The Pursuit of Justice

More and more leaders of governments show themselves in foreign capitals these days. Visits like that of Britain's Sir Anthony Eden to Washington this week have two kinds of meaning-practical and symbolic. Main item on the practical agenda of the Eden visit is to reach U.S.British agreement on some world trouble spots, especially on the Communist threat to the Middle East (TIME, Jan. 16). But this effort will probably be sterile unless the talks are permeated by the symbolic meaning of Eden in Washington. Diplomatist George Kennan to the contrary, international relations are not mere projections of practical national-power interests ; foreign affairs are also a quest for justice, in which each nation is indeed its brother's keeper, and the sovereignty of each is limited by a "decent respect" for the moral judgments of the others.

British-U.S. friendship rests on more than a community of language and a similarity of power interests. Its main base is a shared belief in the pursuit of justice-everywhere. The occasion of Eden's visit is a time to remember how much idealism has influenced the course of British policy even in the Empire's supposedly cynical past, and how fleeting and superficial was the isolationist phase of U.S. history.

Illinois to Hungary. Even in the eighth century, Americans, though facing mainly the challenge of their own Western opportunity, reacted again and again at the popular level to events bearing on freedom and justice in distant lands. In 1849, for example, Americans and Britons alike were sympathetic with the erupting nationalist revolutions in Europe, and particularly indignant about the Habsburgs' brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution. In September 1849, well before the days when there was a Hungarian bloc anywhere in the U.S., a promising Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln proposed a resolution to a pro-Hungarian mass meeting: "Resolved that in the opinion of this meeting, the immediate acknowledgement of the independence of Hungary by our Government is due from American freemen to their struggling brethren, to the general cause of republican liberty."

Recently, Dr. Bela Fabian, a Hungarian emigre living in New York, reminded Britons of their share in this same upblazing of indignation. In a letter to Time & Tide, he recalled the visit to London of Austrian General Julius Jacob Haynau in 1850. Haynau was known in Britain as "The Hyena" because, in suppressing the Hungarian war, he executed 13 commanding generals at the fortress of Arad, and ordered women stripped and flogged in the streets for speaking for rebels.

Slipping informally into London a year after his atrocities, Haynau stopped one day to inspect the Barclay and Perkins Brewery. No sooner had he scrawled his name in the guest book than the brewers -as the Illustrated London News of Sept. 14, 1850 put it-set up "the most fearful yells and execrations." Neighborhood draymen advanced on The Hyena with their heavy whips, shouting: " 'Oh, this is the fellow that flogged the women, is it!'" A flying squad of police finally dragged him, bloody and beaten, to the safety of a police boat, and, "in the course of Friday night he took his leave" -much to the private delight of Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston.

For over a century, wrote Emigre Fabian, whenever Hungarians mourned their martyrs, the orators "never omitted to commend the British people for their sympathetic attitude . . . Now I read in the newspapers that Marshal Bulganin and Mr. Khrushchev plan to visit England in April 1956 . . . For many hundred years the oppressed nations of Europe have regarded England as the champion of freedom and as the adversary of tyranny. It would therefore come as a great shock to Great Britain's faithful friends and admirers if Bulganin and Khrushchev were to be received with flowers and ovations . . ."

Peking to Paris. Fabian recalls that as a young man in 1918 he heard Lenin in Petrograd make the famed speech in which he surveyed the Communist course to world triumph. "The road to Paris leads through Peking, the road to London through New Delhi." The warning he draws is not merely political and military; present also is the moral point that tyranny and injustice anywhere are the enemy of freedom and order anywhere.

The vexing and dangerous practical problems of the Middle East are also, especially for Britain and the U.S., problems of moral responsibility. The Arab-Israel quarrel, for instance, is directly traceable to reckless and selfish past U.S. and British deeds and omissions in that region. Responsibility for solutions must rest largely in an agreement between Britain and the U.S. on how to make Arabs and Israelis stop the fighting and begin the stabilization of the area. No doubt the forms of solution will require hard, technical, diplomatic work. But nothing will come of technical gimmicks in this or any other area unless Britain and the U.S. show some of the moral sensibility of Lincoln and the London brewers.

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