abominable that even between this prosperous pleasure resort of Estoril
and Lisbon, a dozen miles away, an automobile journey is a dangerous
adventure? Why are my letters and cables decaying in the Lisbon
post-office, and why does everyone say that things are going from bad
to worse, and hope for such violent remedies as a dictatorship? In no
part of Europe is the riddle of European decay posed so plainly as it
is here in this setting of windy sunshine and gay colour and natural
wealth.
The full answer to that riddle so far as it concerns Portugal would
involve a long history. But certain broad operating causes may be
noted. All Europe suffers from division, but it is in the smaller
countries that the evils of division are most apparent. The smaller
the country the nearer the Custom House and the more hampered the
trade. Lisbon might be one of the greatest ports of Europe as Beira
in Portuguese Africa might be the chief port of South Africa, but
for this, that a little way behind each is a national frontier with
a strangulating Custom House. No goods or passengers will endure the
present railway journey through Spain and Portugal if they can find
another way to the high seas. The railways are necessarily short
little railways and they are inefficient. And every sort of transport,
and indeed every concern depending upon organised labour, is further
troubled by another consequence of the sub-division of Europe. The
money is unstable. Portugal, like every proud little sovereign State,
must, of course, have its own currency. Anything else would be
unthinkable to the patriotic Portuguese. But the currency of so small
a country is at the mercy of big speculative interests abroad. The
recent postal strike turned entirely upon the readjustment of wages to
rising prices. That is the common issue in nearly all European labour
struggles now, but it produces its acutest conflicts in the weaker
countries.
The railways of Portugal are in a very bad condition and the roads are
frightful. Everywhere there are the visible evidences of incompetent or
corrupt administration. A little country like this, with an unstable
currency, cannot keep its popular education up to date; there is not a
sufficient reading public therefore to sustain an authoritative Press
and literature of political criticism. Ministers are not sufficiently
watched. And as to the things that happen in the overseas possessions
of Portugal one can hardly learn anything at all from the Portuguese
Press. No “public opinion” seems to be watching them at all. There is
a distraction of interest to other centres. Portuguese who grow rich
in the Portuguese possessions bank and invest their money abroad,
chiefly in London; there is a perpetual outgoing of this tribute from
the Portuguese empire to the stabler, greater States. Nowhere else in
Europe has one so strong a feeling of a country in pawn to capital held
abroad.
It seems to me that the full exercise of national sovereignty in
Portugal lies at the root of all its present troubles. It is a
convenient specimen, so to speak, of the universal European disease:
the attempt to treat what are now only parts of a system as though
they were still complete wholes. Its absolute independence, instead of
securing its people the full benefits of freedom and all the material
possibilities of the land, is the very thing that keeps the country
dependent upon big international financial and business interests. If
Portugal, instead of standing alone with its colonies to fight the
financial and economic forces of the world, were part of a combine of
States, acting together politically, financially, and economically, it
would be in a far better case than it is at the present time. I have
no doubt in my own mind that if Portugal were a free State in a larger
union in which sovereignty was sufficiently merged to ensure a common
currency, a common inter-State traffic control, free trade at least
within the union, common labour conditions, and a common front to the
speculative forces that are destroying Europe, her outlook would be
vastly different from what it is to-day. She would very speedily cease
to be a land of slovenly and increasingly inaccessible loveliness, and
her people would no longer be the most lamentably wasted nation in
Europe.
And I do not see that such a union is a very remote or improbable
thing. A congress of Latin Pressmen has recently been held in Lisbon,
and beneath a turbid flow of compliments and flatteries there were many
signs of a real and practical recognition of the possibility of, and
the enormous material advantages of, a federation of Latin Europe and
Latin America. There seems to be a growing recognition in Portugal,
Spain, Italy, France, and Latin America of the essential similarity of
the Latin civilisation in all this wide patchwork of States. It may
lead sooner than English-speaking people expect to practical political
co-operation. From the point of view of world civilisation all such
agglomerations of States, that will gradually relax the intensity of
nationalist concentration, are desirable and welcome developments.
XXVI
RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS: THE PRACTICAL PROBLEM
8.3.24
If the world had suddenly become rational in November 1918, I suppose
there would have been a conference of all the Powers of the world to
atone for their common sins and restore their common welfare. But as
the world is some thousands of years yet from rational collective
conduct we have the treaty of the Victors, the Demi-League of Nations,
and all the post-war disorder, waste, and misery that still unfold upon
us. The League is unsoundly planned; it stands on rotten foundations;
it is poisoned by the delusion that sovereign States are real enduring
human things instead of being arrangements entirely provisional and
largely hallucinatory, and it does not represent more than a portion
of mankind. Still, there is talk of at last bringing in Russia and
Germany, and it will be interesting to see how the people who have got
hold of it will set about tinkering up an arrangement with the German
people and the Russian Soviet States.
In Britain and America there are considerable organisations for the
glorification of the League of Nations. In Britain, in the countryside
especially, the League of Nations Union has become a social feature,
rather like a more liberal Primrose League; it has pleasant meetings,
parties, bazaars, tennis tournaments, fêtes with sack races, and
so forth, and no parliamentary candidate can afford to neglect it;
but it has no ideas worth speaking about of how the problems of a
world organisation are to be approached. It just glorifies, simply
and loyally. At the beginning of the League of Nations Union a few
of us made a desperate attempt to establish a Research Department
in the organisation. We felt there were a lot of things we didn’t
know and that had to be known about the psychology of international
co-operation, a lot of questions about scope and method that wanted
hammering out, and that the time was short before action was thrust
upon us. It was, however, impossible to get anything effective
done. Few of our colleagues realised that there was anything in the
business that could not be settled at once by anyone with a good heart
and a clear, loud voice; that Research Department faded out in the
platitudinous blaze of Lord Grey’s great meeting in Westminster; and
then Mr. and Mrs. Wilson came to Europe, and upon the wave of their
coming this present League of Nations, such as it is, a ramshackle raft
of political misconceptions, achieved its magnificent launch. Future
generations will study its incredible constitution in a desperate
attempt to realise the full mental slovenliness of our times.
Personally, I am for a world conference to take it down and build
something better, but that is because I have a simple, straightforward
mind. What everyone will consider more practicable and more politic
will be to alter it bit by bit and worry it round, tortuously and
expensively, towards the form of a League of Mankind against Nations,
that it ought to have been from the beginning.
Now how are Germany and the Union of Soviet States coming into the
League? Are they to come in as Boss States, like the British Empire,
with a parcel of accessory faggot votes representing Dominions and
Possessions, or are they to come in on a footing with Hayti, the
Hedjaz, Abyssinia, and so forth? Will they come in as the equals of
Abyssinia? I would like to know the ideas of the Prime Minister upon
this question. I do not think the present constitution of the League
of Nations allows them to come in on any tolerable terms at all. That
being so, it follows that any attempt to bring in either or both
of these great masses of people will involve a special conference
to reconstruct the League; the League will have to liquidate and
reconstruct itself. Both Germany and Russia, that land of new ideas,
may have some bold proposals to make. In Britain we have had little
but fulsome praise or angry exposure of the League since it was set up
at Geneva. In America it has been talked about endlessly, but I do not
know if it has been thought about at all. In France there are signs of
an awakening to the needs of a reconstructed League. M. Bertrand, of
the _Quotidien_, calls for a League that shall represent peoples and
not Governments, and proclaims that the first article of the Republican
Credo. The time is at hand when the League might be very beneficially
altered, given a better balance, and made more serviceable to mankind.
One cardinal evil could be attacked and at least minimised: the absurd
pretence that anything with the legal status of a sovereign State is a
nation, a people, a thing with a distinctive soul and an individuality,
entitled to full and equal consideration in the counsels of mankind.
It is to this we owe the intolerable absurdity that while such highly
individualised people as the Scotch and Welsh have no voice as such
in the world’s affairs, a trumped-up State like the Hedjaz votes and
speaks on an equality with Holland or Denmark, and that while one
group of black barbarians is solemnly welcomed as Abyssinia (that
age-long friend of Poland) the far better educated and altogether
more civilised Zulu and Basuto peoples must be represented by a tenth
of the coat-tails--it works out at about that, I believe--of Lord
Cecil. If nations and races are all to be represented, then India is
full of them, from the Veddahs upward; if sovereign independence is
the standard, then India has no rightful place at Geneva. But if we
recognise fully that the League we need is to serve the purposes not of
nations but of mankind, then we shall cease to be embarrassed either
logically or practically by political oddities or ethnological rarities.
Let us consider in its crudest form a possible alternative. Should
the League of Nations be put upon a population basis and should its
members have a card vote after the pattern of a British Trade Union
Congress, in which each representative has votes in proportion to the
number of workers he represents? This would give an undesirably heavy
voting power to the quasi-representatives of great barbaric illiterate
populations. In world affairs an illiterate population can have no will
because it can have no knowledge. But supposing voting power were given
in proportion to the number of literates in a population or to the
number of University students. Then we should at least get some sort
of approximation to the relative intelligence and power of the various
States. And suppose that subject to this definition of voting power
every State sent just as few or just as many representatives to the
Assembly and appointed them or selected them and distributed its votes
among them as it thought fit. And suppose the council were appointed,
not by nations, but indifferently by the vote of the Assembly. Then
at Geneva we should really be getting towards something like a
representation of the civilisation of the world or of the civilisation
of as much of the world as took part in it. We really should have a
body with authority behind it, capable of handling something more
than the petty arbitrations and the necessary small arrangements of
international affairs, of which the present propagandists of the League
of Nations make such boasts.
It is amazing how unable people seem to be to realise the full
danger of an assembly entirely dominated by the idea of competitive
nationalism, and the urgent necessity of getting away from that idea,
however great the mental exertion required. For suppose presently Mr.
MacDonald is successful in getting in Russia and Germany, and suppose
the League begins to handle such larger questions as disarmament,
European currency, tariffs, and so forth, then just as the interests
involved become greater, so much the more nationalist will the spirit
of the delegates and representatives become. The League gatherings
under the present constitution will certainly become battlegrounds of
great nationalist interests. The dear little smaller States will be
drawn into groups and alliances about the greater States. They will
not be able to help themselves. Their votes will be cowed and bullied
or bribed votes. So long as the members go to Geneva to represent not
mankind but national Governments they will go there in a diplomatic,
bargaining, and competitive spirit. There will develop a pro-French
or pro-British group, and an anti-French or anti-British group;
the alliances and antagonisms of another great war may easily work
themselves out upon the floor of the League gatherings. That all the
nations of Europe and under European influence may have been got to
meet in Geneva will in itself be no more a guarantee of peace than
was the meeting of the United States Congress before the election of
President Lincoln a guarantee of peace in America. It is a matter of
supreme importance to the whole world that before it is too late this
body which we now call the League of Nations should be denationalised
and put upon a cosmopolitan basis.
XXVII
THE LABOUR PARTY ON TRIAL: THE FOLLY OF THE FIVE CRUISERS
15.3.24
I have recently been watching British politics from a rather
interesting angle; I have been seeing Britain through Latin eyes
from the Portuguese corner of Europe. Events come to me generally in
this order. First the Lisbon _Diario des Noticias_ comes in with my
coffee; next day the French _Quotidien_ arrives before lunch and the
Italian _Secolo_ at dinner, and there is usually another twenty-four
hours before a bundle of London papers comes to hand. The Paris
_Daily Mail_ or the _Action Française_ may come in neck and neck with
the _Quotidien_, but I don’t go out of my way to see them. I get no
American papers at all. In this perspective the death of Dr. Theophilo
Braga, a sort of Frederic Harrison, who was the first President of the
Portuguese Republic, and a congress of Latin Pressmen in Lisbon take
on the importance of considerable international events, and all that
looms largest in the London _Times_ or the American Press undergoes a
compression that amounts at times to complete effacement. That stupid
outrage upon civilisation, the deportation of Miguel de Unamuno, the
great rector of the University of Salamanca, to the Canary Islands
because of his disrespect for the Spanish monarchy and dictatorship
gets a large Press in all these Latin countries. It matters to them. It
ought to matter to every civilised man. The petroleum scandals in the
United States get a rather muddled attention; every country has the oil
scandals it deserves; and there were important articles upon the death
of President Wilson. In its day the coming of the League of Nations
was a great event. Otherwise there has been very little notice either
of the United States or the overseas Empire of Britain. America means
Brazil, and “overseas” Angola.
The Latin mind has always inclined to be sceptical and cynical about
the League of Nations. Was it Anglo-Saxon practicality or Anglo-Saxon
hypocrisy behind this new thing? Did the Americans and British mean
what the League seemed to mean, or was it just another of their deep
inexplicable manœuvres? The doubts have long since carried the day. The
Paris _Quotidien_ supports the League, indeed, but it concerns itself
very little about the criticism or creative reconstruction of the
League, as it would do if it regarded the concern as a working reality.
It treats the whole business as a sort of ethical deep breathing--good
chiefly for the soul. When it refers to it, a note of piety comes into
its style.
The arrival of a Labour Government in Britain was a matter for lively
attention in all these Latin lands. Liberal thinkers everywhere
welcomed it with a hopefulness that was only very faintly tainted by
suspicion. Here, perhaps, was a new thing, a break in the age-long
British tradition of heavy national selfishness and overbearing
self-righteousness. Bits of election addresses, Labour manifestos, and
so forth, had filled up columns and carried headlines in every paper
from Oporto to Fiume and from Mexico to Buenos Aires. This Labour stood
for a reconstituted League of Nations, with wider powers; it stood for
a generous treatment of Russia and Germany; it stood for disarmament;
it stood for a universal retrenchment of military and naval expenditure
and a surcease of grabbing and exploitation. Once again, just as with
the League of Nations, the Latin Press betrayed the peculiar power
which the great English-speaking community might and could exercise, of
putting over broad political ideas to the world at large. There is a
natural reciprocity between the mind of the Latin community and ours;
it is far more delicately critical and far less rudely creative. We can
do much to sustain or destroy its faith. It can do much to clarify our
ideas.
The first utterances of the new Government were scanned with
exceptional closeness; the gestures of Mr. Ramsay MacDonald were
watched with ten times the attention that was ever given to Mr.
Baldwin’s. The prompt recognition of Russia was widely approved
of; the rather empty politenesses towards M. Poincaré were taken as
evidence of an essential goodness of heart and a desire to give him
a fair chance--and then came this business of the cruisers. It would
be hard to exaggerate its evil effect. The first I saw of it was in
the Lisbon morning paper. The paragraph was headed “Signor MacDonald,
Militarist,” and the statement was made without any qualification that
the Labour Government was to lay down the keels of five new cruisers
forthwith. It seemed incredible. Followed the French and Italian
papers. The Italians were derisive at this footnote to the disarmament
conference at Rome, and the French clamoured for six cruisers in reply
to the British “challenge.” The _Quotidien_ was disappointed but not
surprised. The caricaturists, who do so much in the Latin countries to
personify the character of nations and peoples, got to work, and are
still at work, rubbing in this last revelation of the British soul. One
discerned the sensitive, the irritable Latin mind sick with disgust and
bitterly ashamed of itself for its folly in supposing for a moment that
the Labour programme was anything more than electioneering flummery.
“Labour” was just a fine name for a group of British politicians as
dishonest, as basely “patriotic,” as dangerous to the welfare of Europe
as any other group.
Never has there been so gross, so stupid and needless a sacrifice of
moral capital in international relations. I do not see how Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald can ever restore the provisional credit the liberal thought
of the Latin States had accorded him. The guns of those five cruisers,
though not one of them ever materialise and though they will certainly
prove obsolete weapons before they can ever be finished, will have
blown the prestige of the British Labour Government as a possible
European peacemaker to smithereens.
I will confess I shared this immense disillusionment. As one who had
written and spoken to the text of the Labour programme at the last
general election, as one who had explained that the Labour Party at
least would have the courage for disarmament and a better use for the
taxpayers’ money than battleship building, I did my best to suspend
my judgment until the London newspapers came to hand with Mr. Ramsay
MacDonald’s speech upon this issue. It seemed impossible that he could
have gone the complete Amery he has done. I could not believe that he
would not have realised that this thing his Government has done was
not a mere parochial extravagance but an act of intense international
significance. I expected to find some explanations, some palliations,
some apology, that could be put before the foreign observer. I found
a speech--the rottenest Old Parliamentary Hand could not have made a
more parliamentary speech. It was in two parts: the first part was an
ingenious quibble about these ships being merely the replacement of
“wastage”--as though the naval equipment of a country was a constant
thing that had to be kept up to a standard mark instead of being an
incessantly variable thing--and the second was a scarcely veiled
admission that the building of these unnecessary and provocative ships
was a bribe to the labour in the dockyard constituencies. There was not
a word to anticipate the inevitable interpretation of the act abroad;
there was not an indication on the part of this astonishing Foreign
Minister that the affair would even be observed abroad.
One does not buy a weapon without an enemy in view, and I am altogether
at a loss to see what enemy Mr. MacDonald has in view--unless it is
the Conservative candidates in the shipbuilding constituencies. Does
he think he may have to fight France or Italy or Japan or the United
States? Those five cruisers will be no good in a war with France; we
should have to tuck them away somewhere and put patrols of submarine
chasers to take care of them. In a war between France and Britain
the mutual suicide, so to speak, would be achieved through the air.
The cruisers would hardly be of more use against Italy. It is Italy,
however, which is likely to be most estranged by the thought of them.
Italy or Japan. Is there a ghost of a chance of a war with either the
United States or Japan? It is our excellent custom to defer to the
United States, and we always shall. This leaves Japan. Can anything
but the blackest folly bring us into a conflict with Japan except on
some issue which would put the United States on our side?
These cruisers are to cost five million pounds--or more if, failing
the Capital Levy, Britain is forced to inflation--and they are to give
employment to some few thousands of men. Meanwhile I gather that the
educational clauses of that magnificent Labour programme which was to
have kept the next generation at school (and off the crowded labour
market) until it reached the age of sixteen are to be crippled--à la
Fisher--for want of funds.
The more Parliament changes, I perceive, the more it is the same
thing. It is organised for politicians by politicians; it is elected
so stupidly that the statesman wilts into the politician so soon as
he breathes its air. He ceases to see beyond the division lobby and
the dockyard vote. If laying down cruisers is the chief business of
government and the chief end of taxation, I would rather, on the whole,
see Mr. Amery spending my money than Mr. Ammon.
XXVIII
DICTATORS OR POLITICIANS? THE DILEMMA OF CIVILISATION
22.3.24