British Chairmanship
Sta,—The easy impartiality of even the worst British chairman derives, surely, from causes deep in our national Character. For the same reason Germans excel equally decisively in other ways; but we in this. A thousand years of a settled island society make us feel that a lapse from fairness will sooner or later have to be expiated, that the other fellow's turn is sure to come, and come before very long; and for us this dominates all other considerations. But a German has no reason to want to be this kind of chairman at all. How can he feel the same urgency to be impartial ? For him it cannot stand out as an important virtue. His society has a different environment from ours, and a different sort of job to do, and that difference is one which makes him feel that it is far more important that some one coherent point of view—his own, if he is a sincere man—should prevail, and he is bound to have more faith in this than in the arbitrament of free diScussion, which in his experience is a luxury his society cannot afford. This determines his style of chairmanship, and influences its expertise.
The point seems worth making, even at the cost of being a little ponderous, as I think it holds the key to a lot of the mistakes we make in our international relations. We British think we have made a sufficient contribution to the peace of nations when we fairmindedly refrain from pressing our claim to some superiority; whereas we might do better to press it boldly and confidently where it exists, and concede with corresponding freedom some quite different superiority to the foreigner, I would even venture on the generalisation that when the foreigner fails consistently to achieve some virtue we admire, it is always because he does not see it as a virtue, that it would be of little value to him even if he did, and that he is not trying to achieve it at all—at any rate not at the expense of something he considers more urgently important. Studies in comparative anthropology, such as those carried out by Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, seem to show that we know far less about other nations than we think.—Yours truly,
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