MR. BEVIN'S PREDICAMENT.
WE have always regarded Mr. Bevin as an honest, straightforward, and particularly able revolution- ary, a man mistaken, as we hold, in his methods of attaining.the goal which we all desire—the well-being of the nation as a whole and a more •equal distribution of the good things of life—but perfectly sincere. We are bound to say, however, that if Mr. Bevin continues to support his cause and his policy on the lines of his letter to the Prime Minister published in Monday's newspapers, it will be necessary for moderate people like ourselves to revise their judgment both of his character and ability. We can understand, though we do not agree with, those people who deolare that they are Internationalists and not English- men, and that, therefore, they might just as well take money from a foreign Government like Russia as take it from an English Trade Union. In their opinion they would be showing the better way by accepting a foreign subsidy, as their opponents call it, but, as they term it, a grant from a country blessed with a Soviet Government. Their benefactor would be a government in the proud position of being able to water the seeds of Communism with the blood of their enemies and furthering the cause 'of " a heavy civil war " at-home and aggression abroad in the interests of the international revolution. That is a logical and intelligible position, 'granted the premises that revolution, civil war, communism and the rest of it are what we want and what we cannot be really happy without. It is per is a perfectly clear proposition and involves no dishonour to those who honestly entertain it. Mr. Bevin's line of argument is, however, the meanest and most ignominious piece of shuffling imaginable. He appears to accept the contention that an honest newspaper ought not to be any outsider's tied house, and certainly not the tied house of foreign rulers whose hands are dripping with blood—men who repel with scorn and indig- nation the monstrous libel that they have.executed 10,000 persons, whereas all decent people know or ought to know that they have not done to death more than 8,5001 Mr. Bevin's angry repudiation of the charges brought against' him and the Daily Herald, with which he is .clearly still proud to be connected, is based in effect on the old " Not a bond, not a rouble, not a frano " contention—a contention, it will be remembered, that Mr. Lansbury first employed, but to which we can now see he must have added sotto voce, or at any rate in his heart, "Ali the same I should be very glad to be tempted, and if some good .honest Communist were to press me with a real large number of you s sterling—well, there's no telling." And then some- body did press him. Strangely enough, it was one of his own directors, Mr. Meynell—" whoever would have thought it ? " That beautifully dressed, attractive and romantic person •[see recent personal column notes in various Radical journals] appears to have been sent to Russia to look round and to review the field of temptation and to report generally on prospects of subsidies or credits.
We know, at any rate, that when a good firm offer of pecuniary help did come, Mr. Lansbury, whoever else was timid and stand-offish, was quite willing to accept diamonds, Exchequer bonds, or anything that was going. This is clear from the fact that though he left it to his readers, or at any rate asked their opinions, he told them plainly that he saw not harm but honour in a Soviet 'subsidy. The sincerity and openness of this appeal to the readers was, in our opinion, a great change for the 'better, from the " not a rouble, not a franc " stunt. " Non olet. It doesn't stink;" be cried with the Roman Emperor, and seemed quite happy at the turn of events. Like many a young lady,im was no doubt almost pleased to have been caught in the conservatory and so forced to acknowledge a proposal and " semi-engagement." Mr. Bevin, on the other hand, was evidently horrified with this suggestion, otherwise he would not have written his angry letters to the Prime Minister. It is true that Mr. Bevin—who, by the way, is a very clever writer and per- suasive speaker and usually has a remarkable instinct for dialectic—fastened specially upon the point. hat the Prime Minister inferred that the Daily Herald would have taken the money but for the fact that its Russian origin had been discovered and " that the secret could no longer be kept." This annoyed Mr. Bevin very greatly. He somewhat naively declared that four of the Daily Herald directors are responsible Trade Union officials and enjoy the confidence of a combined membership running into millions. That Trade Union officials are, as a rule,men of sense and honour we are most willing to concede. It is, however, a very strange notion that they. are to be honoured not for personal character but because the members of the societies in which they have risen to the top are so numerous. As well might the propriotor of a popular newspaper or the manager of a successful Film Palace slap his breast and ask fiercely, " You dare to doubt my 'honour and integrity I And yet you are aware that I se11500,000 copies of my paper every clay " or " fill half a dozen theatres with three performances a day ? " We are strong and convinced Democrats, but we have never pushed the idea of :sanctification by numbers so far as that.
We cannot find space to 'reprint the Prime Minister's reply to Mr. Bevin except to say it is a model of what such a letter should be. It puts forward all the facts of the case very shortly, very poignantly and very fairly, and then leaves those fads to speak for themselves. Certainly they speak loud enough and clearly enough for all to understand. Mr. Lloyd George's only comment is the very sound one that if the directors did not know what was going on they ought to have known. Mr. Bevin's final reply is an astonishing proof of how utterly demoralized even the ablest advocates become when they have a hopeless case. Of course Mr. Bevin should have remained silent in the hope that the public, or at any rate his parti- sans among the public, would be able to declare that there was something up his sleeve which would some day come down, though for good and sufficient reasons he could not disclose it at the moment. Instead of that, Mr. Bevin did the thing which the beaten man in .a controversy is always inclined. to do—he called names and tried to raise totally irrelevant issues in order to create prejudice. In his rage at the appalling hash which has been made everywhere of everything and by almost everyone, Mr. Bevin hit. out not only wildly but with great unfairness. Yet one can hardly help being 'sorry for him when one thinks of the hash and its constituents which he had to explain away. There is Mr. Lansbury's mixture of boiling .inno- oence and tepid cynicism. There is Mr. Meynell's indul- gence in a kind of cinema film intrigue in the land of blood and famine, gold and diamonds, Russian self-deception and the muddy mixture of Jewish mystery and materialism. There are Tchitcherin's and Litvinoff's incautious but strictly businesslike wireless whisperings about paper, Stockholm credits, money subsidies and the like. There is young Mr. Lansbury's naive forgetfulness of the existence of an Intelligence Department at Scotland Yard and of its tiresome and officious habit of tracing bank notes by their numbers. There is young Mr. Lanabury's mother-in- law, .a communistic mother in Israel and her .spirited haggle over a parcel of diamonds—F.31,000 " asking " price and £28,000 " taking." Finally, there is the kind of ducal attitude adopted by the Herald's Trades Unions directors. Truly this super-hash has led the unfortunate Herald into the worst morass into which any newspaper has ever floundered. No journalist,and least of all an editor, can contemplate it unmoved. Here, indeed, " seems surging the Virgilian cry, the sense of tears in mortal things." One may recall also Mr. Lear's inimitable alphabetic rhyme—one of the most pathetic in literature :— " I was some ice, So sweet and so nice, Which nobody tasted, And so it was wasted, All that Woe ioe."
In spite of all,. if Mr. Bevin had, like the lady in 'Mr. Shaw's play, kept on repeating that he was " a good .girl " --i.e., that he represents Millions of Trade Unionists— though we should not be converted, we should have the fullest sympathy 'of comprehension with him in his predicament. When, however, he descends to bringing in a whole batch of irrelevant matter and to the mere calling of names, we are not only not sympathetic, but see strong proof of ,a desperate situation. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that he must have reason to think the situation even worse than do outsiders. His reference to the Marconi case is, from every point of view, inexcusable. The Marconi case may
fairly be used in a direct attack on Mr. Lloyd George and as an argument to show that he is not qualified to be Prime Minister of this country. But remember that Mr. Bevin has never said this, and does not even say it now. He merely employs the washerwoman argument, " You nasty thing I If you bring up wicked stones against me, remember I can bring up worse against you." That is a kind of apology- which we can assure Mr. Bevin leaves the public perfectly cold. It disgusts. It is, and rightly, the most powerful non-conductor of sympathy. The fact that a man takes up such- a line of attack, not in the public interest, but only when he is in trouble himself, is a strong condemnation of the spirit which inspires his action. Unless we are much mistaken, Mr. Bevin at the height of the Marconi trouble in 1913 did not move a finger to help those who were insisting upon the danger and disgrace of the transactions which are grouped under the name of Marconi Further, we shall be very much surprised if a reference to the files of the Herald, which was, we believe, then In existence as a weekly, does not show that the paper held that Mr. Lloyd George was acting rightly, defended him and attacked those who attacked him. Certainly most of the Labour Party and the Radical Extremists generally were in those days not only upholders of Mr. Lloyd. George but defenders of him in the specific case which is now so crudely used to prejudice him. Even if Mr. Sevin could prove his right to cite the Marconi ease by showing a previous record of condem- nation, we should still say that it has nothing whatever to do with the present case, and can be of no aid to hhn in his defence.. How' could it be, at least until the time comes, so deeply longed for by politicians, when two wrongs make a right ? Such a political paradise is a long way off, and until it arrives no wise man will pay any attention to such a defence as Mr. Bevin's, except to note that it is. a sure indication that he has no argument and no facto with which to cover the nakedness of his case.
We must not leave- the matter here. If Mr. Sevin
can prove that Mr. Lloyd George has been unjust to him,. he has a perfect remedy in his hands. The Prime Minister, and it is very greatly to his credit, haa not sheltered himself behind any Parliamentary privilege, but has spoken out plainly under his own signature. Therefore Mr. Sevin can at once take Mr. Lloyd George into court, and make him justify his attack OII the Herald and its directors individually and collectively. If Mr. Sevin has a good case, there is every reason why he should take. the action we have suggested.. He is perfectly sure of a fair trial and of being able to put his case and the case of the
be
Herald before the public. in the best possible way. He would deal a smashing blow to his arch-enemy, as he now considers Mr. Lloyd George to be, and, indeed, to all who, like ourselves, condemn and denounce, not merely the doctrines preached by the Herald, but the dis- credit which the disclosure of its relations with the Soviet Government has brought upon English. Journalism. Once more, then, we ask Mr. Bevin in all seriousness to put himself right, as in effect he asserts he can, by a libel action against Mr. Lloyd George. If be does not take that action we shall be compelled to judge him as we-have had to fudge Mr. Smillie. Mr. Snuffie has not thought it expedient to take action against the Morning Post or the Duke of Northumberland, though he declares he has been libelled by both. As a postscript to what we have written we may remind our-readers of Walpole's famous saying "I only knew one woman who wouldn't take money and she took diamonds." We wonder whether comrades Lenin and Trotsky, who are, we believe, both well read men and both familiar with Eng- lish, recall the anecdote. If they do, will they, we wonder, say cynically, " We have only known one Communist newspaper in Europe which. would, not take gold and that took diamonds, or would have done so. but for the stupidity with which the thing was managed and the idiotic prejudices of the English Trades Union leaders. We. have always believed those leaders to be a set of hidebound, pedantic bourgeois, and have warned our true if somewhat ridiculous English friends against them. Now we see fully the extent of their stupidity and timidity. The bourgeois, as we have always said, is no good. What we want is a heavy civil war, &es &c., &c. The English revolution will never come about without it. We would gladly find a hundred million sterling to subsidize a sound English revolution, but messing about with those anaemic English, so-called Extremists is a wretched, bloodless business which is no good to anyone."
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