The British (Cont'd)

THE BRITISH EMPIRE-Stephen Leacock -Dodd, Mead ($2).

THE LONG WATCH IN ENGLAND-Eugene & Arline Lohrke-Holt ($2).

GREAT BRITAIN-Albert Viton-John Day ($3).

Whether the British Empire will live or die is a question that has become pregnant in recent weeks. Of three books published last week one says the Empire will die, one says it will live, one disregards the harsh question altogether.

Stephen Leacock's book, which disregards the question, makes the pleasantest reading. A simple, hopeful act of patriotism, quickly thrown together, it has a nice old man's blandness over skeletons in the imperial closet, a nice old man's bright readiness with encyclopedic information. Told in the manner of a genuinely charming speaker at a banquet of the English-Speaking Union, the book cheerfully describes the Empire as the reward of centuries of unblemished pluck and fair play, and recommends, as a basis for durable peace, a Union of the Empire, France, and the U. S.

The Long Watch in England is the work of two U. S. citizens who lived, until lately, in Sussex. Neither economists nor journalists but dour, desperately sincere private observers, they presume that much may be intimately perceived, among its inhabitants, that tell the whole fate and meaning of a nation. The Lohrkes' regretful opinion: that England is at once dying, dead and badly in need of burial. They offer some somber and eloquent notes: on the deep feudal loyalty of the rural Englishman like that of a dog to his master; on the fungoid passivity of the English poor; on the drowning weight of the past, the atrophy of the sense of the future; on the "dead-end look" in the faces of the young; on the fagend of the industrial revolution, a people physically rated, even by their own experts, as a third-class nation; on moral apathy and deafness to change of the middle and upper classes; on the leaders of England ("The profoundest wish of English statesmen of our time was to elude the responsibility of statesmanship"). "Looking ahead, one saw the face of nightmare; looking back, one saw the faces of ghosts."

Albert Viton's Great Britain is by long odds the dullest and most instructive of the three. A static, black-&-white study of Britain and her concentric rings of Empire, it ends by appraising the Empire at war, sets up those crises which await it at war's end, and delivers the opinion that it will survive them.

Even if the British do not lose the war, thinks Viton, they cannot win the peace. Unlike their enemies, they have everything to lose, nothing to gain. The Empire owes too much to "the resourcefulness and energy of the British people," too little to "objective material reality." "Powerful separatist movements" in South Africa, even in Canada, are a virtual certainty once the war is over. The war, says Viton, will be a forcing-bed for rebellion in the Colonies: the industrialization of natives, the use of natives in new colonial posts, the return of native soldiers, the rise of a native, anti-imperialist middle class, all guarantee rebellion on an unprecedented scale.

Britain herself, Viton concludes, is in for a worse industrial collapse than that of 1920. Her Latin American markets are already being annexed by the U. S., and she is liable to lose trade in Scandinavia, the Balkans, parts of the Empire as well. With her exports reduced, thanks to labor shortage and lack of shipping, she must liquidate foreign securities to buy imports. She will lose her financial supremacy to the U. S. and thus her strongest bond with the Dominions. The problem of feeding the island population during the war will be slight compared with the difficulty once the war is over.

In the closing chapter, The Empire Will Not Die, cool, hardheaded Albert Viton turns his back on the rest of his book, begins to comfort himself and the reader with such emotional catch-phrases as "this amazing little island"; to deliver such debatable statements as "Few countries can boast as high a type of manhood as that produced by the public schools of England"; to remark, "The septuagenarian Neville Chamberlain is symbolic of the virility of the English people"; and to snort "To say that war exhausts is as much nonsense as that exercise weakens." After his long persuasions that night must fall, such whistling in the dark makes the night seem darker.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.