TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SITUATION AS IT IS.
WE are drifting into a very perilous situation. It is possible, of course, that we may also drift out again into smooth waters ; but apart from that possibility the position cannot but be regarded with anxiety. If it was inevitable that we should be in this peril there would be no more to be said. What is so grievous to sane people, or, at any rate, to people who have the inclination to stop and to think instead of merely blundering on, is that the danger is almost entirely gratuitous. No doubt the War left us many difficulties to overcome, but by a mixture of heedlessness and folly, recklessness and levity, we have enormously increased those dangers. If, instead of drifting stern foremost into the dangerous part of the rapids, the boat had been steered with care and precision, we might have found a better and far safer course. Indeed, it is not too much to say that we ought by now to be feeling ourselves in a sound condition, financially and industrially, and in a fair way to resume our old place in the financial and industrial world. Our commercial system is extra- ordinarily tough, and, where the Government does not interfere, it is managed with extraordinary tact, energy and ability, and, what is best of all, with extraordinary self- confidence and reasoned optimism—the two things which are the life-blood of Business. Even as it is, and in spite of the obstacles of our own milling, Commerce is beginning to recover. In spite of the quack medicine which we have poured down her throat she is curing herself, and if we can only leave her alone and avoid further follies we may very soon see a return of real, and not sham, prosperity.
If when the War closed our Government, instead of behaving like a pack of cynical children, had at once begun to cut down expenses, to conserve energy and to give wounds a chance of healing by resting instead of dancing financial fandangoes, the world would be a very different place from what it now is. Just think of what we did ! Instead of saying on January 1st, 1919, that we would have no more fighting and no more extravagant expenditure, we wasted millions in the stupidest of all things—half-hearted, weakly-intentioned, aimless, unmotived wars—wars which were not pushed with the energy which is the only spirit in which war ought to be or can be properly waged. We did not make up our minds about what we wanted or where we were going. We squandered millions in supporting useless and impossible causes and vague and hopeless movements on the edges of what was once the Russian Empire. It is just possible that, if we had taken these movements seriously and thrown ourselves whole-heartedly into them, something might have come of them. Instead, however, of bold action we took timid action—action which was never enough to win a victory but quite enough to involve us in the loss of huge sums of money and to lead the wretched people we supported into hideous disaster. In Persia, in Mesopotamia, we also kept on squandering more money because our rulers could not make up their minds whether the British people would or would not like to have an imperial " beano " on the Tigris and Euphrates ! It was the same story in Egypt and Palestine and, indeed, throughout the rest of the world. Disraeli used to talk about John Bull, " puzzled but still subscribing." Here was John Bull's Government, puzzled but still squandering. There was one thing, and one thing only, on which we seemed able to make up our minds, and that was to throw money out of the window. Look at our policy in Egypt ! Though we ourselves are Imperialists, we are not prepared to say that, considering the mismanagement of our affairs on the Nile Valley, we could avoid the abandonment of our great task in Egypt in the way in which we have abandoned it. What we do say is that the Government ought to have made up its mind and chosen its policy long before it did. To send out the Milner Commission, to allow the recommen- dations of that body to become known, and then to refuse to act on the decision till the Cabinet were bullied into doing so by a combinaliion of one of our own generals and the Egyptian Nationalists, was a piece of ineptitude on the part of a body of men so able individually as the Coalition Cabinet which, unless it had actually taken place, one could hardly have believed.
The Government's policy in Egypt seems, however, sublimely sane compared with that adopted in Palestine. There our rulers have contrived to get rid of millions which could have been far better spent either at home or in some portion of the British Empire. To use plain words, we have been spending our money and losing our good name by making ourselves the instruments of a mad policy. We have been trying to " dump," or to assist in " dumping," a large number of Russian, Polish and other Jews into a country, small, unfertile and already supporting a considerable population of Moham- medans and Christians—persons who, not unnaturally, want self-determination, not Hebrew determination, as an alternative to Turkish misrule. If it had been nothing but an individual influx of Jewish refugees the natives of Palestine would very likely have protested, but they would probably not have done much more. But what they are now finding it impossible to endure is something very different. Not only have these immigrants—whom the Arabs regard as aliens, and even hostile aliens—been stimulated and encouraged by the Government to come as a matter of State policy, but when they come they are given a position of political privilege to which they have no moral title. They are a small mi- nority and they are not " native-born," and yet they are in fact allowed to run the country. It is true, no doubt, that the giving of this privileged position in the Palestinian State to the Zionists and to the Jews generally is not actually provided for in any legal document. One cannot quote the words of any law or ordinance which says that the Jews shall be the supreme authority and say the last word. Nevertheless, the Arabs firmly believe that such a position is accorded to the Jews. And can we wonder that, rightly or wrongly, the Arabs have this impression when we recall the choice of Sir Herbert Samuel as the ruler of Palestine ? We had hundreds of impartial Imperial administrators capable of holding the position of High Commissioner. Yet the man we appointed is a Jew, and not only a Jew, but a Zionist ! Had a Protestant Anglo-Indian official of experience in holding the balance fairly between warring races and creeds been placed at Jerusalem, the inhabitants would have felt that neither Turk nor Arab, Latin nor Greek, Jew nor Christian would have been given any unfair preference. There Would have been no bias towards any one section of the inhabitants. As it is, Palestine, instead of settling down to the peace for which its people hoped when the Turk was removed, is in a state of such restlessness and anxiety that we are actually in the humiliating position of giving less liberty and less sell-government to the towns and country districts of Palestine than they possessed under the rule of the Turkish Sultan ! And we still babble blithely about the sacred right of self-determination and its universal applicability 1 We cannot even touch the fringe of the Indian question here. We can only say, as we have said about Egypt, that if great and revolutionary changes were necessary —it is, of course, arguable that they were, though we do not agree with the argument—the alleged neces- sary change has been carried out in the worst possible way. Oure.gime has plenty of convinced friends in India, ranging from rajahs of the highest lineage to peasants and out-castes. We have, however, so contrived our preliminaries of abdication that those who, in truth, would have liked to see our wise and equitable rule main- tained—or, in any case, would have liked its abdication to have been very much slower—are actually assuming, in order to save their own skins, a hostility which they do not feel. They study our behaviour, our apparent fear of any agitator who threatens us, and our astonishing instability of policy, and they argue therefrom not only that our reign is coming to an end, but that certain bad and dangerous influences, which they have always known and regarded with suapicion and hostility, are going to win. That being so, and being themselves timid, without leaders, and desiring above all things a quiet life, they feel that they have not a moment to lose in making it up with the cruel and arbitrary men who they believe will replace us. We are losing influence and power, not because we are disliked or distrusted, but because the Indian, like all other Easterns, is a fatalist and thinks he sees signs that our immediate departure is written in the Book of Fate. So without any real cause the ship of the Indian Empire plunges into the heart of the storm without anyone here or in India knowing to what port she is destined, or why such a moment was chosen for her to put out to sea. All we know is that the night is dark, that the man at the wheel is anxious and fearful, that he has no policy of his own, and can get none from the busy and distracted chief who is the only person to whom he can look for help and advice. If we turn from India to Ireland, we find the condition of things even worse and even more fatally mismanaged. There we have almost deliberately produced a state of affairs which not only corresponds to the visions of the most pessimistic of political prophets, but from which there promises to be no outcome, so far as the South of Ire- land is concerned, except a state of anarchy and conflicting interests. This must destroy all the good effects of the wise, careful and generous system of government which obtained in Ireland till 1906, and, save for a certain weakening at the centre, went on till 1916. We have given Ireland full sell-determination, and in only one part of Ireland, that is, in the Six-County Area, has this self-determination been used for any purpose except to provide a playground for murderers and fanatics. In the South of Ireland a triangular duel is in progress between the Provisional Government, Mr. De Valera, and the Irish Republican Army. Indeed, we are not sure that we ought not to say it is a quadrilateral duel. The fourth side is sup- plied by the British Government, though that side may be said to have caved in through its own weakness and its desire not to fight if it can possibly avoid doing so. In the Celtic quarters of Belfast and along the Northern border-line there may, indeed, be said to be a fifth side to this tragically shaped polygon—that is, the Northern Government.
All we say of this intolerable situation is that apparently the hatred the Irish Republican Army and the Republican Party have for the Provisional Government is of the most intense kind. But, though both the I.R.A. and Republicans now loathe Mr. Collins and Mr. Griffith beyond words, their common enmity does not seem to bring them together. The Irish Republican Army are by no means prepared to take orders from Mr. De Valera, but rather, under certain conditions, are quite prepared to put him in his place, wherever that may be. All that seems certain is that nobody is going to agree to a com- promise or to make any agreement of the kind made so wisely and so swiftly by Sir James Craig, and without any thought of either personal or Party amour propre. The one matter in which the Irish Republican Army and the Republicans seem to agree is that under no circumstances will they bow to the Will of the People, unless, of course, that Will is exactly consonant with what they consider true and sound principles. The people, as they would put it, have no right to do wrong. They have only a right to do right, as the I.R.A. or the Republicans view it.
Can we wonder that in these circumstances the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland is becoming extraordinarily anxious ? If recriminations or reprisals were of any use in politics, one might be inclined, to point out to the members of the Roman Church that they have no right to be annoyed, because they are only reaping what they sowed. They tolerated, contrary to all the true tenets of the Christian faith, the hideous crime of murder. One Jesuitical scribe actually went so far in an official organ of the Church as to revive, with the full imprimatur of the Roman Catholic authorities, the wicked old sophistries of Killing No Murder. They let him lay down a set of so-called religious doctrines with regard to murder which must have acted, not only as an excuse, but as a positive incentive to Roman Catholic extremists who were tempted to _enrol in murder gangs and secret clubs of homicide. And now, much as the Girondists did as they went to the scaffold, these very Roman extremists who searched the books of the casuists in order to find a religious basis for murder, and, in effect, condoned the massacre of the British officers on the Red ftunday, are looking with horror at the results of the evil work they once justified, The toleration of murder has its own peculiar and appro- priate reward. That is one of the few deductions from History on which reliance can be placed.
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