TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE EXHIBITION OF EMPIRE.
ON Wednesday the Exhibition was opened. Its completion is the result of the greatest co-operative effort for pacific ends that the British Empire has ever made. By Wembley our generation must be judged. This is the best we can do—this is what the Empire can offer to the world. In the War the peoples of the Empire put forth their supreme effort to make their ideals, their civilization, their culture the dominant one. They succeeded. What then are these ideals and this culture ? The Exhibition is an attempt to answer that question. It is, indeed, the first real tangible attempt to " win the peace." We have rested content with having won the War for five years. But here at any rate we are trying to show that it was worth winning—that the Empire was worth saving. That phrase may sound almost blasphemous to conservative cars. But if anyone cares to visit our industrial area in this day of its depression—or even to turn to the article we publish this week on Sheffield—they will understand how it has come about that some men, mistaken but sincere, such as the Clydesbank group of members of the House of Commons, have come to the conclusion that the Empire, if it means the Back lands of Glasgow or the slums of Sheffield—is not worth saving.
It is of little use to answer such men's questions in words. Those questions are put in the dialect of all the human agony, utter material sordidness, and sunless barbarity that goes to coin the name of slum. The only answer to the Communist is such an answer as Wembley gives —an answer of hope and life—and yet one written in a language as solid and as convincing as that in which the question was put. Wembley must say clearly to the world, " Here is both the remedy and the achieve- ment." British industry is continually being accused of being conservative and even slothful, of helplessly allowing the tragedies of Glasgow and of Sheffield, " the British devastated areas " as they have been well called, and of hopelessly seeing even those grimy monuments to industrialism crumble into the decay of trade depres- sion and unemployment. But here at last is the answering effort. Our manufacturers know that the one way to start again that revivifying flow of orders which can alone set their factories at work again is to create demand. And one great way of creating demand is to make a great market. And that on the industrial side is what the Wembley Exhibition essentially does. It is a great market-place where buyers and sellers may come together and satisfy their wants, where a hundred new channels of trade may be opened up, a thousand contracts made by means of which exchanges of goods can be brought about.
It is as though British industry had realized that the moment of its acutest depression must also be the moment of its supreme effort. If old markets have been lost, new must be found. There must be no tame surrender to misfortune. Glasgow and the Black Country may be the nearest approach to the Inferno that we have yet produced on earth, but every plan for their improvement depends on a trade revival which will once again put funds at the disposal of their inhabitants. The first essential of a smoke abatement campaign is that there shall be work enough in the factories to keep the furnaces alight ; bankrupt municipalities cannot undertake vast housing schemes. Thus Wembley is a work of confidence and energy which will do more to restore British prosperity than a hundred tariffs. Tkis is Wembley considered as a remedy for our present ills.
But it has another and no less important side. An Exhibition is a story of accomplishment. It sums up the contemporary life of the Empire as a political organization. In little, it spreads it out for the eye to take in at one glance. By this fruit we may know what in fact this Empire of ours is. It will bring home to us as nothing else conceivably could the realities of the vast dominions of the British race. It will force us to take notice of the urgent problems that confront us, but above all it will compel us to seek out the proper way of development for our great empty lands, samples of whose illimitable natural resources we see around us. After all, the British Empire is the greatest fact of world organization to-day. It is the most interesting, the most important and the most daring experiment in human affairs that the world has yet seen. And here at Wembley we have it all gathered together in the space of a large park. We may stand upon the Stadium and look round us, and, noting this and that, here a success and there a failure, we may try to make up our minds whether all this majestic display stands symbol for something truly great, inwardly inspired with the unconquerable spirit of progress, or whether it is only the last bright flame of an already doomed civilization.
We may decide either of these things according to our fundamental scale of relative values, but it would be a poor heart indeed which was not stirred to some emotion by that view from the Stadium. And those who, like ourselves, believe in the Empire are doubly bound to try with all their energy to make the Exhibition not merely a success, but such a success as never yet has been seen.
Here is the Imperialist's chance to show how much and how much good can come out of the Empire. It is essential that no small prejudices should be allowed to qualify this attitude. In so vast an enterprise as the Exhibition it will be easy to pick holes. For instance, it is undoubtedly true that the Exhibition was not complete on the day of the opening ceremony. Indeed, work will go on during all the months that the Exhibition is open. But after all what does it matter whether every exhibit was in place by Wednesday or will be by Saturday ? By the end of this week the Exhibition will be complete in every essential, and next week will be an ideal time for a first visit.
A fascinating vista of conjecture is opened up by the speculation as to what will be the effect of the Exhibition on public taste. We deal in our Architectural Notes on page 668 with one side of the aesthetics of the Exhibition. Obviously the millions who will see Wembley will carry away with them impressions that will educate and modify their tastes and habits to a considerable extent. Millions of men and women will have their whole outlook broadened and deepened by the realization of what organized effort can accomplish. They will see that this world in which they live is not necessarily, or even naturally, that grey pit which our great cities have become. They may achieve that " divine dis- content," that renewed striving for improvement, which is the one force that can drive the race on to those further and greater achievements of which we all believe it capable.
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