[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—" Under Thirty XII
" is even more remote from life in his belief than his predecessors in their unbelief. Rarely have any of your contributors been so fatuously wrong-headed in their notion of what the State is for. Surely, the State exists to safeguard (by communal effort, certainly) the elementary rights of human existence—the right to live, to food, to work, and to the elementary decencies. And none of these rights is assured by the modern State. My right to live is in serious jeopardy because my Government is plainly afraid that it can't for very much longer keep foreign aeroplanes from dropping bombs on me. My right to food and to work is not, and never has been, more than precariously assured, and the same applies to the majority of people. And not even a Doctor of Philosophy would agree that more than a fraction of the population is assured of the elementary decencies. And yet from his remote ate, Shangri-La (a Buchmanite House Party ?) he pontificates about a philosophy of giving and of responsibilities ! He must have lost his sense of proportion in the strain of mugging- up his thesis. The notion that responsibilities are .anterior to rights in the State is not merely nonsense : it is Fascist nonsense, as is shown in his commendation of a Trade Union official who plainly wanted his organisation reduced to the status of an American Company Union or a Fascist band of industrial " followers " deprived of all right of independent economic or political activity,
The thing that is wrong with the State today is that it is failing in its fundamental task of safeguarding the rights of the ordinary individual. Once we abandon that position, once we cease to work to get those rights adequately established in fact, we deliver ourselves bound hand and foot to Fascism.
Besides, Sir, " Under Thirty XII " need have no fear that we shall be allowed to forget our responsibilities or withhold our giving. I am pretty certain I shall one day be face to face with the poster that once confronted my father and his- " Your King and Country Want You ! " They may say this time that it's " Collective Security " that wants me, but I shall know what it means—that " Under Thirty XII " will be able to put on his respirator with a good heart because I shall be giving to positive patriotism—my life. And when I have choked up my lungs or had my guts gouged out he will come to view the sight and know that all things are made perfect because I (like a first-class fool) sacrificed my right to live to the sacred responsibility of dying for the dividends on British Capital.
I am sorry to have been a good deal less polite than your genteel " Under Thirties " themselves. But they are all so divorced from reality that they deserve it. L. SEAMAN.
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