A Review of Reviews

The world, Mr. Winston Churchill is reported to have said, is on the eve of great events. But the world itself seems to be singularly uninstructed with regard to the great events in our own country. The July periodicals contain no articles on India of outstanding merit, probably because the issues were then still hanging in the balance. The typical Anglo-Indian view is expressed by Patrick Lacey on ‘the Deadlock in India’ in The Nineteenth Century. No useful purpose would be served, he says, by interviews between Gandhi and the Viceroy; the provincial governors ought resolutely to carryon with minority governments. An abler and more objective analysis is provided by The Round Table, which emphasizes’ the come-’ of Gandhi and the point that the demand for assurance was more a political than a legal question. The writer thinks that the country is overwhelmingly in favour of office and that the Congress would eventually be occupying the ministerial benches.

India also forms part of a brilliant monograph in the third and latest number of Fact. Mr. Leonard Barnes writes on a ‘Skeleton of the Empire.’ It is a grim skeleton, bared to the bones and with all stuffing beaten out. He says that in the main "……trade and investment have always provided the main motive force behind British imperialist expansion" and surveys in brief the history of British India, the present state of the Colonies, the problems of Empire defence, and the relations between the Dominions and Great Britain. He asks the question

"What is the Empire’s significance as a factor in the world crisis?"

and answers

"Its strong points are three: (a) it employs some good public officials, (b) a few of its mission stations are free fraternities, and (c) it allows some beginnings of applied science to be introduced to primitive peoples.

"The Empire has four weak points: (a) it drives the world towards war, (b) it holds down 400 million coloured subjects of His Majesty in abject poverty, (c) it enables capitalism to bear its taintful children among peoples hitherto un-touched by the disease, and (d) it makes impossible the working of a universal system of collective security and is thus anti-social……..

"Only two solutions are possible……You can cut out the democracy and preserve the capitalism…….or you can cut out the capitalism and preserve the democracy…..If you cut out the democracy you get Fascism. If you cut out capitalism and extend democracy to the economic sphere, you get Socialism."

This is a terrible balance-sheet drawn up on relentlessly Marxian lines and will hotly be disputed and resented by large sections of conservative opinion. How different is the view of Fred Clarke, Director of the Imperial Institute of Education, who writes in The Fortnightly that the British Commonwealth represents "the unity of a historical idea" in actual realisation! Education ought to seize on the significance of the experiment. The Commonwealth should evolve a common ideal, a common way of life, and a community outlook based on real economic interests. "Spiritual frontiers ought to coincide with geographical frontiers." An article in The Round Table describes the part played by the Crown in the life of the Empire.

Perhaps Prof. Zwaritz strikes the balance in The Political Quaterly. Writing on a Soviet view of the British Empire, he remarks that the history of the Empire has been a story of disintegration culminating in the Statute of Westminster. But the Empire has also shown immense reserves of centripetal power and she has need of all of them now." The Empire has Achilles heels all over the world." And Italy and Germany have become clamant in their demand, symbolic or real, for colonies and world domination. The Spanish war involves a direct menace to British communications in the Mediterranean. Italian Abyssinia cuts across the Cape-to-Cairo route and threatens the Red Sea route to India. The Mediterranean problem is one of crucial importance to Great Britain.

The history of this problem before and after the war is examined by W. B. Langer in Foreign Affairs. As early as 1912 Grey said, "once Italy is in possession of a naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean the Triple Alliance will be mistress of the shores." The fact is that

"Great Britain gets three-quarters of her supplies from E. Indies, Iran, Iraq and Rumania. France gets half of her supplies from Iraq….Anglo-French pipe-lines run from Iraq to Haifa and Tripoli-in-Syria.

"Politically, strategically and commercially the Mediterranean is far more important to France and Great Britain now than twenty years ago….

Italy has fortified the Dodecenese and Pantellaria……

"The Germans at the Canaries or in Rio de Oro would be a serious menace to British or French shipping, not only on the Cape route but on the South American route……Lessages Islands keep oil for German submarines and ‘planes.’"

That is why Malta is being furiously fortified by the English, why Cyprus has risen to be the solar plexus of the Empire; why Egypt has been given all that she has wanted and good relations are maintained with Turkey; why the English are anxious to mollify Jewish and Arab interests in Palestine even after the publication of the Royal Commission Report.

But are the British statesmen alive to these larger issues of the Spanish conflict? By any reckoning the stock of British statesmanship in foreign affairs has never fallen so low as in the present decade. The National Government appears to be incapable of pursuing a policy of definiteness and consistency. Graham Hutton, Assistant Editor of The Economist, writing in the same number of Foreign Affairs, says that the Civil War in Spain involves three issues: the ideological issue between Fascism and Communism; the strategic issue between the idea of the Roman Lake and British Canal in the Mediterranean; the issue between dictatorship and democracy. Public opinion in England would have supported a strong League policy or of non-intervention maintained from the beginning. But the conservatives were divided among themselves, the older section advocating a policy of waiting and delay, the younger section eager to call the bluff of the Fascist powers.

Wickham Steed writing in The Contemporary Review says there is documentary evidence for the importation of Italian and German armaments even before the Civil War was started. But the British Government does not seem to realise that the triumph of Franco would mean the final overthrow of the democratic principle in Europe. Wickham Steed quotes the remark of a German Liberal which sums up the Nazi (and Fascist) outlook: "These Nazis hate you with almost a metaphysical hatred, because you recognise and pay the Leader of the Opposition instead of killing him."

The internal consequences of re-armament are ably analysed by R. W. B. Clarke in The Political Quarterly. The problem is an industrial one requiring highly specialised factories. But the Government by rejecting nationalisation and by assisting, subsidising and creating shadow schemes, reap neither the advantages of capitalism nor of socialism. The type of economic organisation built up in re-armament has an ominous tinge of Fascist Corporativism. Further, during the period of piling up arms, there will be a budget deficit of £80 millions every year and the National Debt will be at £7,800 millions. When the decline comes, there will be the devil to pay. Cuts in social services would be the disastrous result.

What of Russia? An exceedingly interesting article in The Contemporary by V. S. Swaminathan makes out that Russia stands third after Great Britain and the United States, reckoned as a unit in the strength of her mineral resources. She stands third in coal deposits, second in petrol. She produces 1,356,000 oz of fine gold and by 1940 will reach the 1935 level of S. Africa. But she suffers from distances and the transport charges are enormous.

But whatever the metallurgical prospects, something seems to be rotten in the Soviet State. The recent Moscow trials have shocked progressive elements and exposed the extent of the ‘Trotskyist’ plots. Sir Johrr Maynard throws fresh light on these trials in The Political Quarterly. Examining the record of the victims, he finds that many of the alleged Trotskyists were men who had made their peace with Stalin and who figure prominently in ‘the Stalinite school of falsification’–a notorious indictment by Trotsky. Why did the prisoners, then, confess and glory in confession? "We suggest," writes Sir John, "that they were under the influence of certain ideas which the orthodox faith has implanted in the Russian soul…..One of these is that truth resides in the congregation where love is…..He who is outside the congregation must find his way out of the misery of isolation……." So the prisoners hating to be branded as traitors to the congregation ‘confessed’ their guilt.

Sir John may be right or not; but this is a profoundly disquieting reflection to revolutionaries. Do all revolutions after all end up as restorations? Do old beliefs killed as dogmas survive as habits? Do they always turn up like bad pennies? Is there no progress of the species even through cataclysms and upheavals? There may be no automatic law of progress but the pendulum of change at least swings in upward curves.

The latest number of Philosophy answers some of these questions. It contains a remarkable address given by Sir S. Radhakrishnan to the British Institute of Philosophy, written with all the verve and brilliance so characteristic of this philosopher-knight.

"Though there is no automatism in history, its course is not a matter of mere accident or chance. It may not disclose a plot or a rhythm; it yet has a reason and a sense. It can be understood by a study of the underlying spirit of man……

"Civilisation does not proceed in a straight line upward or downward but rather in a series of reaches. It follows an undulatory course……Progress is not inevitable. It requires to be achieved by man who grows by aspiration and effort…..Human society is still in its infancy with vast spaces of time to fulfill the destiny that awaits it…..

"There is a confusion between progress and perfection which belong to two different planes. Progress refers to a future world-aeon and perfection to the ultimate depths of one’s being. Progress deals with a solution in the stream of time....Perfection is a victory over time, a triumphant passage from the historical to the super-historical…..

"……Christian theology believes that the revelation of God in history is a non-recurring, indivisible, incomparable, unique event. Hindu and Buddhist thought does not look upon it as exceptional. The experience is sufficiently frequent to be called normal……

"The purpose of the universe……is the attainment of perfection….the complete manifestation of eternal values on the plane of history can only be, if at all, in the last moment of concrete time, which contains all the others in the sense that it completes, synthesizes and explains them…..When the universe becomes a bearer of values it may well have its terminus.……

"The two chief characteristics of our age which are hostile to the life of the spirit are economic materialism and romantic sentimentalism……while resolved to renounce nothing, this generation wishes to enjoy the fruits of renunciation……A new simplicity, a new asceticism…….is what we need…….."

This means that we must be essentially religious in temper and life. This is well stressed by Dr. Urquhart in The Hibbert Journal. He discusses the relation between religion and communalism, the relation between religion and the group, religion and the State. "A true relation with the members of another community is reached only through a true relation with God." "The line of advance can be not in the suppression of one group by another…..but in the exercise of intelligent good-will, based on a sympathetic consideration of fundamental similarities."

But while Philosophy is proclaiming counsels of perfection the crack of gunfire seems to be imminent in the Far East. In Northern China the pot has been brewing for a long time and is now boiling over. Northern China has become the cockpit of ‘crusading ideologies’–the aggressive imperialism of Japan, the encroaching communism of Russia, and the militant nationalism of China. But ideologies apart, there are vast vested interests at stake. The Empire Review has an article which mentions that Japan has lent money–the Nisihara loans–to Northern China and that she wants to safeguard her interests. Her total investments in China amounted in 1936 to 500 million yen. Moreover, Japan wants Northern China’s strategic coast-line and her iron ore, oil, tin, copper and gold. From Northern China she will later proceed to outer Mongolia and Nanking.

What will the powers and China do? Great Britain has £250 million invested in China. The Dutch producers of oil, tin and rubber are closely bound up with the British investors. It is to her interest that no war breaks out between China and Japan. To America the menace of Japan in the Pacific is very real and she will act provided Britain keeps step. But even in America opinion is divided. Pacific Affairs took a poll on Pacific policy and received various answers.

"The failure of diplomacy to achieve the objects of Hay, Root, Kellogg and Stimson, and the determination of the American people not to resort to arms has led to the absence of any clear-cut purpose in the relation between the United States and the Oriental nations……..

"This is due to the non-existence of a compact governing class, cohesive as to ground, outlook and interests……and wide divergence of national intesests…..

From the point of view of China, the problem is one of shaking off the capitulations, protecting herself against Japan and raising the standard of living of the people. Her problem in the main is one of desperate poverty, a problem paralleled and surpassed only by our own.

We take the following from The Churchman, New York, quoted in Public Opinion, July 9th; but we do not vouch for the truth of it.

During the recent military operations in China, one side captured the other’s general. An envoy was sent to negotiate for his exchange.

"We -will give you four colonels for him," said the officer.

The offer was declined.

"Eight majors?"

"No." "What then?"

"We have given the matter most careful consideration and the least we can accept is two dozen tins of condensed milk."