THE RETREAT OF BRITAIN

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By WICKHAM STEED

SIR NORMAN ANGELL is a national asset. He reminds me of a brainy lady whose younger and less brainy sister once said to her in a tone of mingled horror and reproach : " I believe you positively enjoy thinking." Sir Norman Angell loves to think and—what is still more repugnant to good, solid British minds—he loves to reason. His attachment to a kind of

intellectual nudism verges on the scandalous, for naked thought is one of the few forms of indecency against which up-to-date Britons still revolt. This is what makes him a perpetual inconoclast. Never is he happier than when he can smash idols and preach honesty and purity of thought and deed.

His speeches, writings and books are constant antidotes to the sleeping sickness into which comfortable British minds, surrounded by a haze of shibboleths, are prone to fall.

" The Retreat of Britain " is the title of the longest chapter in this stimulating works upon The Defence of the Empire. Those who, with Cassandra-like perspicacity and mournful premonition, have watched. the course of British policy during the past seven or eight years will read it, if not with joy, at least with strong approval. Sir Norman writes : " An outsider, coming into a room where people have been sitting for some time, finds the atmosphere close and foul ; says so, to the surprise of those present. The change, because gradual, had been unnoticed. Only when we put the piecemeal surrenders together and estimate the total effect do we realise the significance " of the steady British retreat from the discharge of duty and from the path of safety.

The principal stages in this retreat were Manchuria, Sir John Simon's refusal to co-operate with the United States in upholding the Kellogg Pact and the Nine-Power Treaty in the Far .East, the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, the Hoare- Laval . proposals and the tragedy of Abyssinia, the yielding to Italy in the Mediterranean, and the present failure to uphold either the law of nations or British interests in the Spanish conflict. Sir Norman Angell does not write at random. He quotes chapter and verse in a way that must be disconcerting to certain British Ministers and journals. In one pungent passage he says :

When large Italian armies, necessarily at the direct command of the Italian Government, had invaded Spanish territory for the purpose of destroying the government we might have invoked the principles of the League, which compel us to do what we may to make that kind of aggression difficult, and could have said that this new tech- nique of aggression threatened the security of all legal government everywhere, unless it happens to be of the Fascist or Nazi type. Instead of this, the burden of the recommendation throughout has been for "impartiality," for not taking sides. But to recommend that we be impartial as between the law and those who break it, means, again, that we stand for its destruction.

To this indictment there is no present answer.

But Sir Norman Angell would not be himself were his criticism merely negative. The positive side of it comes both at the beginning and at the end of hii book. Asking

" What is the Empire ? " he shows that it is certainly not the sort of Empire it once was, not a world-wide sphere of British

domination;- but mainly a *Corninimweelth of independent democracies under a common Crown whiCh, while " made up of States too obstinately independent to accept any written and rigid Federal Constitution, have nevertheless managed to federalise the function which it-is most essential of all to federalise, that of defence." The world knows, for instance, that if Japan should invade Australia the British Commonwealth.

The -Defence of the Empire: By Norman Angell: (Hamish

Hamilton. 6s.) . . . _ as a whole would stand for the defence of that particular member ; and Australian resources, human and material, would be available for the defence of Britain and the Common- wealth as a whole although there is no article of any constitution which imposes the obligation.

But what is it that we do defend ? We defend a certain order the world, an order based on the individual freedom which is the essence of democratic institutions and the right

of men to have a voice in settling v-hat shall be done with their lives. As Sir Norman writes : One of the strangest spectacles of history is to see young men parading the streets clamantly demanding that the right to dispose of their own lives shall be taken from them ; demanding that they shall not even have the right to know the purpose or end for which the Chief, the Duce, the Fuhrer, the Leader, is to send them to die. They are told for instance to destroy Communism as the enemy of their Fatherland ; but they are not permitted to know what Communism is, to read its literature, to study its purposes. They must not judge for themselves ; the Leader must judge for them. And the demand that this right to know, to decide for themselves, be taken from them is a demand usually made with passionate fanaticism.

We, however, know that like every other nation in the world we would fight for the right to govern ourselves according

to our own way of life and feeling. " And in the circum- stances of the British Commonwealth this means that the defence of the Empire involves the defence of the right of democratic communities to retain their own form of govern- ment. To defend ' the Empire' makes us, even though against our will, the defenders of democracy, of the right of such democratic communities to organise co-operatively their defence." If the lesser democratic States are to survive at all it will be by their capacity for union—a capacity extremely difficult to develop as between democracies. We know that democracy is threatened by the greater power and unity of dictatorships. Any form of combination which increases the defensive power of small nations of a million or two, like New Zealand, or of six millions like Australia, so as to make a better showing when confronted with dictator-dominated masses of eighty millions or more, is assuredly an aid to the defence of democracy which is threatened more seriously now in Europe than it was in Abraham Lincoln's day in America.

Lincoln believed that if the American Union went to pieces democracy would not survive in the Western hemisphere. He took the dread decision to fight rather than al:ow the Union to be split, because he felt that, if American unity went, democracy must go too. The need for union today among the remaining democracies of the older world is funda- mentally just as vital. And if we will not fight for it or for any general principle of right, but only to defend our pos- sessions and interests ; if we are to be militarist when our " property " is touched but pacifist when it comes to fighting for a better international order; then it is almost certain that the youth of this country will decide to be pacifist at all times.

It may well be, Sir Norman Angell concludes, that for these reasons also collective defence is the only possible defence.

Therefore Sir Norman Angell would have the British Commonwealth help, not hinder, the formation of a Grand Alliance to guarantee peace, to ensure the supremacy of third- party judgement in international disputes, and, in effect, to outlaw the war-method of dealing with the affairs of nations. This Alliance should not be exclusive. Germany or any other . nation could " join the club by accepting its rules."

Meanwhile the defence of the Empire is the union of demo.. cracies. in defence of peace.