BOOKS OF THE DAY
Planners Come Home to Roost
G. D. H. COLE has gone round the world and turned up in his own back-garden. Do you remember Mcmalive, where Chesterton's hero deserted his wife and children, declaring that he had a much finer wife and more exquisite children on the other side of the world ; and went off to look for them armed with a revolver and the garden rake ; and how he found them again, when he had gone right round the world to his home, having been through America and Cnina and through Russia—Russia where the stationmaster thought him a remarkably novel and intelligent personality, and wondered if he had written any books. He wouldn't wonder that with G. D. H. Cole ; but in most other ways he would recognise " Manalive."
Oddly enough, a similar conception, the conception of return, has been recently set forth by a still more international figure than G. D. H. Cole ; by Mr. Winant, United States Ambassador to the Court of Si. James, in an address before the University of Leeds. He was speaking for the Promotion of Public Interest in International Relations as an Endowed Lecturer—a very responsible occasion. Hear the word of the Lord as it revealed itself to His servant.
"We must be great of purpose," he says, "or we cannot survive." (I know—I know—but go on.) "We are fighting to win a second chance to mak,: the greatest of traditions come true. Do not let us ever talk as if we were fighting to substitute something else for that tradition ; because there is nothing to substitute. Either we go ahead, perfecting the political and moral 'system we have inherited, or we let the system perish and the world revert to barbarism."
You think that's pretty reactionary? All right—take a spell of Cole. "To some of my readers," he says, in the very last page of the last chapter, " this will appear as an anti-climax—after a journey round the world, a pitiful return to gossip round the parish pump. I ask, then, is it not because we have lost command of our parish pumps that we have lost also the command of greater affairs, and, what is more, faith in ourselves? " This is not an isolated passage ; it is also the theme of his Introduction ; where he says, "This should make even Socialists wary by now of tearing up by the roots any small man's refuge that is left in a world so ridden by hugeness. It should make them regard the farmer, the shopkeeper, the small manufacturer, not as obstacles in the way of universal centralisation, but as valuable checks upon a dangerous agglomerative tendency." Where are we getting to? Has the wheel really come full circle? Not really ; but the intelligentsia are certainly beginning to walk all round the subject. Anybody with a sense of history knows the alternations of systole and diastole, of ebb and flow, that charac- terise the affairs of men. A knowledge of long time, of real time, such as is pressing upon these men, cures the temporary pessimism which declares that it is only necessary to live long enough to see "all and the reverse of all." In fact, long history shows that time is as irreversible as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which was the Devil of the later Victorians). Whatever the end may be is none of our present business. G. D. H. Cole has a new angle to his old message for the sons of men.
It is, shortly, that we must find some new training-ground to develop anew the democratic elite which "grew out of the Non- conformist chapels and the trade unions, the co-operative societies and other working-class organisations when they were struggling to establish a recognised position in the life of society." Since then Nonconformity has lost its social force ; the Nonconformist is simply one among a number of Churches which no longer differ very greatly in social recognition. As for the trade unions and the co-operative societies, they have become bureaucratised and, still more, they have become fully recognised institutions. Nor has the growth of local government done much to fill the gap. Security, says Cole, is knocking away the foundations of the older democratic institutions without putting anything in their place.
Therefore, the new democratic elite must grow from the small institutions of the small man and these must be preserved and, where necessary, restored. Cole simultaneously holds to a con- viction of the necessity of Communism, "the reformers of today find themselves confronted with the immediate necessity of rebuild- ing society from the foundations, if the life of the people is to be able to go on at all." This is emptying the baby out of the bath with a vengeance. To tear up society by the roots so as to get men interested in the roots is a process no more likely to be fruitful amongst men than amongst vegetables. Roots are among the few things in the world which do not stand scrutiny. Incidentally, Cole's preoccupation with the small man and the small society out of which he must grow leads him to tolerance, and indeed approba- tion, for the peasant. He has a whole chapter—a most interesting and well-informed chapter—about agriculture, only marred by the inevitable stigma of a Liberal upbringing—a horror of the sugar beet as a sort of accursed plant, a thing evil in itself, grown by the protection of a subsidy. I wish he would have a look at con- densed milk. Clearly, in the new society we must have security, and we must have stringencies ; for out of security is born strength and out of stringency thrift and adventure. But these are not found synthetically. They are found in a clash with real things ; and there are plenty of these, roaring, just round the corner.
WALTER ELLIOT.
Previous page
