EQUALITY V. LIBERTY

TIME'S London bureau chief, John Osborne, spent much of the last month touring industrial England. He talked to factory workers and their bosses in Manchester and in Birmingham, clerks and businessmen in Liverpool, shipyard workers of the Merseyside, miners in Newcastle. He reported:

This is still a good country. A month in the Britain outside London is enough to convince anybody that there is a lot of vigor and promise left in the people who live the real life of this island and who do its real work. The alien traveler returns to London with a sad feeling that all these confident, energetic, likable Britons whom he has just met don't know what has hit them. But their strength has always been that they never know when they are down,* and maybe that matters more than anything else.

One thing that matters gravely is whether Britons are going to keep their country free for free men. I am not so sure they are as I once was. You find strength at the old roots of England. But you also find the creeping, dangerous illusion that freedom consists of equality at any price. The determination that nobody shall have an advantage over anybody else is taking on a morbid and destructive quality that may in the long run be more disastrous than all the country's other troubles.

The queue spirit is extending into every phase of British life. Sports, food, clothing, politics, the Government's efforts in the economic crisis are all affected by the popular insistence that if anyone is to be miserable, everyone must be equally miserable. In a country where inequality has been and still is crass and pronounced, this is perhaps a natural tendency. But it is nonetheless inhibiting to national and individual effort, and it is already justifying and concealing innumerable small invasions of personal freedom. Britons have given up most of their economic freedoms and seem intent on abandoning the remainder as soon as they can. So far, they imagine that this will not mean the final loss of individual freedom. If they are wrong, they will know it only when it is too late'.

"They Don't Give Us a Lead." It is often said that Britons have never cared much about their Empire, and do not now. They do care, and they simply don't believe it when they read that they are losing the Empire. They don't mean the technical empire of India, Burma, the Colonies. By "empire" they mean South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada--the Commonwealth. That is the "empire" that matters to them, and a good many of them see Britain's future in it. Some of them even think they can somehow transfer much of their home island's population, energy and talents to the Dominions without diminishing the great collective entity which they think of as "Britain and the Empire." The world might get a jolt if they were right. But most of them still think of Britain as their natural home, and look with scorn on the minority, noisiest in London, which talks of migrating because "this country's had it."

The main political effect of the coal crisis, industrial shutdown and the blizzards and floods has been to draw Britain's workers closer to their Labor Government. The shocks gave Britain's workers a sense of responsibility, a will to work they had not had for a long time. The sudden threat to their pay checks had something to do with it, too, and the jolt was healthy for everybody. Unhappily along with the jolts came material shortages which make it impossible for millions to work full time at full effort, even if they want to.

The Labor Party and Government will make a serious mistake if they misread all this to mean that they can get by with anything. The one complaint heard in workers' canteens and in Tory bosses' offices alike is: "They don't give us a lead." It is the single crack in Labor's armor, and it could widen into one big enough to let out Clement Attlee and all his Cabinet.

I met a good many Britons who said "Crisis? What crisis?" and weren't joking. This little thing they'd been having, they explained, wasn't a crisis worth the name. They said that what this country needed was a really bloody awful crisis, something so bad that people would have to take notice and put their backs into it in the good old British fashion. There is still a future for people like that.

* A few superstitious Englishmen were sure last week that Britain was "for it." "Woe Water" (which only runs just before a calamity) was tumbling down the hillsides of the Caterham Valley, about 20 miles south of London. Had not a bourne flowed out of the hills (according to local legend) before the Restoration in 1660 and the Plague in 1665, and again just before the revolution of 1688? Woe Water had run again in 1915, just two days before the German submarine campaign started, and in 1938, the year of Munich. The non-superstitious scoffed: an exceptionally wet winter had made the bourne appear. The exceptionally wet winter had also brought on The Crisis.

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