TOPICS OF THE DAY
THE ADVANCE OF THE SHADOW. THE greater number of Englishmen and Englishwomen are at the moment playing, unconscious of the dangers that lie before them. All, however, who are wise and prescient know that danger draws near, and that it is only by care, forethought, and above all by effort, that we can escape. Mr. Hoover, who understands better than any living man the material, social, and moral condition of Europe, has used language about the situation abroad (when he spoke of Europe he was not thinking of these islands) which is the most menacing, the most soulshaking, that has been used within living memory. He tells us that in the worst part of 1917 he and his colleagues felt that the situation was so terrible that it was one for prayer rather than for human action. And he holds that the menace is now greater, not less. Lord Robert Cecil, who also knows, has spoken with equal gravity. It is felt, indeed, and not by the light-minded sentimentalists but by those who have studied the situation with a full sense of responsibility, that unless a remedy is found, and found quickly, there is a real danger of Europe falling into the condition to which she was brought in the ninth century. That Means plague and famine, and the demoralization that goes with them, following each other in horrible succession till civilization breaks down altogether. The peoples starve amongst the ruins of what were once great cities. Ignorance, black and hopeless, and the squalor not of the primitive and the savage but of the degenerate, hold what were once the seats of thought and enterprise. A weak and wondering concourse of helpless and fortuitously grouped human atoms gaze forlornly at the great and splendid works whose uses they cannot even understand, or only cherish some vague and soon-to-be-forgotten memories of what was wrought by the great and strong and learned of long ago. That the immediate danger is far less for these islands than for the Continent the most pessimistic must thankfully acknowledge. But even if we may count on ourselves escaping the worst of ills, the ruin of Europe is bound to cast its awful spell over us, and to poison our economic as well as our moral existence. Even if it were not ignoble, it would be mad to shrug our shoulders at the fate of the rest of Europe, and to act as if we could remain unaffected by the miseries of our neighbours.
Once more, in peace as in war, we have got to save ourselves by our own exertions, and to save Europe by our example and by our co-operation. What is the cause of the dangers that surround us ? The lack of Production. Europe is not at work. It seems to have even forgotten the way to work. No one appears to know how to begin or what to begin at. Industrial lethargy is apparent everywhere. Effort, energy, vitality, are for the moment only visible in those who bid us substitute deadly drugs and soporifics for wholesome food, or in those who believe that a froth of words or the frenzies of hate will in our hour of peril help us better than mercy, patience, and goodwill. Production, Production, and again Production. That is the need of the hour. The need, indeed, is so simple and so palpable that one is almost ashamed to preach it, oi:tO tell people what they know so well already. Yet it must be said in season and out of season. If you want food and clothes and houses, and all the other apparatus not merely of civilization but of existence for a vast population, you must work to produce them. If you do not work and do not produce, there is nothing for it but famine, disease, and death. Work is the only remedy, or, rather, work and the avoidance of every form of economic waste. He who wastes is defeating the ends of labour, and producing that scarcity and dearness which cause famine. He is banishing that cheapness and abunean le which it is the function of work to bestow on the world. By far the greatest and most poignant example of waste is of course waste of energy—the d ing of things in a bad, slow, wasteful way when they might be done well, quickly, and in a saving way. It has been said, and said truly, that the greatest benefactor of mankind is he who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before. In the same way, the greatest enemy of mankind is he who goes on using a piece of ground, or a machine, or his own man-power in a way which will only produce half of what it could produce were he to take the trouble to conserve rather than waste his energy, to employ it to the best advantage instead of the least. Extravagance and undue luxury are evils, and great evils, when they make men soft and self-indulgent, and so demoralize them. But we must never forget that what we call luxuries are often necessary inducements to labour—the carrots in front of our noses which make us pull the cart, and without which many men would not work at all. Therefore, while at a time like the present we ought to condemn all extravagance and useless expenditure, we must be careful not to take away valuable stimulants to human endeavour.
Labour will always be well paid when plentiful production gives us an abundance of good things. But in order to bring about the plenty we desire, labour must be well paid, and above all the hours and conditions 1:4E iwpfk must make for health of body and. health of mind in the labourer. The overworking of human beings and the underpaying of them, which means depriving them of the power to feed and clothe and house themselves adequately, are the worst possible forms of waste. But we come back always to the one need of the hour. Produce more, Produce more, Produce more. If you do not, you will perish, and deserve to perish. And remember, Production in the widest sense does not consist only of direct production or hand labour, or even of management and direction. He who is stimulating men's minds and hearts to effort or to the prevention of waste may be doing ag much for Proauction as he who digs the soil or grinds at the mill, But though the need to work and to produce is so clear to those who can use their reason and their imagination, it is only too plain that the great mass of the workers have not yet realized their danger or the approach of that dread shadow of which we write. The world, to those who know, is exactly in the position which the astronomers describe to us during an eclipse. They see the first signs of the coming of the great shadow, and know that it is going to pass swiftly and inexorably over half the surface of the globe. For the moment, however, and, till it cores, the landscape before them is in glowing sunlight. The birds are singing, and all the cheerful works of man and. Nature continue unaffected and unalarmed. Yet nothing will stop the progression of the shadow. The penumbra, moving like fate, gradually eats up the landscape, and as it passes all is hushed and dead beneath it. The birds stop their singing, the animals are cowed to silence, or only give forth a wail of terror. All quail before the uncreating menace of the darkness. But that eclipse is only a momentary phenomenon. The eclipse of civilization of which we are now in peril, the eclipse which mankind can and must avoid by its own efforts, if it were to overtake us, would not, like the shadow, depart as it came, able to terrify but not to harm. It would leave our world witheret and in ruins behind it.
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