APPOSITE ABSTRACTIONS
IN what many listeners will consider the -best of the many Christmas broadcasts he has delivered, the King on Monday sounded a note that could hardly have been improved on. The year before us is charged with crisis. The new half-century it opens is pregnant with the unknown and the unpredictable. The potentialities are tragic. War, which in the hundred years after 1815 seemed to be vanishing, as it should, from a civilised world, is today an imminent menace. It is not that mankind has learned nothing from what it underwent in the four years after August, 1914, and the five and more years after 1939.. Two- thirds of the world is sick of war and all its horrors, and con- cerned only to set peace between nations on durable foundations. But it is not prepared for peace by surrender. It refused to surrender to German Imperialism in 1914. It refused to surrender to German Nazism in 1939. It is under no illusions at all about what surrender to a militant and autocratic Communism would mean today. Peace is indivisible, as a leading Communist declared, and if the greatest Communist Power in the world determines that peace shall be broken, either by its own action or that of some serviceable satellite, then the endeavours of the peaceable nations must be frustrated, and no choice is left them but to defend by arms those things in life which only the aggressive ambition of one powerful State prevents them from enjoying peaceably in their habitations.
That was the background against which the King shaped his words of encouragement and hope. They were necessary and timely, and they were addressed to a people ready to respond. For if there is in these islands a deep hatred of war and a realisation that peace today is in mortal danger, there is no craven fear of war. Preparations for defence must go forward ; the material sacrifices that involves must be accepted; the gravity of the prospect must temper in some degree the philosophic cheerfulness natural to our race. But in the main we can, till the storm breaks if break it does, pursue the even tenor of our way—which is the best service we can do to the community with which our individual fortunes are bound up. We may, indeed, do a rather wider service than that. Last week, it is recorded, the British Ambassador in Washington was asked, in the course of a speaking-tour he was making in the Middle West, what the effect of an atomic bomb on England would be. His answer, " I never think about things like that," was admirably suited to the occasion. There are persons in special positions of responsibility in both Britain and America whose business it is to be thinking of things like that, and it is to be hoped they are doing it to some purpose. But the British Ambassador in Washington is not one of them ; nor is the average British citizen, nor the average American citizen. Their business essentially is to stick conscientiously to their jobs, or to whatever new jobs the emergency may dictate, leaving to the future a future menace which may never after all materialise.
Nothing of this did King George say explicitly on Monday ; all of it was implicit in his words. His choice of The Pilgrim's Progress, with its effective contrast between Christian and Faintheart, as the basis of his theme was singularly happily conceived, and in his presentation of the challenge of a choice- " the world must learn to love, not to hate ; to create, not to destroy "—be struck the note on which the new half-century may most fitly open. The limits within which the choice is offered must be recognised. ' If we are bent on creating while others are bent on destroying, the chance for the success of creative effort is small, for since the beginning of time it has been far easier to destroy than to construct. We can be compelled in crises to do no more than hold on to what we have, or simply reconcile ourselves to bare survival as a nation. But we are living under no such conditions as that at present, and nothing could be more fatal than to let the fear that we may be paralyse us. The Pope in his Christmas message spoke wise words. It is true that the first urgent problem is peace within each country ; that social security is an essential step towards national unity and that one of the essential bases of solidarity is the family. The question whether family responsibility, with all its moral value, is not in some danger of being weakened by the assump- tion of ever expanding responsibilities by the State calls for serious thought. But, fundamentally, the message which came alike from Sandringham and from the Holy City, that a.vital choice is before every individual at the opening of this New Year can unite men of all creeds and races, and stimulate them to new faith as well as to new effort as they pass another landmark.
All this, it may be contended, is well enough, but what profit is there in such abstractions when the enemy is at the gates ? The enemy, for that matter, is not at the gates ; it will be time to set about repelling him when he is. No one yet knows whether Russia is seriously contemplating war. That she is in a position to wage it if she chooses no one doubts. It may be questioned whether fear of the atomic bomb, or other even more potent instruments of destruction, would deter her from armed action if she were irrevocably bent on achieving her purposes by war. No one, it is true, can concentrate on abstractions. Alarming realities are far too insistent. But realities are not all of one colour. Hope of peace by agreement has not yet been lost. The acceptance by the Western Powers of Russia's invitation to a conference on Germany at least opens up some possibility of substituting discussion for conflict. The acceptance is not un- conditional. Not Germany alone, but all the field of discord between Russia and the West must form the agenda, and the proposals of the Cominform Conference at Prague, which Russia enclosed in her note of invitation, are rejected in advance. If Russia, in spite of the stipulations in the Allied Note, is still ready to confer, there will be definite hope of the present dangerous tension being relaxed.
In Korea the situation is as critical in the diplomatic as in the military sphere. That a settlement is possible on China's terms is, of course, plain enough, but neither the United Nations nor the United States is likely to make peace at the point of an ultimatum. Yet the gulf between the opposing theses is not so wide that reasonable discussion, if there is the smallest sincerity in the Chinese profession of a desire for peace, should be incapable of bridging it. The essential, as both Britain and the United States insist, is to get the fighting stopped by a cease- fire agreement ; the fact that the opposing armies are standing on or about the 38th Parallel should facilitate that. Next, the three paramount questions of the future of Korea, the future of Formosa and a place for Communist China on the Security Council can be discussed. But China rejects that order of events. All three questions, including the evacuation of Korea and Formosa by foreign troops, must be decided according to her desires before the fighting can be stopped. That is a completely intransigent attitude, and the demand can certainly not be accepted as it stands. But in reasonable discussion China would certainly get what she wants in the matter of the Security Council and at any rate a fair compromise in the matter of Formosa and Korea. She would find States, notably Great Britain, her friends whom she persists as regarding as her enemies, and she would see her status as an Asiatic Great Power fully realised. Unfortunately, Peking appears to be segregating itself as much as Moscow. There is room there only for evil counsellors, and none for good. The one foothold the British Commonwealth has in the Chinese capital is in the person of the Indian Ambas- sador, Mr. Panikkar. There is still the possibility that he may be able to drive a little deeper the impression which Sir Benegal Rau appeared to be making on the Chinese at Lake Success.
But all that is problematic. The Chinese can no more be argued with on a normal basis than the Russians. Their choice between peace and war must be awaited, and the necessary decisions taken in the light of it. Meanwhile the abstractions remain. The King has defined them. Abjure hatred, create rather than destroy. In national life and domestic life, at any rate, that is possible. It is when we are set in the midst of so many and great dangers that the preservation of moral standards is most essential. The coral reef, which the King pictured as " strong to resist the surge and thunder of the tides of fortune and of time," is built up by countless individual units. So is this nation. It is on their fortitude and determined purpose that its salvation depends.
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