MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IHAD determined not to mention on this page a single word of politics until after the decision has been given on February 23rd. Such delicacy of feeling, it will be admitted, was a fine and, in its way, a moving thing. I have since regretted this self-denying ordinance, since there is much which might be
said in connection with the letters exchanged between the leaders of the Liberal and Conservative Parties about the part played by humour in electoral contests. One could trace a whole descending scale of election polemics—from the extreme of invective at the one end, passing through the several gradations of abuse, irony and derision, and concluding with the element of good humour, Which is effective sometimes upon platforms and very effective when committed to the public prints. But since I have resolved during these February weeks to write about indifferent subjects, such as gladioli and Leigh Hunt, I cannot break that resolution at the very outset of the campaign. I shall therefore this week write, not about any of the issues which will be placed before the sovereign people, but about the things which at the election will be ignored. Having read with admiration and sympathy the election manifestoes of the; two main parties, I find myself bewildered, not so much by the many subjects they mention (since they have been careful to ex- pound their policies in words of one syllable) as by the fact that other significant matters are scarcely mentioned at all. The problem Is one which should be of interest to all those who are concerned with what has been called (idiotically to my mind) "the philosophy of history." Some student of this abstruse area of thought and learning may be able to provide an answer to the question which I am about to formulate. All I can say is that I am not satisfied that the obvious answer, although it contains part of the truth, provides any complete philosophic explanation.
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My problem, stated as simply as possible, is as follows. The election manifestoes, although they examine in detail and with charm the varied domestic problems with which the country is today con- fronted, dismiss in a few short sentences those external issues, whether imperial or foreign, which hang like a black snow-cloud In the east. The answer which is generally given to this question is that the ordinary elector (and most electors are ordinary) is more interested in the pay-packet or the shopping-basket than in the hydrogen bomb. This evasion of important factors in our future destiny appears to me to be unimaginative. The extent of the pay- packet or the depth and emptiness of the shopping-basket assuredly interest and affect the many millions who find it hard indeed to cope with the cost of living. Yet, whereas these matters may have an all-important bearing upon their means of living, the external situation, in company with the hydrogen bomb, may have a most decisive effect, not merely on their liberties and their meam: of living, but upon their lives. - When I ask candidates, statesmen and his- torians to explain to me this distortion of values, they regret that any man should be so naive. It is to them self-evident that in an age of universal suffrage and popular education the electors should be more concerned with their day-to-day requirements than with any hypothetical dangers. How can one, they argue, expecl the harried housewife or the earnest artisan to be anything but wholly Indifferent to all that Tiridates may threaten, when they are eternally worried by the prospect of what to obtain for the next Sunday meal ?
• * * * I am not for one instant denying that this is, in fact, the attitude of the British electorate. I have fought three elections in the last fifteen years, and in the course of these elections, and of others which I have attended, I must, I suppose, have been asked a thousand questions. Of these thousand questions, those which related to foreign or imperial affairs cannot have been many more than thirty to forty, which is a meagre proportion. I have even observed that when from the platform I have turned my discourse into foreign channels, there ensues a complete lull in the attention of the audience, punctuated often (as I develop my powerful periods) with a cry of "Keep off it! ". I admit, therefore, that the statesmen and syndicates who, and which, drafted and prepared these potent pamphlets were probably correct, from the electoral point of view, in relegating our vast external problems to a few short lines of somewhat meaningless exhortation. What I do not admit is that the reasons which are generally adduced as explaining this mood of public indifference are really as self-evident as is some- times averred. After all, between 1930 and 1935 the public really were concerned with the League of Nations, and although they only rarely asked questions about it at public meetings, they certainly did fill up the ballot addressed to them by the League of Nations Union with assiduitY and in great numbers. Moreover, it is not sufficient explanation to contend that the voters today, being better educated and as such more conscious of their own class interests and power, believe that by exacting pledges from their candidates they can exert a more direct influence upon the legislature. Nor am I entirely satisfied with the materialistic argument which assures us that any true democracy will pay attention to economic argu- ments and promises, and will in no circumstances be moved by any statements, however weighty, concerning external or hypo- thetical conditions of which they have no personal experience and which, in any case, they would be unable to control.
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Why, if this be true, was Mr. Gladstone able in 1879 to lash Scottish miners and Yorkshire mill-hands into paroxysms of passion in regard to events which were then occurring in Bulgaria ? Surely the economic insecurity of those electors in the Midlothian cam- paign was far more acute than any which the modern voter need immediately fear today ? Surely, even in Scotland, the level of education at that date and among the masses was lower than it is today ? No national leader in this year 1950 could arouse a popular audience to even momentary attention by discoursing about Bulgaria. Moreover, in 1879, however atrocious may have been the conduct of the then unspeakable Turn, however immediate might be the effect of that conduct upon the unhappy inhabitants of Rumelia or the Dobrudja, it is difficult to conceive that the voters of Lanark felt that their own interests were in any sense directly involved. Today the march of events in Tibet or Formosa, at Petsamo or Helsinki, may at any moment create a situation which could expose the ordinary, citizen of this country to the gravest dangers and sacrifices. Yet whereas in 1879 the voters of this country shouted themselves hoarse in denunciation of the Turk or Russian, the voters of 1950 are encouraged and inveigled to tuck incomparably greater dangers into the side-pockets of their minds. Can so strange and disquieting a phenomenon be wholly or satis- factorily accounted for by arguments to the effect that man has today, in fact, ceased to be a political, and become an economic, animal ; or that the class-consciousness of the masses has blurred the old clear-cut sense of international rivalry ?
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Such explanations do, in all probability, account for two-thirds of the change which has occurred since 1879. The remaining third must, I suggest, be ascribed to other causes. The Midlothian cam- paign was conducted in a fervour of righteous indignation ; the emotion aroused in those audiences was a moral, not a political, emotion. The ethical appeal has today lost its potency. The voters of 1879, again, believed that Great Britain was sufficiently powerful to impose, without grave danger to herself, a moral solution. They do not believe that today. And thus the modern voter has ceased to be moved by external iniquities, has ceased to assume that we could, if we desired, abolish those iniquities, and turns an indifferent back upon problems which he feels are beyond the strength of any political party to solve.
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