities of increased production—the latter because capital' stic production is carried on for necessarily to supply public The social problem cannot bo solved except _by eliminating conflicting personal interests. An economic system based on competition for the individual appropriation of wealth (a system which must necessarily result in a few wing successful in the scramble at tho expense of the poverty of the many) can nevar give general _ satisfaction.. The OH World Order is in rains because it was inherently bad, selfish, and immoral. The New World must he built on different nnncaples. Reconstruction must proceed upon the idea that the world and its resources are the common heritage of all, that the co-operation of all must he substituted for the competitive struggle m which the fittest to survive are those endowed with cunning, greed, and audacity. Reconstruction must be governed by definite ideas and principles. No plans will be effective unless they are based upon a knowledge of the causes of the future of the old order.

In discussing the possibilities of the establishment of a New World Order, Mr Snow don tokos hope from the influences steadily at work, foremost among them being me persistence of idealism, a qualitv which it the_ inspiration, of all worthy action and of which the war furnished eloquent illus. tratiem. . He takes courage from the tact that the Christian churches, despite ‘ de. plorable failure” in many directions, still retain their hold on millions, an evidence that as well as devotion to material gain there is still a longing after a spiritual life. He sees hope also in an intelligent social unrest ami discontent, contributed to, in no small measure, bv the widely circulating newspaper and the enormous output of cheap literature. In regard to the growing political influence exercised by Labour Mr Snowdon has a characteristic ward;—

It is not to bo expected that newly qn. classes will immediately u;o their political power very intelligently; but it is significant that after the exten sion of the franchise to the counties, there began movements for the political organisation of Labour based upon a broad platform of industrial and social reform. _ Unreasonable expectations have been excited as to what a minority Labour party _in Parliament could do. Some sanguine people looked for the millennium from fifty to a hundred Labour members. The failure to bring this has added to the volume of social discontent. But the possession of political power is in itself a great educative force. It raises the dignity and self-respect of those who possess it, and oven its failures are bene ficial because they provoke greater effort

and sagacity. Mr Snowden insists that tho New Order must be international. “No nation can to-day solve all its social problems.” The economic interdependence of the nations is an outstanding fact revealed by the war. “Just as individuals within a nation are all parts of one another, so the nations of the world are parts of the great human body, and where one nation suffers ail the nations suffer with it, or one nation bo honoured, ail the nations rejoice with it.” The characteristics of tho New World Order are many and striking. They include the abolition of the economic subjection of the workers to either individuals or classes. The worker will bo elevated from a “wage-slave” to an intelligent partner in industry. The instrument of production will become common property, and all production will be for use'and not for profit. “ Tho possessor of riches will bo a guarantee against want, and riches will no longer be the passport to social position.” As a consequence of the scientific organisation of production and distribution, there will he abundant leisure in which the individual can follow his personal inclinations. _ All iho artificial frontiers between nation nation will he eliminated; all barriers to the free exchange of commodities will bo removed. Tho New Order will “bring under tribute for the benefit of all the resources of every country, each country contributing in return from its own knowledge and resources. Each country will keep and develop its own racial and cultural traditions and qualities and in this variety tho whole world irill gain.” After outlining in this fashion the New World Order. Mr Snowdon odds This ideal may be dismissed with a sneer by the cynic as a vain delusion. Those who believe in tho possibility of tho attainment most fully realise the difficulties of achieving it. But it is better to cherish and to work for this ideal, unattainable though it, wore, than passively to asquiosce in tho continuation of a system where tho “ workman has to find his way to tho tomb, Heeding and footsore, through the brambles and thorns of poverty.” A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, Or what’s a Heaven for? To those who seem to profit and sucoewi st&st the present immonpl conditions I would say that they would find, in working for a happier Order, a greater satisfaction than the possession of riches can ever give them. Bnt this ideal is not impracticable. It needs but the goodwill of good men and women, aided by knowledge and guided bv experience, for humanity to reach the loftiest heights its vision can but dimly see to-day.

Mr Snowden is definitely opposed to the idea of revolution’ by violence as a method of establishing a new social order, an idea abandonee! by the whole International Socialist movement, but revived since the Russian revolution. Ho points out that the failure of thv. liussiaa Comrati’’i» duo to tho lact that they attempted the impossible. “They tried to establish a social order for which neither tho economic conditions nor tho people of Russia were ripe.” In this connection ho utters a word of warning:— Revolution in Groat Britain is extremely improbable. It will never come by the deliberate choice of tho working classes as the best method for achieving economic and social emancipation. If revolution should come, it will be due to the ignorance or deliberate provocation of Governments and employers. If economic conditions in Great Britain are permitted, through the neglect of statesmen, to get into tho state in which many of the Continental countries are now plunged, not even tho natural instincts of the British working classes for constitutional methods might be a sufficient bulwark against rebellion. This is a warning, but not a prophecy. I do not think it will come to this in Groat Britain. Tho common sense of the British people has saved them in the past in many groat crises from plunging deeper into chaos by wild and reckless action. While Continental countries have made futile revolutions, the British working classes have followed the sounder ways of industrial and political organisation, building up their trades unions, co-operative movement, and organising politically for the conquest of Govern meat This method the British working classes will still pursue. Revolutionary ferment is like an epidemic. It breaks out periodically, and it affects a small number of people, leaving the vast muss untouched. The folly or ignorance of the few may retard progress and may weaken the necessary solidarity of tho working classes. This is the case at the moment. The Socialist Movement on the Continent is impotent through the ravages of the revolutionary element. But it will recover its health, and as the young and inexperienced men who constitute the revolutionary section of the Continental Socialist Movement gain knowledge and wisdom with age, and from the patent folly and futility of their methods, the ferment will subside as it has so often done since the Trench Revolution. Indeed, there are abundant signs that the revolutionary fever is rapidly abating already.

Mr Snowden discusses in detail and from the standpoint of a moderate evolutionary Socialism such subjects as the nationalisation of resources and industries, the land problem, the instrument of taxation, the organisation of industry, unemployment, the working day, education, tho drink problem, and Imperialism and internationalism. Under the now world order, taxation will be based upon ability to pay; all inheritance will be abolished; the banking institutions will bo nationalised; industry will bo democratically controlled; a national economic council will be established to deal with hours of labour and rules of remuneration; the unemployment problem will bo solved in the scientific organisation of production and distribution; a broad and open highway will be maintained from tho elementary school, through the secondary school, to the university; a comprehensive scheme will bo attempted for the solution of the drink problem by reducing the temptation to drink, by strengthening the moral fibre of men and women, and by making tho conditions of work and living more healthy and natural; a sane foreign policy will include the abandonment of an Imperialism which is productive of war and greed and grab in favour of a modified internationalism. Mr Snowden writes:—

If we are looking to a.federation of the world, then it would be a ba'ckward step to take any action which would break the ties which now bind the self-govern-ing dominions and Great Britain together. That the advantage to the world of the maintenance of the federation of the self-governing dominions of the British Empire depends upon the spirit which animates the federation and upon its attitude to the rest of the world. If the Anglo-Saxon Empire be animated by the idea of Britain against the world, then nothing but evil can come from such a federation. But if, on the contrary, the policy of the self-governing States of the British Empire bo one of friendliness and co-operation with the rest of the rvorld, if the British Empire uses its powerful position in the worla, not for domination but to help the weak, then it can be the greatest instrument for world progress which has ever been created. This is the only real destiny of the British people. It can be the only ultimate justification 6f our past impoverished and colonisation policy. If pursued this aobler policy may atone for the wrongs which have been done in the past.

A close and careful analysis of the New World Order, as outlined by Mr Snowden, will excite comparison with the condition of affairs in the dominion. New Zealand has already gone a long way towards the fulfilment of this “New World” programme. It remains to be seen how much farther she may quietly and well-nigh imperceptibly progress. A companion volume which may probably be studied in conjunction with Mr Snowden’s “Labour and the New World” is “The Present State of Germany,” by Brigadier-general J. 11. Morgan. General Morgan spent several years in Germany, where he was the British representative in the Inter-allied Council of the Military Disarmament Commission, in which officialcapacity he visited every State in Germany. He had a unique opportunity at frequent intervals of surveying the political, economic, and social conditions in Germany after the war. The conclusions thus reached were cast into the form of a lecture delivered at the London University in November of last year, and are now Issued, with an introduction. In book form. It, is remarkable how accurately General Morgan envisages the situation as reflected in the decision of the London Conference. He says of his lecture:—

It was an attempt at a diagnosis of a body politic vexed with many maladies, and the methods employed were those of clinical observation of the patient. It might oven bo said that they were also those of experiment, in that the writer was for four years a member of a communion which performed on tho body politic of Germany an almost surgical operation. You cannot finally disarm a groat nation, to tho extent of effecting the abolition of a system of conscription that has endured for 50 years and has spread its roots very deep, without cutting into the body of it, and in the process severing many social arteries. It is not tho only surgical operation to which Germany has been subjected under the Treaty of Versailles, though it is by far tho most radical one. . . . Now it is a common experience in patients who have suffered amputation that their sensorial consciousness will retain long afterwards the memory of sensations originating in the member amputated and peculiar to it; such sensations endure and reonr after the nervous tissue whence they came has been cut aWay, until there are times when the subject of them can, by no great effort, imagine that ho is no longer maimed but is once again whole. Such moods persist in the national consciousness of Germany. It is the explanation of much that is happening today.

uuring four years’ residence in Germany, General Morgan traversed tons of thousands of miles, viewing Germany and the Germans in many phases and under all sorts of conditions. Ho studied the soul of tho nation and witnessed tho resurgence of a now national consciousness, the conviction that the Allies have sought and will seek her annihilation. That conviction has welded tho Germa.n people together in a new unity. “Nothing is more characteristic of tho German temperament,” says General Morgan, “than its utter callousness to tho suffering of tho individual. In no country in the world are the rich less conscious of their responsibilities towards the poor, in none is human life so cheap, nowhere are the military and the police so ruthless, and never since the worship of Moloch have so many victims been sacrificed on ihat, altar of ‘the State’ which Gorman philosophers have sought to idealise as s kWi of mystical expression of the ‘ General Will.’ ”

General Morgan points out that while political convulsions may produce new forms of natural government they do not change a nation's character and that the substitution of a German Republic for a monarchy has made no_ difference. “There is the same ruthless disregard of (ho individual. the same cynical belief that the end justifies the means.” He has little faith in the Committee of tho League of Nations in so far ns world disarmament, is concerned, and the idea that private armament production is one of the causes of war is denounced as “a complete fallacy.”

General Morgan claims that, ■with ex. ceptionai opportunities for observation, he has spared no pains to understand spirit of Modem Germany; and as a result he emphasises the fact that the German mind and the German character are not the same ns the British. “The mind of the average German is as different from the mind of the average Englishman as the shape of his bead, the cut of his clothes, and the idiom of his speech.” German 1 standards of conduct are not British standards. “You may think them better, you may think them worse —the point is that rliey are different.” This lead® up to ono of the most important declarations in the entire lecture: In the German character there is what there is in all of us—in you, in mea power for good and a power for evil, and they wage eternal conflict in the soul of a nation as in the soul of an individual. The most profitable thing for ns is, I submit, not to confine our search to what is evil in the German character, but to extend it to what is good and to decide what degree of responsibility rests upon us for giving Just that fatal impetus to bo ono or the other which may determine the whole future of Germany’s national development, and, with it. the future of the world.

General Morgan declares that the occupation of the Ruhr profoundly affected the whole temper of Germany ; and ho argues strongly “for the speedy settlement of the Reparations controversy on terms which will be such as to secure the continuance of constitutional government in Germany.” for “in its continuance lies almost the only hope of peace in Europe.” The chair at General Morgan’s lecture was taken by Viscount Haldane, to whom the lecturer paid the following tribute: The question has often been discussed, “Who won the war?” It is rather a silly question, and there are so many competitors for the palm among those who were least exposed to it—for the soldiers are apparently not in the runnings—that I will make no attempt to answer it. But I will tell you who the Gorman generals think—and after all they ought to know—alone made it possible for the Allies at the outset not to pose the war—and that was the distinguished statesman who sits, in the chair hero tonight—the creator of the British Expeditionary Force. General von Kluck told me as much. He naturally spoke with some feeling on the subject, but the reluctance of his tribute does not make it any the less sincere. There are many distinguished soldiers here to-night who, without his reluctance, would endorse that tribute. And the moral of mv digression is. I hope, obvious. It is this: You will be much better equipped to encounter the German problem if you make some attempt, and a dispassionate attempt, to understand her. But if you don’t mitigate your terms, what will happen? You will make Germany desperate, and a desperate Germany may yet be dangerous.