LET US HEAR THE TRUTH. T HE Duke of Northumberland, speaking
as the guest' of the Tin Plate Workers at their installation banquet last week, used the following words : " Our Government have made a great mistake in not taking the people of this country into their confidence and telling them the whole truth and showing them the way in which these sinister influences could be best combated." In a previous passage the Duke pointed out how the Labour Party here had been got hold of and bemused, and are, in effect, controlled by the so-called International Socialist Party. But this body is simply the agent of the military party in Germany. German Social Democracy, he insisted, had been working for years before the Russian Revolution broke out, developing a plot in the interests of Germany. There are, of course, many opinions as to the truth of this indictment of the Labour Party and as to the existence of an International Socialist plot ; but there surely ought to be no two opinions in regard to the Duke's demand for our enlightenment on the part of our Government. The people who disbelieve in what they call " plot scares " and the " conspiracy bogy " ought to be'quite as anxious as those who agree with the warnings of the Duke of Northumberland to demand that the Government should tell us all they know. Remember that it is impossible for what we may call the " ostrich " party to say it is absurd to ask the Government to examine a mirage and to tell us about things which do not exist, and of which, therefore, they- can have no knowledge. That attitude- would be possible if the leading members of the Govern- ment had said nothing about the dangers of the situation. It is not possible when men holding such positions as the Prime Minister and Mr. Winston Churchill—both politicians who have seen our ad ministration from almost every angle— tell us in language such as the nation has not heard during the last hundred years that we are beset with grave and secret perils, and that there are large and powerful bodies of men working for our destruction.
In our opinion, for such men to have used such language is to have said either too much or too little. As it is, they have said enough to cause the deepest anxiety and that suspicion which comes from anxiety, but not enough to give anxiety the strength and certainty it requires to beget a high national resolve. Unalloyed, unjustified, vague, and haunting suspicion is the very worst state of mind from which a nation so sorely tried as ours can possibly suffer. The first effect of suspicion is to cloud the mind. It warps the judgment; it paralyses action; it creates that most dangerous of all things—an atmosphere of panic. One half of the nation trembles, the other half gets into a condition of intellectual atrophy which is quite as perilous. They are frightened and anxious for the first two or three days after the Prime Minister or a Secretary of State has made a menacing speech. When, however, nothing vivid happens, and the warning is not followed up by some concrete fact, they at once suffer from reaction. _ They begin to say : After all, that was only bogy talk to frighten us. There are no signs of the alleged conspirators doing anything. Instead there are actual signs that it was only talk, meant probably to cover the weakness of the Government and to elicit support for themselves from the timid. If they had really meant business, they would have told us a great deal more and given us strong reasons for their attempts to make our flesh creep. Let us banish all such worries and amuse ourselves."
Thus, while one half of the nation is ready to believe almost anything and to go conspiracy mad, the other half is lulled into a state of foolish security—the security of those who are always assuring themselves that nothing is going to happen, that to-morrow will always be like yesterday, and that " funk " talk is rubbish. The only way now to put an end to this condition, so distracting and so likely to break down that confidence in the Govern- ment which ought to exist in times of danger, is for the Cabinet to tell us all they know about the action of foreign plotters. Only a very small proportion of the English people are either traitors or revolutionaries, or both, though a very large part of them are extremely innocent and extraordinarily unwilling to believe that people could plot to kill and destroy wholesale, to usurp the powers of the Government, or to force upon the nation, whether it liked it or not, the principles of International Socialism. But • why, then, does the Cabinet hesitate to destroy, as we are certain it could destroy by the sharp sword of truth, those whom it dreads, and who it knows will show no mercy upon persons who can truly boast themselves to be the depositories of democratic power—i.e., the chosen of the people as a whole ? The mandate of the majority, remember, is nothing in the eyes of the advocates of the " dictatorship of the Proletariat." They scorn the idea that the majority have any right to rule. Power is the exclusive prerogative of the lowest stratum of the manual workers. But even they have no rights unless they are true believers in the religion according to Karl Marx. So obvious, indeed, is the necessity for enlightenment through the Government, now that the Government have admitted grounds for deep anxiety, that many moderate and intelligent people are saying at the present moment that the Government must have some very good reason, though it is difficult to guess what it is, for not speaking out, otherwise they must long ago have told us all they know.
We do not believe for a moment that there is any such strange and undisclosable reason for inaction. We believe that the reason why the Government do not take the people of the country into their confidence and give us a lead as to how we are to resist the revolutionaries is based upon two things. In the first place, they have been half bemused and half frightened by the attitude of the bureaucracy. :A bureaucrat loves a secret-fer its own sake, as did the hierarchical priesthoods of the Egyptians and of the Assyrians. Knowledge of secrets, they think, is power, and they are eager to maintain power. To know something which other people do not know also feeds their intellectual pride. But beyond this instinctive desire not to part with what they consider a valuable asset is the desire, and this, if kept within limits, is a very right and proper one, that they should not dry up their sources of information by disclosures which may be traced by our enemies and bring swift and dreadful punishment upon the men from whom we obtained our secret information. But though these seem at first sight good excuses for the policy of keeping the nation in the dark and for refusing to tell us the truth and to give us full information, we believe that the policy of secretiveness is largely mistaken. It is perfectly easy for a Cabinet to let the nation know almost all that it knows without disclosing the sources of its information in such a way as to dry up those sources. While letting us know all it knows about the plots of the International Socialists, it can preserve complete anonymity as to its informants. Who can doubt that if the Prime Minister were to state in the House of Commons specifically and plainly what was happening, and, when challenged, to give chapter and verse for his warnings, were to say boldly that he could not run the risk of betraying his informants, he would not only be believed but would be held to have acted sensibly and with political discretion ? To secure the full confidence of the nation, he has only got to tell the country that he and his subordinates have thoroughly investigated the source of the statements made, and that he and they are confident that they are correct, and that he takes full responsibility for all that he has said. To be specific in statement does not necessarily involve a dis- closure of origins. The British people would repay the Prime Minister the confidence which he had shown that he had• reposed in them.
But how is one to explain the fact that our rulers do not do anything so easy and, indeed, so obvious as this ? Why miss such an opportunity for increasing their hold upon the nation ? We believe that the answer—a dis- agreeable one, we confess—is that our politicians have so long relied upon " Management " and little Parliamentary and diplomatic tricks for retaining power, that they have almost forgotten how to speak the language of truth. They will not believe that their sovereign lord, the people of this country, will bear it. One of their maxims is, "Never alarm the country too much." As they put it, " If you create a panic, the nation becomes unmanageable. There- fore don't make disagreeable disclosures. A hint or an expression of anxiety is the most you should risk." For example, during the war the Government never made complete disclosures because they were afraid of popular anger. They were never able to realize that, for English people, disagreeable knowledge often acts as the very best of tonics. It may depress people for a few days, but then, in the case of our race, comes a reaction which is indomit- able. It is hardly too much to say that we won the war because of the terrible disasters in the push of 1918. That push and its dangers could not be concealed from us, and the result was that the nation was braced to irresistible effort.
There is another matter connected with " Management " which we are afraid affects the minds of our rulers. They don't want to press anything too far. They don't want to take the gloves off with anyone. They are always brooding on the old Arabic maxim that you should not treat a friend as if he could never become an enemy, or an enemy as if he could never become a friend. They see that a great many of the Labour Party, out of weakness and panic and the desire not to sever themselves from what they call their " hotheads," have bowed the knee to the Baal of Moscow, and have, while no doubt detesting revolutionary ideas, accepted or seemed to accept them. " Surely you don't want us to let everything fall into the hands of the extremists." The Government are thus persuaded that, if they were to tell us all they knew and all the grounds for their anxiety, they might hit very hard people whom they wish to have a hold on—people whom they consider to be " all right," and who very likely have told them a good many things, but who also, if the whole truth were ruth- lessly disclosed, would be shown to have done things which can only be described as criminally foolish—things of which they did not realize the full obliquity at the beginning, but which they now find are veritable fulcrums for blackmail. If we are right in this view, as we are sure we are, these men, who perhaps have 'taken money, not for themselves, but " for the cause," and then found too late its contamin- ated origin, are now imploring the Government not to expose their blindness and stupidity and " give the revolu- tionaries complete control of the Labour machine." Possibly, also, the Government are themselves tarred with the same brush. Meaning to act for the best, they too have possibly committed themselves to secret negotiations and agreements with the men of Moscow which they are now beginning to think were anything but wise or safe. That being so, a really candid revelation would, they think, show them up besides showing up the conspirators. Thus it will be seen that there is a whole series of reasons for making them prefer the timid counsels of secrecy rather than those of candour.
If we are right in this suggestion, the Government are very much mistaken as regards both their own safety and the safety of the nation. Whatever mistakes others may have made, and whatever mistakes they have made themselves, the wisest policy will be one of complete candour. Let them own up at once to any mistakes, however grave, and they will find that the nation, which is composed not of children but of men and women who have made plenty of mistakes of their own, will show no lack of indulgence. What the country wants is knowledge— specific grounds upon which it can base action for the future. For example, there are thousands of men here who take a great pride in thinking that they are not going to be frightened by the talk of the Third International or, as they would say, " any other Socialistic talking-shop." When they are told by non-official instructors that the Third International is something very different from a " Socialist talking-shop," they frankly don't believe it. They will tell you that they have heard too much of that sort of thing, and that they are not going to damn anybody or any institution on newspaper paragraphs. It will be a very different matter if they can be shown, on the word of the Government, what the real designs of the Third International are and what are their relations with the dictators of Moscow.
If it is said that the Government, though they may have great suspicions, have nothing which, if put forward as disclosures, would contribute to popular knowledge, why should not the Cabinet appoint either a Royal Commission or else a Committee of the House of Commons, or, again, a Joint Committee with the power to hold both public and secret sittings and to investigate the truth or want of truth in the allegations of the Duke of Northumberland in regard to the influences exerted by foreign conspirators.? And here we may add that the ways and means and the expenditure of foreign money should be a matter for very special and close inquiry. The Commission or Committee would of course have complete power to grant exemption from prosecution to any witness who acted with proper candour and straightforwardness. A body investigating on these lines would soon draw to itself evidence of a very valuable kind and would, through the testimony which it would receive, soon become a cause of real enlightenment. There is also another way in which it would be of great practical use. It might be able to give judgment as to the authen- ticity or not of particular documents. The last thing we want to do is to see the nation taken in by either forged papers or papers which, though authentic, may represent no real force. On the other hand, we do not want the country to dismiss as absurd or impossible some statement which, after all, however sensational or incredible, proves to be an important document and one to which we ought to pay attention.
Finally, the Government should not neglect the power of enlightenment which comes from a public trial. No doubt the main object of a public trial is to punish a particular individual, but this is by no means' the only benefit. Even if the man indicted may get off, and justly get off, with a technical plea or becausethere is not sufficient evidence to prove him guilty, though he may in reality be guilty, the prosecution may be of the utmost public moment. • It is the habit of Englishmen to read trials when they will read nothing else. Therefore it is well worth while for the Government to run the risk of not getting a verdict, or not being able to uphold a verdict if they do get it, provided they can get sworn testimony examined before an impartial tribunal.
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