LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym, and the latter must be accompanied by the name and address of the author, which will be treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR] FEDERAL UNION: THE AMERICAN ANALOGY SCR,—I have no desire to discuss the general question of the desirability or practicability of "Federal Union," but there is one aspect of the campaign for this remedy or panacea which deserves more critical examination than it has hitherto got. In Mr. Streit's Union Now great stress was laid on the alleged analogy between our condition in Europe today and the condition of the American States between the achieve- ment of independence and the beginning of the present Federal Government in 1789. Whether historical analogies ever prove more than that there are historical analogies, more or less plausible, for every new historical situation, may be doubted. However that may be, I should like to suggest that the analogy between the problem of the organisation of a democratic Federal Union in Europe or in the world and the problem of providing a more efficient Federal Government for the thirteen States is one of the less plausible specimens of its kind.
We are sufficiently familiar with our own difficulties ; old, proud nations each with a damnosa hereditas of war, internal and external feuds, powerful economic and political vested interests with a bias in favou'r of staying vested ; each with a clearly marked conception of the good life differing in many details, if not fundamentally, from that of its neigh- bour, are to be asked to make great sacrifices of amour pro pre, of pride, of apparent security, to enter a Medea's cauldron out of which, no doubt, we shall all emerge much improved, but certainly profoundly changed. This situation is radically different from that of the thirteen States. There were no old, deep-rooted, profoundly held convictions of State differ- ence and State superiority. No doubt Virginians thought themselves better than other men, and so did New Englanders, but can we compare this school—indeed, this house—spirit with the national pride of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans? There were causes of conflict between the States ; there were persons and groups which had an interest in exacerbating the petty feuds of the land speculators, for example ; but there was no great dividing tradition, no powerful body with an interest in fostering those things that separated against those things that united.
In the first place, all the States, a few years before, had had a common allegiance. They were all subject to King George III. The vast majority of the inhabitants had a common language, a common legal and a common political tradition. Not only did they think much alike concerning this world ; they thought Much alike concerning the next. From being Protestant, English-speaking British subjects, they became Protestant, English-speaking American citizens. Together, the active political minority that made the American Revolution had collaborated in waging the war and in carry- ing through the important social changes that went with the war. The Revolutionary party, the Whigs, had leaders from all parts of the country ; Virginians like Washington and Jefferson, New Englanders like John Adams and Nathaniel Greene. The war which began outside Boston ended in Virginia. There was a recent powerful emotional bond of union in the memory of the common triumph. There was a powerful material bond of union, too. The great confisca- tion of Tory property and the cancellation of debts had anchored to the revolutionary cause the numerous persons who had done well out of the Revolution and who wanted (like their French counterparts a decade later) to keep what they had won.
Where is the analogy to this party of revolutionnaires nantis today? We have instead many earnest and public- spirited persons animated by the general -honest thought of common good to all. That, I suggest, is not quite enough. It is worth emphasising that during the Revolutionary War the United States—that is, the ruling party—under the pressure of immediate threat to their own security, had set up a Federal Government under the "Articles of Confedera-
tion" of 1781. To that Federation most of the western lands claimed by the separate States had been transferred. There was thus an asset common to the whole United States held by the Federal Government.
Mr. Streit makes great play with the internal difficulties of the so-called "critical epoch." This is not the place to
discuss the historical questions involved, but the critical character of the critical epoch has been greatly exaggerated. Two guides whom I suspect Mr. Streit of following, John Fiske and F. S. Oliver, were agreeable writers but indifferent historians. That the conflicts between the States and the dangers of war and disruption that arose from those conflicts were comparable to the deep divisions between the old Euro- pean nations is simply untrue. There is blood between France and Germany ; there is blood between Germany and Poland ; and recently shed blood at that. The memories of blood between the American States were memories of blood shed in common against a common enemy.
The motives that led tl-fe. "Founding Fathers" to meet at Philadelphia in 1787 to revise the existing constitution were good business motives. Supporters of "Federal Union" who want to discover what kind of support they would need to secure in order to repeat the success of the Philadelphia Con- vention should read Dr. Charles Beard's Economic Interpreta- tion of the American Constitution. If they can get the great business interests of this age on their side, win over the Comite des Forges, the Federation of British Industries, the Trade Union Congress and the Confederation Generale du Travail, they may begin to have hopes that history will repeat itself. But whereas business, in the America of 1787, had excellent reasons for wanting the establishment of "a more perfect union," business today is (unless it has suffered an unannounced change of heart) one of the great supports of divisive measures, tariffs, quotas and the like. Nor would labour, in this country at least, welcome that freedom of migration, that possible invasion of a protected labour market by poor migrants with feeble bargaining power, which can and does happen under a true Federal system.
Then, while it is true that the United States considered over a long period of time has been a success, it is not an unquali- fied success. The Federal Government, in the first two generations of its existence, simply did not perform some of the duties that the most meagrely endowed Federal Govern- ment today would have to perform. Its control of the cir- culating medium was, for instance, merely nominal until the system of national banks was created during the Civil War. The internal unity of the Federation was constantly threatened, and finally (as should always be remembered), the United States failed to solve its fundamental political problem by any other means than a long, bloody and expensive war. That war, in its aftermath, did produce just those violent emotional conflicts with which we are so painfully familiar in Europe. Some of the evil then done has survived to this day, and the defeated side was only induced to accept the verdict of arms by a post-war policy of repression that makes all the German lamentations over the Treaty of Versailles sound like mere childish whining. That conflict, too, arose from a refusal to face the fact that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and I would like to recall Professor Hogben's very pertinent criticism of the same kind of refusal to face facts that is involved in treating the Union of South Africa as a "democracy."
As far as the history of the creation of the greatest Federa- tion casts any light on our problem, it does so by showing how different was the situation of the United States in 1787 from that of Europe in 1940. The history of the working of federalism in the United States shows that even in excep- tionally favourable circumstances it can break down (I consider the Civil War a proof of that), and in its working it requires a constant vigilance that may not be beyond our powers, but which will make more demands on them than most preachers of the new gospel seem to realise.—Yours, &c.,
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