The Future in the Pacific
War and Peace in the Pacific. (Report of an Unofficial Conterence attended by Delegates from Australia, Canada, China, Fighting France, India, Netherlands, N.E.I., New Zealand, Philippines, U.K., and U.S.: Royal Institute of International Affairs. 4s. 6d.) The Menacing Rise of Japan. By Alexander Howard and Ernest Newman. (Harrap. 6s.) THE 1942 conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, held at Mont Tremblant," Quebec, last December, and of which Chatham House now publishes a preliminary report, possessed an interest and authority denied to its predecessors. On each of the delega- tions to it served high officials of the corresponding government ; there were members of the- Pacific War Council and of the War Cabinet in London ; and even if the U.S.S.R. did not send delegates, nevertheless the conference represented a fair cross-section of official opinion among the United Nations on Pacific matters. For that reason it is well worth studying its deliberations.
At first the British Delegation seems to have come under hot fire from the Chinese and the Americans. There is no good .denying the Chinese bear us some ill-will for our preoccupation with the Germans as main enemy. America is relatively exempt from this attack ; the Chinese know that the bulk of the American public is much more concerned with the Japanese than with the Nazi • danger. But on the whole Chinese criticism does not seem to have been mischievous ; and in the tussle certain ideas emerged, notably regarding the co-ordination of war propaganda, which, if adopted, might ease relations between London and Chungking. The American charge was a different matter entirely—dark con- demnations of the British colonial system as a whole. In our lost islands of S.E. Asia, it was inferred, British rule must never be restored ; sweeping aside the " hypocrisies " of the Cripps offer, we should accord immediate independence to India. With as much sense as adroitness, the British Delegation seems to have turned
the American attack by inquiring whether'the Unified States were prepared to honour those provisions of the Atlantic Charter which call for mutual aid in time of crisis. The American reply was by no means definite. The tendency in the States to criticise foreign regimes without assuming foreign responsibilities is one that we English have long been chary of censuring. It is an emotional idiosyncras- which does not always go hand in hand with a know- ledge of the facts.
No liberal-minded person wants to perpetuate the defects of an old-fashioned colonial system, nor to defend our _errors in India. But liberation is no good without security from aggression ; and the U.S. must bear their share in extending this security to Asia. That was one of the lessons of the Mont Tremblant Conference. Incidentally, if we had extended full independence to a Gandhi- dominated India before the war, the Americans would probably now be the most seriously inconvenienced!
The Menacing Rise of Japan is an impressive photographic record of Japan's sinister growth in the last century. It is addressed to a less specialised public than that for which the Chatham House pamphlet is designed. But as one looks at the pictures of great Japanese factories, one is reminded of a question that aroused some discussion at Mont Tremblant : Can Japan, when defeated,'be left in possession .of her industrial equipment? Are not factories as much weapons in these days as tanks or bombers? To this excel- lent little book Lord Vansittart contributes an admirable preface, in which he makes the consoling point that in this war " the civilised have got into one camp and the uncivilised into the other."
SIMON HARCOURT-SMITH.
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