THE FOURTH CHRISTMAS
AND the last? That is the question men of every colour and tongue are asking as the festival which commemorates those blessings of peace and goodwill which are being tragically derided today by events in every continent comes round again. The answer is unpredictable. General Smuts has prophesied that victory when it does come will come swiftly, and no doubt he is right. But if the crumbling process, once begun, is certain to be rapid it has not begun on any formidable scale yet. The initiative is passing inexorably into the hands of the Allies, and the double pressure on the German armies in Russia and in Africa may have conse- quences that can hardly be foreseen. When a third front on the Continent of Europe is added the demands on the German armies will be such as to strain them to breaking-point. But the break may not come before the fifth Christmas of the war is reached. Over that the veil of complete uncertainty is cast. Meanwhile we stand on the threshold of the fourth, and the conflict with prin- cipalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world continues. Never were deeds more devilish compassed than Hitler and his criminal associates are perpetrating against the Jews throughout the territories temporarily subject to them. Never did the leaders of Germany proclaini their utter foulness as they are doing in the week of this fourth Christmas of the war. Never was the impossibility of any kind of negotiation or transaction short of unconditional surrender more inescapably demonstrated. Christmas with its message of peace brings almost irresistible desires for peace, but the distinction between a false peace and a true peace has by this time been burnt into the very soul of the United Nations. The end can come only in a peace, not indeed of undiscriminating retribution, but of liberation and justice.
Yet peace and goodwill among men have not been altogether banished from the world. With Germany and Japan and Italy we are at war, but the bonds that link us with the United States and Soviet Russia and China have never been as close, not even in the last great war, as they are today. We perhaps accept our unity in the common struggle a little too lightly, and with an imperfect realisation of what it may mean in future happiness for the world. It may be true that neither America nor Russia would be fighting at our side if each of them had not been wan- tonly attacked. But America at least was already as a neutral giving us indispensable aid, all aid short of war and such aid as a neutral State had never given a belligerent before in history. She shared our idealS, our hopes, our loathing for the embattled evil arrayed agamst us, and all that was best in her people made the burden of the sufferings of humanity its own. Of Russia, still in many respects inscrutable, we cannot speak so certainly. Not perhaps without some reason, the leaders of that great people thought every man's hand, our own as much as Germany's, against them, and in their mood of universal suspicion they desired only to protect their frontiers and avoid entanglement in any general conflict. Hitler made that impossible, and if it is for him to reap the consequences it is for us to see to it that out of the alliance thus enforced in war we forge a friendship• on which the fabric of the peace of Europe can be based.
These are easy words to write, easy sentiments to frame, easy aspirations to express, but the goal we have to aim at will not be reached without the exercise of patient endeavour and deter- mined self-restraint. We and the Americans by no means under- stand each other completely ; we and the Russians understand each other still less. Even in war, with one common and dominating danger to compel our unity, there are a thousand strains and tensions and petty jealousies and half-silenced criti- cisms which justify serious misgiving about what the relationships may be when the danger has been exorcised and each nation is free to shape whatever course may seem to favour its own pur- poses and ambitions best. We are familiar with the isolationist school in the United States; we shall recognise if we are wise that the whole of Russia is an isolationist school. Or has been ; for it is in that distinction, or hope of a distinction, between past and future that the only prospect of the salvation of humanity lies. Any temptation to dogmatise about the United States or Russia should be checked by the consciousness that when peace comes it will not be with the America or Russia of 194o that we shall have to deal. We are constantly warned of the folly of conceiving of this war in the terms of the last war. It would be folly no less crass and culpable to conceive of the post-war in terms of the pre-war peace. The nations with whom it will rest primarily to defend that peace will have changed both within themselves and in their relation to one another, and as a result, in part at least, of their attitude towards one another. What Russia's atti- tude to us will be may be a matter of some uncertainty, but it will be decided to a large degree by our attitude to her. The deter- mination of that is in our own hands. There will be prejudices to renounce, knowledge and understanding to acquire, the patient resolution of psychological differences to achieve. Two horizons, our own and Russia's, have to be enlarged. Reflections on how that can be effected are a fit exercise for the Christmas season.
But in all the discussion of future hopes in terms of nations or of humanity it must never be forgotten that the ultimate and single object of every work of amelioration is the individual man. It is to vindicate his rights that the pernicious doctrine of the all-powerful State is being fought and must be fought to the death. The aim of every civilised democracy at least must be to open even greater possibilities of life for the common man. So far as we do that here—and quite apart from the detailed merits or demerits of the Beveridge scheme, it is immensely significant that such aims should have been set before the country at such a time as this—we generate forces that will forge new friendships and strengthen old ones outside our borders. There are dangers as well as advantages in a striking. phrase, but when the Vice-President of the United States spoke of this as "the century of the common man " he was voicing aspirations which animate, even if in no quite conscious shape, the whole of the American Union. And tragic though aspects of the Russian cataclysm have been, the underlying purpose was that the common man might secure his elementary rights. So far as he has secured them we can rejoice unfeignedly at what our ally has accomplished. In many matters her way is very far from being ours, but if in our long experience of gradual and relatively ordered evolution there may be lessons she might profit by, we need not affect that there is nothing for us to learn from the results of her revolutionary upheaval. The first task is to create an atmosphere in which those mutual benefits can be freely garnered.
All this has a bearing that may not be immediately apparent on the suggestive, important and very valuable speech delivered by the Home Secretary at Swindon on Saturday. Mr. Morrison's text in one word was progress, progress in enriching life for the common man, and making institutions, economic and politic, his servants, not his masters. That is a task which is going to need much more than goodwill. Goodwill, and a readiness for sacrifice by those who are privileged above the common lot, may be the first essential requisite, but qualities of mind as well as heart must be invoked if the new society of our desires and dreams is to become reality. Mr. Morrison contended that to aim merely at a minimum standard of life fell far short of a worthy purpose, and he is right. But progress must be methodical, and to secure the minimum standard is the essential preliminary to achievements more satisfying. On that there will be little disagreement ; on the methods by which the goal is to be attained there will be much. Fortunately the mistake of adhesion to doctrinaire formulas is not likely to be committed. That in all the operations of industry public interest must come first may and must be conceded. But that, as Mr. Morrison showed, does not mean for a moment that all industry is to be conducted on a single pattern. There is room for the widest variety—purely private management, State control, public utility corporations, and probably enough other forms and methods still to be devised. But, throughout, the ideal must be the welfare of the community and the individuals that constitute it. The general acceptance of that ideal, the fact that any Govern- ment that repudiated it would itself be repudiated forthwith, is something to have achieved. It evidences a national solidarity that must be preserved and deepened perpetually. And beyond that lies the far greater, but no less essential, task, of extending such solidarity across national frontiers, not in sentiment only, but in terms of durable agreements and institutions.
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