Exit and Entrance

New Zealand Tablet, 24 April 1924, Page 33

Exit and Entrance

/. ‘ (By Mgr. Canon Barry, D.D-., in the London Catholic . Tirriei.) /‘They have their exits and their entrances,” observed the melancholy Jacques, likening all' the world to a stage, ... and ourselves to the players thereon. But who is it that , times the correspondence of such goings and comings? Amid a “farrago” of news littering the daily papers, once in a way shines out as perfect as in any meditated work of art some coincidence, some grouping,, which has a lesson or a s hint for us, and the stage becomes an oracle, big with wise /' forebodings, significant enough did we choose to read them. ’ One such coincidence took the boards when Europe and America .were taught on the same day, January 22, 1924, that Lenin had expired Hear Moscow, and Ramsay Mac* : donald kissed Hands on his appointment as British Prime Minister at Buckingham Palace. Who could have anticipated a superb stroke like this, which smote the Russian Bolsheviks as with palsy, while it warned the Socialists of England that not even supreme power, backed by the Red Committee kiown as the Slfekah, had been able to realise for good and all the doctrine of Karl Marx on the ruins of a dead and buried Tsardom? What is Socialism ? In Britain, somewhat to the public astonishment, we have come all at once 'under Socialist rule; but while we know the men, more or less, who glory in this name, we cannot be sure that we know what is their doctrine—or that they know it themselves. When I was in close contact with very distinguished Fabians, during the earlier .stages of that society, their general view seemed to be Collectivism, or that the State’should own all the menus of production and distribution now in private bands. But Communism they disliked and rejected. In a certain sense, too, they were democrats, allowing men and women to shape i V.. • . v ..... 1.. ,1, ..„( r u i i.. (' t- coilXTtPTt ffTOi-n, - • " "Tl.T'l '"' J * A - trelrwrhii is the genuine Historical account of Liberalism, English, French, or American. Vet even in this country Socialists have more and more sacrificed individual freedom to alleged Labor interests, whether in tradejinions or outside of them ; and a Socialist-Liberal appears now to be nearly a contradiction in terms. The English mind is neither happy nor much troubled about'having clear ideas it likes to get on without scientific formulas, but is accessible to claptrap; nor shall we learn the actual creed of a ' Soviet Cabinet made up of Britons except by the measures they bring in. Perhaps it is as well. In purely abstract thinking the Scotch have gone far beyond their old enemy; but the Southron still makes headway in act and enterprise by an inbred faculty which has given him the dominion of the ocean and created the British Empire. Exit Lenin, the Idealist. How' unlike the process followed by Lenin, who was a Russian mixed of the Tartar breed, idealist to a fanatical degree, at the mercy of pure logic, and merciless in obeying it! He despised the English utterly, calling them all, without regard to any tinge of Socialism visible through our island-fog, mere middle-class property-mongers and hypocrites. He had substituted “Das Kapital” of the Jew Karl Marx for all other Gospels, being, as Nietzsche would say, - an “atheist, immoralist, and antichrist.” He laughed democracy to scorn, shrank, from no deed of violence or cruelty, and betrayed his kinship with Genghis and Tamburlaine the Great by the monstrous piles of dead lie set up every wherein, Russia. Lenin’s “pure idea,” it has been / said, may well have .cost as many human lives as were ■ sacrificed on the ’-'whole; extent /of the Western fronts (during the war/" He approved, according to . the' • best available ’ authority, of the massacres in which the dethroned Im- . perial family perished a{ Ekaterinabnrg. In slim, we cannot apply, to a maxi of this description the received human standards. His deliberate wickedness beggars language; his / frantic hut steady violence takes us into regions where in-' / sanity becomes the. orde| of the day. l : - Lenin suggests /a ■ j reincarnation of Robespierre, decreeing universal happiness / with the guillptiifi’e as his lieutenant-general. Yet more' -w fclosely he resembles Tolstoy in. his illimitable devotion,to : • v- 'w-v-/-'- r'/- - ; • *

■a single abstract notion, which overshadows and would speedily annihilate’ wholesome everyday human existence. Dreams of this nightmare power belong t-6 - realms we had better leave unexplored. That his Communist Utopia was incapable of realisation until the whole world entered into his-scheme, Lenin admitted eighteen months ago. He found Russia weak, but not 'entirely exhausted in spite of abuses; and he flung out Kerensky that he might make a desert in the name of Karl Marx. The desert is an accomplished fact none of the Marxian benefits" can be produced as evidence of Lenin’s wisdom or foresight. If Communism and the Russia bequeathed to posterity by Lenin correspond as cause and effect, mankind will never be Communist. The fact drives theory off the stage. Exit Lenin, and with him the spectre of Marx, the discredited foreteller of a Millennium that did not arrive. Enter Macdonald, the Practical Man. - / We need not be afraid, then, of a Labor Government as likely to pull down the throne, or to- murder the Koval Family, or even to seize the bullion (if any there still be) stored up in Threadiieedle Street. Labor has made its entrance most unexpectedly from the wings, oh summons of the prompter, who is Extemporising because he has no more “book” from which to go on. In plain English, the old parties, Tory or Liberal, have lost principles and.programme ; their day is dcu^; and in Britain, as throughout the world, democracy claims the succession, not, only to fallen kings and kaisers, but to political factions which have lost the art of ruling a nation. Our fresh Cabinet bears a strong resemblance to Kerensky. It is humane, peaceloving, lull of compassion for the disinherited. I speak without satire; but I go on to remark with equal candor that no man living knows what will come of this-desperate Labor experiment. Will it create, or will it dissipate, capital ? Is it going to encourage more work by way of providing a larger outcome? Or will it leave us poorer than we were when oppressed 1u r AVI ; - .. ,* - . . v," P , A - . ana j.ei-ie<s V- Wq cannot «nv • -+1 ~ e -* * - . / • . , .... ift-iire is wrapped in impenetrable darkness. But there would seem to be certain obscure laws in the! realm of economics which are for ever bringing back private property, no matter how stringently the system opposed to it is put in force. You cannot suppress the individual or his claim to a share in the material order as artist, director, nay, or humble instrument in executing a masters designs. That Britons, though singularly docile at present to their unions, wiii not submit to regimentation under Government officials I consider an assured thing, whatever party may be in power. Communism lies dead with Lenin. Collectivism has never yet been tried in ’Western lands. It is pure theory, while human nature is the necessary coefficient in any equation where it may enter. The Russian peasant, defeated Lenin’s policy ; in Britain, with its thousand years of intricate laws, successions,/entails, and a vast commercial system resting on credit at home and abroad, Labor will find hindrances multiplying whenever it tries to alter these fundamental conditions of business,. It will never .dominate the free competition of world-markets where it must buy and sell at rates it cannot fix. .. Perhaps we may venture on one point of, prophecy. Englishmen, caring not at all for pure ideas, succeed by coin-: promise;. and Labor will make its bargain with Capital in good season. . ~ " , ' ...