Bewildered and Bemused

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 18986, 1 July 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

Bewildered and Bemused

SIR PHILIP GIBBS seeks to view from the angle of the common man, the problems which have beset us since the Armistice. “I am not an economist, just the 01 dinary fellow trying to understand things, he writes. Whereupon he plunges into a pit of gloom in which he sees the eternal solidity of ordered things discharging ■ the of post-war conditions. ti tc The world is bewildered and bemused' (says he); “its mind like that of a ships •crew in a sea fog, who see no way of escape from the surrounding darkness, with its lurking dangers towards which they drift.” The inhabitants of England to him, Live In an Agony of Uncertainty, the Bank of England is an institution which has fallen “into reduced circumstances and suddenly declared her inability to pay even •one gold piece to the butcher, the baker \j J and the candlestick maker.” nJU ii e quotes Mr Montagu Norman, its governor, as saying some months ago as in truth he did but with not quite so much •certainty or altogether in the sense in which Sir Philip appears to quote him —that he could not see the light ahead. And as for the gold standard, that eternal verity which has comforted the Englishman’s sense of security since the remote dark ages—in point of rich fact since IS/3 well, let us read what has happened to it and all the prosperity of which it appears, in Sir Philip’s eyes, to have formed the foundation: “These great banks, buildings, 'Offices, clubs, with their marble pillars and noble porticoes, so strong as* they seemed upon the foundation of England’s wealth (a vast heritage piled up by centuries of trade, industry and prosperity; the envy of all •other nations) —aren't they standing on a thin •crust ? “On a night when England went off the gold standard —September 31 (sic!), 1931 — old gentlemen, and younger men than that •stared about them, from the depths of club chairs with a

Sudden Sense of Apprehension, with a feeling of ‘gooseflesh,’ which did not come with any draught from one of the club windows. It was the chill of doubt that beneath those chairs the ground might not be solid; that all this comfort, this old tarnished splendour, this old England of Pall Mall might have no security but stand over a quaking precipice.” This, after all, is just exactly the way Englishmen always have felt right through that long series of crises which constitute history. But they appear always to come out of their semi-coma of despair at the crucial moment, have a quick reviving spot of mead or long ale or sack or whisky or whatever else may be in keeping with the times, and tackle the question of saving the Empire just In the nick of time- Sometimes, of course, they have not done this quickly enough to save themselves a full issue of trouble, but usually they do. They did it when Charles the First threatened tc ruin their personal pockets; they did it when the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars ’W - threatened to shake the last stiver out of Y their stocking. They survived even the Reform Bill; and if they are at present shivering, as Sir Philip would have us believe, before the “dreadful warning” embodied in ruined Germany and U.S.A. industry “collapsed like a house of cards,” their Press at any rate seem to be keeping it a profound' secret from the world at large. The more factories close down, the pinker and more festive the Financial Times appears to get and its slatelier namesake in Printing House Square, which usually reflects the feelings of those who (as Mr Lang would say), “Wallow In the Gold Standard,” si ill finds that it can be sedately humorous in its third leader occasionally on the subject or regulated currencies. However, optimism does not deceive our author, lie proceeds via "the creeping up of ruin” to “the fear of war”; then tarries a little with "the failure of hope” ... it appears that many minds have come to the point of “a hopelessness, even—about the future destiny of mankind and its chance of progress towards an ordered and intelligent world."

When has there been more trend to ordered and intelligent world, leaving out fit consideration the question of actual

Sir Philip Gibbs’ Lamentation.

monetary prosperity—which Is only a relative term, anyway? Will Sir Philip tell us? Was science more ordered in the good old days of Arcady before 1914, which Sii Philip seems to regard as the old Kentucky home of existence, so to speak? Was there more order or security in the world of those days when the Turks were always burning Armenians, the Persians hanging up petty thieves by one leg or crystallising them into gypsum salt pillars by the roadside, the Chinese, as ever, committing Ling Chi, and beheading wretched hundreds on the Potter’s Field? Was there More Obedience of Law, when the criminal courts and gaols were twice as full? Or a more ordered and friendly feeling among nations in those times when there was almost always a North Sea scare and war correspondents felt they had had a bad year when Greece or Bulgaria were not at each other’s throats or Italy hammering Tunisians, or a few Allies on the Way to Pekin or something really happening with guns in a pass on the North West frontier?

Sir Philip seems to have lost his sense of proportion. There never was an age before when there was so little actual lawlessness and disorder, so much organisation and secu-ity in the Western world as at present; and even the condition of the poorest Englishman on the dole to-day is better than that of the full time Scottish •miner (one cannot look back 60 years on the lives of industrial children without a shudder) of one hundred years ago. Turn to the Annual Register- No' doubt the 18th Century was the best period for law and order in England for centuries. Yet George 11. was robbed by a highwayman from peruke to socks in his own garden at Kensington in 1757. Frederick, Prince of Wales, was warned In 1787 of the presence in his own drawing room at St. James of a gang of thieves who had come to rob him. Eastern Europe, as late as the present century, had corpses of both men and women hanging in many of its foetid market places. And as for the other

Conveniences of This Crumbling World •—does Sir Philip desire to forsake them and retire to the old solid age before England went off the gold standard? Will he, for instance, exchange endothermy, anaesthetics and alophens, for a hack saw, live strong coal-heavers and a Georgian purge; the equivaltnt medical accessories of the charming early Victorian and Georgian ages, which he appears to bemoan ?

However, let us leave Sir Philip on the brink. The present tirtie seems to him to be charged with the kind of feeling which •afflicts one before the coming of the storm: “Nature seems strangely quiet. There is hardly a breath of wind stirring. No birds are singing. Everywhere there is a hush, •and for a moment one’s heart seems to stop Its beat as one listens uneasily. It is as though the human tribes were striking their camps and getting ready for a long trail to •some new adventure in a new kind of world ... It Is, again, as though the foundations of our life upon which we build our odd style of civilisation, our great cities, our social system, our palaces and homes and hovels, are Cracking Visibly Beneath Our Feet. We stare at the cracks in a dazed way, wondering if they can be patched up again, while they widen ... I have read passages in Greek and Roman writers who felt this premonition before the overthrow of their civilisation and the downfall of their ancient gods, in whom they no longer believed.” In the end, what is the solution? Apparently (according to Sir Philip) democracy is a dead letter; dictatorships arc a temporarily effective palliative, but we arc glad to have the author’s admission that •at least “we need no new kind of faith, but a reasserlion of the 'unchanging ideals which for a time have weakened in the modern mind. “The Destroyer will not come after all if we have a wider sense of •comradeship with other peoples stricken like •ourselves.”

For all its lack of proportion, the B'ook is well-informed on fact, well constructed, and eminently readable; a challening statement of the viewpoint of an up-to-date pessimist whose despair has bitten too deep into l his soul to be washed out by the Englishman’s usual solutions.