Читать книгу A Year of Prophesying - H.G. Wells - Страница 13

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24.11.1923

MR. ASQUITH is now, to use the phrase he coined for a contemporary, the last of the Victorian "giants." He is the leader of some sort of Liberal Party in England, the oldest and the ripest, I am told, though I confess I am quite unable to make head or tail of these various Liberal parties in England nowadays, and he is always trying to lead his little band back to the nineteenth century, when there were ever so many "giants" in the land, not to mention the Grand Old Man, and when political life made up for its complete want of seriousness by a pompous solemnity and vast personal enthusiasms. Prime Ministers in those days loomed vast; they were none of your little chaps who can hide behind bull-dog pipes and say muffin. Our Leaders, figures of Pantomimic size, filled the stage and said—floods. They were practically all that there was on the stage. The crumbling peace of Europe and the world, the conflict of labour and order with adventurous capital, were not staged in those days. At most one heard of these things in the Legislature as one sometimes catches a rumble of vans and cabs in a London theatre. In the House they dealt with only the thin shadows of great issues; with the Free Breakfast Table, Unsectarian Religious Teaching, Leasehold Enfranchisement, and the like.

One of the most pleasing traits of the Victorian giants was their tremendous scholarly evasion of all complete statement. The vulgarity of a plain assignment of a thing to its broad roots and general principles was never committed. In such matters Mr. Asquith is finely representative of his period. He has to perfection that ability to deal with a part of an issue as if it were the whole which was characteristic of the great Victorian scholars and gentlemen. If Mr. Asquith were a mechanic, and you asked him to make you an automobile, he would presently produce two wheels, a clutch, and a radiator with so perfect and dignified a manner that you would hardly realise that you had not the complete car until you stepped through it. You would feel it ungracious to complain. When Mr. Asquith drew the sword and threw away the scabbard, he did it with so fine a gesture that you scarcely noted that most of the sword wasn't there. If Mr. Asquith were a domestic hen he would lay eggs consisting of about two-thirds of a shell and as much yolk as would cover a sixpence, but he would cluck so bravely that you would credit him with a complete omelette. I do not blame him, it was the style of his time; but his time has passed, and this is a world too urgent and dangerous for the ample deficiencies of those spaciously empty years.

These remarks are provoked by the fact that Mr. Asquith and his associated and rival Liberal leaders—I can never tell which is which—are now engaged in unfurling the Banner of Free Trade in Great Britain. Encumbered with an immense and growing burden of unemployed workmen Britain is thinking of all sorts of eleventh-hour expedients. Schemes of preference within the Empire, leading towards an Empire Zollverein, are very much to the fore. And in reply this old Free Trade, which figured so largely in the political history of Victorian times, is to be brought out of the shed again, and furbished up and sent round the country to see what it will do for Liberalism.

Now nothing could be more typical than Free Trade of this peculiar incompleteness of the political methods of the "giants" of the "heroic" Victorian Age to which I have already called attention. It is a one-wheeled, engineless, body-less Liberal automobile. It is a project to keep down one's natural frontier in respect to inward and outward trade, and it ignores all the correlated measures that should go with this most desirable abolition. It ignores the fact that nearly all the separate sovereign competitive States into which the world is divided are always actively engaged in mutual injury, sometimes frankly in open warfare but always by fiscal trickery, monetary tactics, diversion of trade, and the like amiable activities. True Free Trade must be mutual. One-sided Free Trade is like disarmament in the face of malignant military preparation. And if there is to be real Free Trade between any two countries then certain other things follow necessarily, though they never appear on the party programmes and banners.

Production will tend to gravitate to the regions of maximum advantage, and so there must also be a free movement of population over the frontiers to the regions of most advantageous employment. If there is not such free movement, then one of the States may suffer from unemployment in this or that industry and social degeneration while the other is enjoying high wages. But movement of population and the shifting of many industries across frontiers will affect military efficiency, and so there can be no real Free Trade between any two countries unless they are ensured not only against mutual attack but by a mutual guarantee against attack.

Free Trade is, in fact, only a practical proposal between countries prepared also for free movements of population between each other and for a pooling of their defensive resources and foreign policy. The way to permanent and satisfactory Free Trade lies in a steady extension of leagues between friendly peoples prepared for that much waiver of their sovereign independence. But only peoples near the same educational level and with closely similar standards of comfort and behaviour can contemplate so intimate a union as this. There might be such a league of the Latin-American States, or of the English-speaking and Scandinavian and other North-European States, but not of any much more extensive coalescences at present. So long as a State remains potentially at war with any other State, Free Trade between them is a dream.

Great Britain in the Victorian period had a practical monopoly of modern industrial production and benefited by an open frontier that gave her workers cheap food and so kept labour cheap. That was a temporary and now vanished condition of affairs. So long as States insist on their sovereign independence they must be prepared to use tariffs just as they must be prepared to use armies. It is the price of the flag.

Tariffs corrupt. That is true, just as war contracts do. But the way to escape from these diseases of conflict does not lie in the maintenance of fiscal non-resistance by this or that independent, irresponsible State, but in a creative foreign policy that seeks union and coalescence, and aims, openly and educationally, through coalescence in a broadening series, to reach at last world Free Trade, world freedom of movement, and an organised world peace.

But Mr. Asquith will never tell us he means anything so intelligible as that. He will just wave the banner of Free Trade as though it meant anything the imagination of the voter might like. That was how the giants did their business in the grand old days, and he will never do his business in any other way. And it is because of these splendid old traditions of pompous vagueness that more and more of the liberal-minded people of Britain drift towards the Labour camp.