MARGINAL COMMENTS
By E. L. WOODWARD
ILISTENED, with several million others, to the broadcast 1 of the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race. These accounts of races and prize fights and football matches, given to you while the events are taking place, have something of the excitement of the messengers' speeches in a Greek play. Moreover the time element is important. Test match cricket in Australia, from the listener's point of view, is now as tiresome as billiards, where, day in, day out, two cham- pions of exquisite skill pile up scores of five figures ; but the boat-race, like a boxing match, has nothing of this ennui of eternity.
As I listened, or rather after the flags had been lowered and the inexorable limits reached, I wondered whether Signor Mussolini knew that on the morning of March 24th millions of English people would be listening anxiously to a wireless commentator. On the previous day Signor Mussolini had delivered himself of a warning to the Anglican clergy and the people of this country. The Italians, it seems, do not forget. One would have thought that they had forgotten a good deal of their own military history during the last hundred years. They do not always remember Cavour's remark, before he turned for help to the French, that there were too many songs about freeing Italy, or Bismarck's comment, when the Italians made one more outrageous demand, that they seemed to have developed an appetite before they had cut their teeth.
Whether in paradox or in earnest, the oracle had spoken. Imagine the effect in Italy of a speech of a similar kind delivered by our own Prime Minister. Yet in England these fulminations about the long memory of Italy fell flat. Signor Mussolini spoke on the wrong day. His speech was crowded out by the University boat-race, which does not appear in the Fascist calendar.
Rudyard Kipling, who wrote so well, and misunderstood the English people so completely that he may well delude future historians, once blamed the English for their refusal to concentrate on the main issue. In his curious manner, he blamed the wrong people. If he had turned upon the brass-hats who had given less thought to preparation for war—their proper business—than to preparation for sport, he would have been right ; but he made the blunder of blaming the English people for maintaining their interest in flannelled fools and muddied oafs when they ought to have been lamenting the collapse of their empire and the threat to their security from the dark designs of continental enemies.
This indifference to the fulminations of foreigners, this concentration upon side-issues like boat-races, is a most encouraging thing. It is a sign of confidence. It is also a sign that politics, political speeches, and, above all, patriotic political speeches, are not really interesting. Government, after all, is not much more than committee business, and politicians are worth hearing only if you have a chance of voting against them. Most people who want self-govern- ment want it because every other kind of government is, in the last resort, boring for the governed. It is most of all a bore when you have to listen to the self-congratulatory speeches of governors against whom you cannot, or dare not, vote. I can well understand why Indians have disliked speeches about the great work done by Englishmen in India. This kind of thing is even more of a bore when you know that your irresponsible governors have made a mess or it, wasted your money, and possibly risked your life. Prince Albert once said that the dictatorship of Napoleon III had transformed the French nation into spectators of their own government. The role was dangerous—for Napoleon III. It may well be dangerous for other dictators. It is a maxim of government (you can find it in Machiavelli) that you may bore some of the people some of the time, but you cannot safely bore all the people all the time.
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