AFTER VICTORY
rr HE heading of this article should be sufficient to
impose a sober restraint on the discussion of war-aims in any detail. Before we can build the peace we have to win the war, and, as Mr. Mackenzie King said in the Canadian House of Commons on Monday, that is likely to be a matter not of months but of years. Such a con- clusion is not pessimism,- it is realism.. And in this grim struggle, to cease to be realist is to court disaster. It is not surprising in all the circumstances that disputants on peace-aims are finding less to say than they were six months ago. When the well-known American editor, Mr. Ralph Ingersoll, was in London in October he made enquiry as to how far war-aims were occupying the public mind, and discerned, quite accurately, a general conviction that for the present all energies must be concentrated on the winning of the war. The conviction is sound, but it is not the last word. Prosecution of war does not so com- pletely monopolise all mental activity that none is left for some thought about the world that is to emeroe from victory. That problem is conditioned by many °factors. It may be less a question of what we would do than of what we can do. But nothing is lost, and a good deal may be gained, by some concentration of mind on what the machinery and decisions, and the nature of the decisions, should be when once the dictators have been defeated and the defenders of freedom can both frame a policy and impose it.
Some attention is devoted to this problem in the December issues of more than one of the monthly reviews, particularly in two articles in the Contemporary by Lord Cecil and Mr. George Peel respectively. Both of them, as might be expected, offer valuable food for reflection, and both of them avoid the sweeping and foolish general- isations by which discussion of the post-war world is some- times darkened. Prophets and preachers of revolution, starting from the dogma that we can never return to an order of society remotely resembling that of today, have driven a theory tenable within limits beyond all reasonable bounds. It is not true of our own country, and it is not true of the United States, that the war proves that the structure of society has broken down, or that democracy as we know it has had its day. The exact opposite is the truth. It is democracy in this country, the confidence, unity and resolution it inspires, that and that alone, which guarantees the endurance that will end in victory. It is democracy in the United States which has impelled that great country deliberately and with increasing momentum into a position in which it is aiding us in our struggle hardly less than if it was itself belligerent. Democracy may have failed, though there is no need to believe it has more than faltered, in France, but it has vindicated itself decisively in the Anglo-Saxon countries, including in that term every British Dominion, and it is keeping resistance and hope in Norway and Holland and Czecho-Slovakia, and the rest of Hitler's European victims, alive. Our social system has grave faults. Some of them have been corrected under the stress of war. Some of them remain to be corrected still, and to that task we must apply our- selves with determination. There must be less privilege, less inequality, more comradeship, more opportunity. But while recognising that, let us not be guilty of the falsity and folly of proclaiming that our old order is radically wrong and that our first war-aim must be to destroy it and build something new. There is destruction enough without that. We have no call so to condemn our
generation. There is room and need for progress, there is none for revolution.
As regards plans for an international settlement, there are checks and qualifications at every turn. The nature of the settlement must depend largely on the ultimate extent of the war and the magnitude of the victory. We do not know whether there will be one peace with Italy and another, later, with Germany. The only great Power of whom it can be predicted with certainty that it will have a seat at the Peace Conference is Great Britain, for it is by no means accepted doctrine that Germany shall be invited to come and discuss what treatment she is to receive, and the future of France is still obscure. The British Government, it is true, has assured Soviet Russia of a seat at the Conference on conditions, but the con- ditions have not been accepted. If Russia were present, so a fortiori would the United States be. It is to be fervently hoped that she would be anyhow, whether she is still a neutral when the war ends or not. But all those, and many like questions, bearing both on the liquidation of the war and the separate, though kindred, question of the creation of a new international organisation, are still unsettled—proof enough of the unwisdom of attempting to frame detailed peace-plans now. Even the postulate of the necessity of an international organisation to main- tain peace and confer security is by no means universally admitted. It is a little startling Jo find the able and liberal editor of the Nineteenth Century writing:
Once the power of Germany has been broken, England has nothing to fear either from Italy or from Russia— provided, of course, she does not reduce her own armed might by disarmament, by " collective security " or by any form of practical internationalism," —but he does write that, and there are no doubt others in the country who share his views.
Among them, needless to say, is not Lord Cecil, nor indeed anyone who realises what the refusal to consider disarmament would mean in terms of mere finance alone. There would be little gain in winning the war to be broken by the peace. Some form of " internationalism " there clearly must be, and it is to be hoped it will be a practical form. The ideal of security with freedom must be opposed to Hitler's programme of security with slavery, and no time is wasted that goes to the consideration of how best that may be brought about. Lord Cecil, it is interesting to note in view of his attitude in the past to such instru- ments as the Treaty of Mutual Assistance and the Geneva Protocol, has reached the conclusion that any new or re- modelled international organisation should not be coercive. Its members as a whole, that is to say, should not be required to bind themselves in advance to go to war in given contingencies, though there is room within the organ- isation for alliances of neighbouring States prepared io accept that extreme obligation as between themselves. Lord Cecil regards disarmament as essential, and believes that whatever temporary arrangements are necessary there cannot in that regard be permanent discrimination between the victorious and defeated States. His own view is that all .national military air-forces should be abolished and an international air-force created as guarantee of general security. Air-Marshal Sir Philip Joubert made some impressive observations on that subject on Tuesday.
These are large questions, and in their broad outline they are most proper subjects for discussion here and now. So is the question of Free Trade, on which Mr. George Peel writes convincingly in an article which follows Lord in the Contemporary. Mr. Peel adduces some striking statistics and some equally striking quotations. In 1929, he observes, under Free-Trade, British exports and re-exports had reached a total of £839,000,000. Under Protection they had fallen in 1938 and 1939 to L532,000,000 and £485,000,000 respectively. When all allowance is made for contributory factors these are arresting figures, and they are largely removed from the realm of controversy by such declarations as those of Mr. Chamberlain (in November, 1939) to the effect that " there can be no lasting peace unless there is a full and constant flow of trade between the nations concerned," and of General Smuts (July, 1940) that " intercourse between nations will be free, and commerce, economics and finance will be free of all hampering restrictions and obstructions." If agreement can be reached, after full discussion, on such principles as these the consideration of detailed schemes can well be left till the conditions environing the peace are clearer.
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