What is Coming

Waikato Independent, Volume XVIII, Issue 1741, 18 April 1916, Page 3

What is Coming

HOW FAR WILL EUROPE GO TOWARD socialism?

A number are saying that this war is to be the end of individualism. “Go as you please’’ has had its deathblow. Out of this war, whatever else emerges there will emerge a more highly organI used state, that is to say, a less individualistic and more socialistic state, than existed before. And there seems a heavy weight of probability on the side of this view. But there are aho a number of less obvious countervailing considerations that may quite possibly modify or reverse this tendency. Ju this paper an attempt is to be made to strike a balance bei ween the two systems of forces, aiul guess how much will be private and how much tutbiic in Europe in 1930 or thereabouts.■

The prophets who foretm? Dm m-m ry of socialism base their -mv ij ( ,.

sets of arguments: They muni -f- ris ,. the failure of individuiD enterprise io produce a national efficiency com putable to the state of socialism in Gei - many, and the extraordinary special dangers inherent in private property that the war has brought to light; secondly, the scores of approaches to practical socialism that have been forced upon Great Britain, for example, by the needs of the war; and thirdly, the obvious necessity that will confront the British Empire and the Allies generally after the war, necessities that no unorganised private effort ca-i meet. All these arguments involve Ihe assumption that the general understanding of the common interest will bet sufficient to override individual and class motives, an exceedingly doubtful assumption to say the least of it. But the general understanding of the common interest is most likely to be kept alive by the muse of a common danger, and we have Hready arrived at the conclusion that Germany is going to be defeated but not destroyed in this war, and that she alii be left with sufficient vitality and sufficient resentment not only to make the continuance of the Alliance after the war obviously advisable and highly probable, but also to preserve in the general mind for a generation or so, that sense of a common danger Avhich nost effectually conduces to the sweepng aside of merely personal and wasteful claims. Into this we have now to bok a little more closely. It was the weakness -f Germany that nade this war, and or her strength. I’hc weaknesses of Germany are her mperialism, her Junkerism, and her infuse sentimental nationalism; for the former would have no German ascendancy that was not achieved by force, nul with the latter made the idea of German ascendancy intolerable to all mankind. Better death, we said. And iiad Germany been no more than her jourt, her Junkerism, her nationalism, the whole system would have smashed beneath the contempt and indignation of the world within a year. But the strength of Germany has saved her from that destruction. She was at once the most archaic and modern of states. She ivas Hohenzollern, claiming to be Caesar iind flaunting a flat black eagle borrowed from Imperial Rome; and also she was the most scientific and socialistic of states. It is her science and her i cialism that have held and forced back the avengers of Belgium lor more than a year and a half. If she has failed as a conqueror, she has succeeded as an organisation. Her ambition has been thwarted and her method has been vindicated. She will, I think be so far defeated in the contest of endurance which is now in progress that she will have to give up every scrap of territorial advantage she has gained; she may lose most of her colonial empire; die may be obliged to - complete her modernisation by abandoning her militant imperialism; but she will have at least the satisfaction of producing far profounder changes in the chief of her antagonists than those she herself will undergo.