DEBITS AND CREDITS T HE sharp turn in English foreign policy
has a 1. deeper foundation than expediency. It has been possible because the rape of Czecho-Slovakia, like the invasion of Belgium in 1914, has quickened the moral pulse of English life. Had it failed to do so we should have been lost and deservedly. After the September crisis there was a wide questioning of values and search- ing of fundamentals in the country, but unhappily in many cases the impulse was allowed to be checked by renewed anxieties and preoccupations. Since then it has rightly found expression in the pledge to Poland. But it is not only in foreign policy that we must renew the national life. Our foreign policy is an instrument to protect something which we feel instinctively— though we may not formulate it—as the English values of life. Without wishing to impose these on anyone else, without even questioning anyone else's right to prefer other values, we imply, when we rally to defend cur own way of life, no more than that it happens to suit us. Let us not forget at the same time to ask our- selves whether our English way of life, as we see it around us today, ought to suit us. We are prepared, especially if the alternative is war, to jettison a good deal of tradition : but we are left with a residuum. We hear much today of the hard core of Germany's demands. What is the hard core of our own national life which we seek to preserve. Do the assets outweigh the debits?
The debit side is heavily weighted. Unfriendly critics have no difficulty in listing our shortcomings— the housing estates which in many cases threaten to become eye-sores as ugly as the slums they displace ; the rampant and successful growth of football pools ; the flagrant contrast between the acknowledged failure to provide two million men with the means of earning a livelihood and the extravagant living of a wealthy minority ; the vast sums spent annually on drink and betting. But there is one supreme defect that under- lies the varied aspects of our national life and which expresses itself in many ways—apathy. There are ex- amples on all hands. In 1935 the Commissioner for the Special Areas, embarking on an attempt to deal with the terrible problem of unemployment, wrote to nearly 6,000 industrial firms asking them if they had con- sidered, or would consider, the possibility of setting up subsidiary industries to provide employment in the Special Areas. Nearly 4,000 of these firms did not even take the trouble to reply. The Air Raid Precau- tions Act was passed in January of last year. Does our present state of defence against air attack really repre- sent fifteen months' maximum effort? About the same time the Bressey Report on London's traffic problems was published. Sir Charles Bressey himself has said that though the provisions outlined in the Report need not take 3o years to put into effect his experience leads him to suppose that that will in fact be the period that will elapse before the plans materialise in action. Would that be the case in Germany?
It need not be the case in this country, because where there is the will to remedy grievances they can be put right as quickly here as elsewhere. When Booth made his great survey of London in 1889 he denounced as slums areas in London which are still slums today— fifty years after the indictment. Six months ago the tenants were organised in a League and formulated their demands, backing them up with rent strikes. In that period the League has reduced rents by a total of £18,000 a year and prevailed on the landlords concerned to refund L2o,000 excess rent. Many of the tenants were ignorant of their own legal rights until the action of a few suddenly dispelled the apathetic acquiescence of all the others whose interests were equally involved. One more instance. The London County Council has recently enjoyed much publicity on attaining and cele- brating its jubilee. Unfortunately the interest is short- lived. Far more important than the fact that the Council has sustained its existence for fifty years is the fact that it controls an expenditure of £35 millions a year, including, of course, a vast outlay on children's education. At the last election four out of every seven ratepayers did not consider it worth their while to go and vote. Some dead weight of lethargy seems to hang on everybody until it is dispelled by the initiative of the few who will bring home to the public their rights, their needs, or their duty.
Weighty as the debit side is there remains something we should be consciously defending. There is still liberty in this country ; everyman's " leave to live by no man's leave under the law." There is freedom to acknowledge any religion. A man is more than a frac- tion of the State. There is no racial persecution ; no cult of war. Our great liberties we take for granted and are almost unaware of them : but we still enjoy the heritage of 1688. We have a freely elected Parliament, an independent executive, an incorruptible judiciary. It is in the sphere of individual liberty that our greatest difficulties and at the same time our greatest opportuni- ties lie. Whilst preserving jealously the reality of individual liberty we have yet to learn that that is in itself not enough if we not do learn to make the tran- sition to some form of reasonably organised communal life. It is not enough, for example, to preserve for the individual the liberty to destroy the countryside which should exist for everyone's enjoyment. Until now we have only tinkered with the problems of an ordered communal life. But we have a national genius for organisation. On all sides amateur organi- sations today are filling the gaps in our developing com- munal life. Such bodies as the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England combat harmful individualism. Amateur organisations supple- ment and go ahead of Government action in solving in a variety of ways problems of housing, of hospitals, of health centres such as the one at Peckham, of welfare work of every variety. Lately in such organisations as the Air-Raid Defence League and the National Defence Public Interest Committee we have examples of bodies of laymen uniting to solve our latest problems. They are a pointer to our greatest need. Can we, now that the nation as a whole finds itself threatened, rely on the national genius for organisation to make the greatest of all transitions to an ordered communal life and, whilst retaining the reality of individual liberty, achieve the other reality—a genuine national service?
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