The Crisis of the West: The Marfleet Lectures 9781487584207

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The Crisis of the West

THE MARFLEET LECTURES

THE CRISIS OF THE WEST Dorothy Thompson

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO December 13th and 14th, 1955

Copyright @, Canada, 1955 by the University of Toronto Press Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 978-1-4875-7351-5 (paper)

INTRODUCTION Ladies and Gentlemen:

On Friday of this week the Michaelmas Term will end, and students will go near and far to their homes for the Yuletide, when there will be sung again the angelic anthem: "And on earth peace, good will toward men." We look about the world and there is no peace. How can we fulfil the hope and realize the desire of mankind to live together with understanding and good will? Kipling wrote: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.

He meant, I suppose, that East and West would always preserve the distinctive modes of thought characteristic of each, but that the mutual respect of human beings for one another can transcend that ground for misunderstanding. In that reconciliation, the United States has a leading role today. Many of us here have seen the United States swing from isolationism in 1916 to the willing acceptance of the burdens of world responsibility. We in Canada are deeply grateful for the best and most generous neighbor that any country could ask for. We pray that the deep-seated respect and friendship of Canadians and Americans, sealed by time and transcending space, can give a lesson to the whole world, East and West alike. This theme is, to say the least. not unrelated to the objective of this Lectureship: the promotion of understanding and good will. In 1910, Mrs. Lydia A. Marfteet of Prophetstown, Illinois, endowed this Lectureship in memory of her late husband and as an expression of the regard which she and her husband had for this City and this University. Many years before 1910, Mrs. Marfteet and her husband had spent several summers here. They had often strolled through the grounds of the University. Mr. Marfteet, a lawyer by profession, made use of the University Library. Shortly before he died, he expressed to his wife the wish that he might do something to advance the good feeling between the United States and Canada and thus further the interests of both nations.

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Although the phrase is worn threadbare by countless chairmen, yet I use it tonight without any risk of banality-our speaker, so well known. needs no introduction. Dorothy Thompson-she is known, through her writings. to millions in her own country, in Canada, and throughout the world. Her columns appear three times a week in more than one hundred newspapers; and though they are not Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian columns, yet they are certainly classical columns, in that they are detached and well-proportioned, graceful in style and solidly based. A graduate of Syracuse University, she is known in many academic halls. She is an honorary graduate of the Russell Sage College, Syracuse University, St. Lawrence University, Tufts College, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, and Oberlin College. Dorothy Thompson's topic as the Marfleet Lecturer is "The Crisis of the West." "Crisis" is defined as a turning point. In what direction does the arrow point? I quoted earlier the Christmas message from the New Testament: "And on earth-peace, good will toward men." I now cite a text from the Old Testament: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Change "spears" to "atom bombs" and "swords" to "H bombs," and we can appreciate the import of that text for the twentieth cenury. The Marfleet Lectures for 1955 are to be given by an interpreter of international affairs who has understanding, historical sense. and vision often beyond that of foreign secretaries. Her lectures will be most timely and significant, because she has just returned from a two-month visit to Europe, including Russia. The tenth Marfleet Lecturer: Dorothy Thompson.

SmNEY E. SMrm President University of Toronto

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I You HAVE PAID ME an unusual honor in asking me to give these lectures. Since they were created you have been addressed by Americans of high distinction-by a former President of the United States, and by renowned Congressmen, University Presidents, and judges of our highest courts. I believe that this is the first time you have invited a journalist to this platform, and I confess that the invitation, while, naturally, it pleases me, fills me, also, with a sense of inadequacy. The profession of journalism has not, for long-in the historical sense-been held in high esteem. With some exceptions-one of them being Sir Winston Churchill, and another the late Georges Clemenceau-it has produced from its ranks relatively few statesmen, historians, political philosophers, or even writers of enduring renown. Our very name "journalist" indicates the transient nature of our efforts. We record, or seek to interpret, the affairs of the "jour"-of the day. The rapidity with which we are compelled to work, and the pressures of time under which we must formulate judgments are not conducive to exactitude of knowledge, profundity of thought, or even to the development of a brilliant and distinctive style of writing. Those of our numbers who have achieved any of these things have often been called to journalism from other efforts, and with reputations previously established, as councillors of statesmen, or editors of other than daily publications, or have not been compelled to earn their livings by the drudgery of meeting datelines, or have been able to devote their efforts to limited fields in which they could acquire high competence such as study and criticism of the arts. Journalists themselves-usually among themselves-have described their profession as the refuge of frustrated novelists, the rostrum of 3

frustrated teachers, the pulpit of frustrated preachers, and whatnot of other frustrations. And sometimes those who choose to describe themselves as "journalists"-Miss Rebecca West, for instance-do so in the rather whimsical knowledge that they are not really journalists at all. Then, there are other pressures apart from the pressure of time. Newspapers in general are published, in this age of universal literacy, at least in the West, for a mass readership, and the badge of the bitch-goddess "Success" is awarded to the popular. But popularity and truth are by no means twin brothers. By and large that amorphous creature that we call "the public" wishes to read echoes of its own opinions or prejudices, resents challenges to whatever, at the time, may be the idols of the marketplace, and is impatient of fine distinctions or even of discriminating vocabulary that appears to speak above the average reader's head. Nothing is so instinctively and cruelly conformist as the crowd, and nobody knows this better than the newspaperman or woman, with a feeling of personal responsibility for the word. It is not by chance that some of the most trenchant criticisms of the operations of modem democracy have come from the most distinguished members of my profession, and not without an overtone of bitterness and alarm. I think in particular, and at the moment, of Mr. Walter Lippmann's The Public Phiwsophy. He chooses hard covers between which to say most discriminatingly what he feels needs to be said, quite conscious I am sure that by this means he is excluding a large part even of his own readers. But this is not a lament over the profession that I consciously chose, and were I to repeat my life, would, I think, choose again. Although the glamor of what was once called Grub Street, and especially that extension of it called "foreign correspondence," has been greatly overrated in a series of books following both World Wars, it has its compensations. Journalism shuts nothing out from its scope of interest. It invites its followers not to mind their own business, but to attend to the business of man as he lives in this time and in whatever place on this globe. It fosters a wider scope of attention than that of the expert, and occasionally a wider range of vision. Initially impelled, I think, by curiosity, the 4

practice of jow-nalism is linked with objectivity-with the desire, at least, to see and record things as they are. A close friend was my colleague, the late Raoul de Roussy de Sales, a French correspondent in America. He possessed a unique capacity to distinguish what is from what ought to be. A witty, gay, pessimistic, and very French Frenchman he was, despite that he was educated in England and lived most of his adult life abroad. His patriotism intense as it was, and his prejudices strong as they were, seldom blinded him to reality. At a very low point for the Allies in World War II, I was once wringing my hands in his presence and enquiring rather desperately what one should do. I have not forgotten his answer. ''The function of our profession," he said, "is to raise the right questions, and to describe. Raise the right questions and describe things as they are, as accurately as you can, and you will perform a service to society. Leave advocacy to those willing to assume and able to initiate action." But to raise the right questions! Is that not one of the sternest and most difficult of tasks? What are "the right questions" about public affairs? A question, it seems to me, that needs always to be asked is "Why?" If one asks the question what-what policies are our governments, for instance, pursuing in regard to other governments, those we have reason to believe to be friendly or fear to be inimical, the answer is forthcoming. In fact the makers of policy do not wait for this question. If one enquires "how?" the answer is made by day to day actions. But "why?" is a demand for explanation of a more fundamental nature. It suggests that actions be legitimized by reference to their intrinsic purpose and their probable results. And it is this question to which it is often difficult to obtain a satisfactory answer, or indeed, any answer at all. And what are we to describe? The events of the day, of course, but these are increasingly reported by hosts of official public relations counsels, information officers, and press attaches, who, able men as they usually are, are nevertheless concerned to put events and policies in the most favorable possible light, to foresee and forestall criticism, to avoid the most pertinent questions that strangely enough are often treated as though they were im5

pertinent. They are not dishonest in so doing. They would be dishonest to their employers if they did anything else. This phenomenon, which has appeared in my lifetime as a journalist, is itself worth describing and analysing. The Press Agent, or Public Relations Counsel, first emerged in America as an adjunct of government during World War I, and he has never since left the scene. He again proliferated in huge numbers only during World War II, although President Roosevelt, a master of public relations, had decided earlier in his regime that if one could not control working journalists, the best thing was to take them into camp. Nevertheless, between the two wars, no · press attache was connected with any American Embassy with which I had to deal as a correspondent in Europe. The direct connection of the American press with government policies was therefore far more tenuous than it is today. The correspondent felt no compulsion to support the policies of his government in the field of his activities, nor was he offered the temptation to let others do his homework for him. I say "felt no compulsion." Formal compulsions do not exist today, either. But there are a thousand little pressures on the journalist to hew to the line. It is not, for instance, comme il faut to cultivate the opposition in countries where one's own government is strongly supporting the intrenched foreign government, as it is, for instance, in West Germany. The correspondent is likely to be warned that so-and-so is co-operating with Communists, or that he-or-she is suspected of being a "neoNazi." The reporter who heeds this advice finds himself isolated from minority trends that may, tomorrow, represent the majority. And, of course he honestly asks himself whether, with international relations as strained as they are, it is not his duty to respect and docilely to co-operate with the policies of his ·government. But this greatly limits his contacts and increases his ignorance. Readers of the American press have, I am convinced, a greatly exaggerated idea of the popularity of Chancellor Adenauer in the Federal German Republic, and are quite unaware of the enormous vressures he personally exercises upon such parts of the otherwise conservative and pro-Western pre~i: that raises questions about his policies, especially the policy of 6

rearming West Germany within the NATO military alliance. The result is that the American public and even our government itself are constantly being surprised by the failure of policies that a more vigorous and independent press would have forewarned against, or are moved to righteous indignation by developments that such a press could have foreseen and explained. To give a few examples: It seems to me that had our press been exercising the investigatory activity, the realism, independence, and objectivity that should attend its function it would have recorded long before the event that the E.D.C. had not a chance in the world to pass the French National Assembly. Nor would the editors at home have received with such childishly indignant surprise the outcome of the plebiscite in the Saar this fall; and our government would have been better aware of the very serious consequences likely to flow from the ratification of the Paris Treaties by Bonn, both within Germany and in Soviet policy; and of the enormous repercussions of the Soviet peace drive upon world mass opinion. Emerson said, "To be a man one must be a non-conformist." Certainly conformism is the nadir of journalism, and a conformist press a menace to enlightened opinion and intelligent policy. If the West is constantly trying to catch up and adjust itself to Soviet moves, it is largely because too few people have exercised the logic and imagination to analyse Soviet possibilities in the field of political action, or the candid intelligence to assume that Soviet leaders will make the most of them. If we attempt to describe anything of importance we will gradually, I think, discover that we are recording symptomssymptoms of a society that is sick or well, or flourishing in one part of its body and pining in another. So that the process of describing leads us eventually to an intellectual responsibilitythe responsibility out of many symptoms to make a diagnosis, and to describe not only what is going on but whither it is probably going. The person who concerns himself with public affairs in the world today, at a distance that is no lofty ivory tower but only the position of standing far enough off to get a larger view of

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events with which he is intellectually and spiritually deeply concerned, will find, I think, that all that he sees, hears, observes, falls eventually into a composition; that through all the news that breaks, every hour on the hour, from Karachi to Tunisia, from Berlin to Timbuctoo, over the multiple media of communication, there is a thread weaving it all together into the news-the news that the paragon of civilizations, the pride of millenia, the arbiter of lesser breeds, the sell-crowned prince of human destiny is in retreat. The West is in retreat. It is whistling, no longer to encourage others but to encourage itseH. Other civilizations are rising that know not our ways or our laws, struggling not for a place in the sun but perhaps for the place in the sun. And in the face of what to Western eyes appears an extraordinary phenomenon, a mirage that may, we fondly hope, disappear, a temporary aberration of the normal condition of human affairs, we fumble and hesitate, break open roads and rush into them before we have charted whither they may lead, take in one moment a threatening stance of power, and in the next a pose of timidity, almost servility. My country, in particular, boasts of its power the while it fears it. It builds air bases around the globe and piles hydrogen bombs beside old-fashioned atomic bombs, and then takes the lead in telling the world how horrible, how senseless, how wicked these weapons are. It arms for a war that its leaders declare impossible, and in the name of peace announces policies that war alone could bring to fruition. In Moscow, less than a month ago, at a luncheon in a Middle Eastern Embassy, a young Russian woman in a controversy that until then had been, let us say, coexistential, hurled into my face with sneering passion the terrible words, "America is the strongest power in the world! America has not the guts to use power." I could not answer that. I could only ponder that perhaps we have insufficiently analysed what power is, and where, in this twentieth-century world, power lies. Power can certainly not be measured solely in terms of armed strength, economic resources, production figures, and financial assets. In these the West, though in retreat, is still far in advance 8

of the newer nations. Power, whatever form it may talce, as the young Russian woman I have quoted sneered, is related to the will to use it. If a civilization has lost its will; if it has lost its sense of purpose; if it has come to believe that the happiness and material well-being of its people in any single generation are more important than the survival of the civilization itself; if it fails to observe and correct every symptom of decay in its corporate life, in whatever area of life this may appear; if it becomes contemptuous of the traditions and behaviors that have made it great -or if it canonizes, as traditions, what are, in fact, mere habits and attitudes of mind; if it fails to foresee, to discern, in time, developments in the world that may logically be anticipated, warnings of which have long been noticeable; if it fails to pass on intact to its children the wisdom of the race; and if satisfied with today it loses prescience of the future and aspirations for generations yet unborn-then it will not know how or when to use the material power that it possesses. Two outstanding developments of our time are disturbing Western civilization, one internal and one external. The first is what Ortega Y. Gasset called "The Revolt of the Masses" and the second what Lothrop Stoddard, over a generation ago, called "The Rising Tide of Color." The revolt, that is to say, of the aliens within Western society; those who have not been assimilated into the meanings of its freedoms or the responsibilities whose exercise alone can ensure those freedoms; and the revolt of the alieniied peoples of Asia and the Middle East who are, without exception, in rebellion against an inferior status that a hundred years ago was accepted even by Christian men as an immutable condition inherent in nature itself, and is still so accepted by certain societies of white, Western men. What shall we think of our brothers in South Africa? Let us think a moment about the .first development. By the masses we do not mean the poor, or those who in the sociological jargon of the times are c~lled the "underprivileged." The northern New England farmer, struggling with his rocky soil, is poor. But he is not a mass-man. We mean rather a certain type of human being. He does not think for himself, nor has he any desire to do 9

so. He is without self-reliance, and concerned above everything else with security, which he conceives as wholly assured from without. li he is aware that he lives in a rich and prosperous society he sees no connection between that fact and his own efforts. His reactions are ahnost entirely emotional, self-centred, and lacking in conscious societal impulses. He is very easily led and susceptible to every wind that blows. He composes what Socrates called "the multitude," and was obviously present even in highly civilized Athens, whose "multitude" condemned its greatest philosopher to death. What this mass-man cannot achieve for himself he begrudges others. What he cannot comprehend, he despises. His scorn applies especially to intellectuals. He was enchanted with . the word "Egg Head," although he did not coin it. He is by nature, and by himself, timid. He would not hurt a fly. But inflamed, and in a crowd, he is terrifying. He is the stuff out of which lynching bees and witch hunts are made. He is the elevator of demagogues. Another characteristic of this mass-man is that he cannot bear to be alone and seeks, when he is not directly employed, perpetual entertainment and sensation. Caesar's circuses were for him and so, in today's world, are the penny press, the pulp novels and magazines, the comics, and most of the television programs and movies. Yet, under normal conditions, he is docile-and usable. Modern technological industry has immensely proliferated his numbers by making it possible for him to survive with a minimum of selfdirected effort. For modem industry has achieved its phenomenal production by breaking down the work process into a myriad small operations, each of which is largely automatic. Henry Ford Senior told me some twenty years ago that there was no such thing any more as an unemployable person. "I can employ the feebleminded," he said. Now, I am not suggesting that those who compose these masses are feebleminded. Nor do I describe them with any arrogance. I am suggesting that the organization of modem life tends to discourage the expenditure of effort by the whole personality, with10

out the exercise of which the human person develops neither mental nor moral muscle. The mass-man who takes the world around him for granted and enjoys its fruits as a natural right is a case of arrested development, because development is not a demand of his existence. And no matter how much the productive apparatus to which he contributes may raise his standard of living in purely material terms, he remains proletarian by every other standard. The level of his tastes and ambitions tends to become, furthermore, increasingly the level of all taste and ambition. In an era of universal education, so-called, the public schools adapt themselves to what he wants for himself and his children. He wants utility, because only the immediately and obviously useful-useful in terms of income and the pleasures it can buy-is within his ken. Of other pleasures, even of the simple pleasure of contemplating a job of work well done, and done for its own sake, he hardly partakes. Indeed, he does not derive his pleasure in life from doing, or from being, but from consuming, and his perpetually unassuaged aspiration is to consume more and more of what are called "the good things of life." But in these things, though there is pleasure, there is no joy. So we have the extraordinary phenomenon that leisure and pleasure and comfort and the pursuit of happiness are joyless. And, indeed, the word "joy" is falling out of the vocabulary. This mass-man is frustrated because he is not fully-or even half-alive, even though he does not know it. Occasionally he runs amok and commits senseless crimes-we read of them every day and wonder why. The chief why, I am convinced, of adults and juveniles alike, is boredom-boredom because the sufferer possesses no inner resources of re-creation and enjoyment. Willie Loman in The Death of a Salesman is such a man, whose fate has not even the dignity of tragedy. I am aware that I am saying nothing that has not been said before, although it is highly heretical to those for whom adulation of the common man is the hall mark of belief in democracy. But if the end of democracy is to establish as the standard the least common denominator, it will surely be, indeed, its end. The problem of democracy, as I see it, is quite otherwise. Its 11

problem is to de-mass the masses; to restore the people; to create a working community of fully conscious human beings; to awaken the societal impulses of joyful mutual service; to quicken and refine the sensibilities; and to make demands upon men to which they will respond because they are men, at least to start with. But we will never do it without being fully conscious of its necessity, even of its stern necessity. It requires, it seems to me, a fundamental reconsideration of the purpose of education, beginning with very young children. The education problem is essentially one of upbringing, which begins with inspiration to certain habits of conduct, inculcating sell-respect and respect for others according to clearly established standards, which must always include industry, love of work, and responsiveness to high aesthetic and social values. Because of the impact of mass media of communication upon every home, it will require firm decision by public authorities and private influences to take these media of entertainment out of the hands of purely commercial interests. It is not the advertising on television which disturbs me. ( One can always turn it off.) It is the commercialization of the programs themselves; the interests of advertisers in general to sponsor only programs that they believe will have a mass appeal because they are directed to the least common denominator of sensibility or intelligence. I do not know how often I have heard from producers of such entertainment the excuse "One must always remember that the average American has a mental age of 12 years." If he does, why? Are we to assume a majority population of near-morons? If so, what case can be made for popular sell-government? Or what case for compulsory education to the age of 18? Should we not assume rather that forces in society are contributing to arrest normal growth? Commercial television is now being introduced into Great Britain. It is still an experiment. But its initiator, Sir Robert Frazer, has made up his mind that the advertisers shall have no more to say about the character and contents of programs than newspaper and magazine advertisers have about the contents of 12

though it is not imminent now, is the emergence of a rival in the East with as strong a will to power, as deep a sense of mission, and as certain a sense of the future as her own. But to count on any of these things happening, as an excuse for the inner regeneration of the West, is, I think, profoundly unwise. Great states and great civilizations, as far as I have read history, have never perished or declined from external pressures alone, and all have gone through times of troubles. But none has been saved by overwhelming military force, or by the economic means. For the nation and the civilization, as for the person, character determines destiny. It is the ultimate source of power.

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the heir to Byzantium, the Eastern Church, who would create a world-wide ideological Empire-at that time a new Christendom. Russian writers of the nineteenth century, especially Dostoevsky, held the same conviction, that Russia would produce the new Messiah and regenerate the world. Russians, and among them the most gifted, were convinced of the "Untergang des Abendlandes" long before Spengler wrote that powerful and part-mystical philosophy of history. Friedrich Nietzsche in the middle of the last century asserted that there were but two nations in Europe with a will to powerPrussia and Russia. Henry James in the introduction to the first English translation of Turgenev, spoke of the great land which he, like all sensitive minds, sensed would soon emerge to play some great and undetermined role on the stage of history. Communism was born in the West out of Western, and especially German, idealistic philosophy. But there were profound reasons why it struck its first roots in Russia, as there were profound reasons why its cosmopolitan and European leadership was entirely liquidated in the mid-years of its history to date. Today, it is, above everything else, a formula for power, as Russian as Alexander Nevsky, reactionary, if I may say so, in the grand and perennial manner of a country that has never accepted Western concepts of freedom or the political independence of nations. The contempt in which the West has held Russia since well into the nineteenth century, and in which she is still held in many circles today, has been an enormous error of judgment. The Russian revolution was an explosion that in less than forty years replaced a fumbling court and elite and an original non-Russian intelligentsia with a new ruling caste-in the Russian case toughminded, shrewd, and fully conscious of its goal-and is propelling Russia along a course entirely in keeping with her history as a state, and her instinctive aspirations as a people. There are hazards for Russia ahead on the road. One is the hazard of intellectual and moral collapse at the top which could crumble the state structure. Another-as for all countries-is an unsuccessful war brought on by overreaching herseH. And a third,

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World War I was to stir up the long-slumbering forces in Asia, and that World War II would accelerate and perhaps complete the process. Since the days of Lenin they have consciously allied themselves ·with these forces, have trained in Russia political leaders from every country and every tribe and have sought, and to a great extent succeeded in mastering, directing, or profoundly influencing the development of affairs. That thereby they have been and are, consciously, seeking to replace Western imperiums of power by their own is indubitably true. But it is also true that their methods are novel, and well suited to the epoch, that the imperiwn they seek to create is not a replica of those that have preceded it and which are crumbling, and that to hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa they appear as a liberating force and the promise of the future. This sense of the future and the will to command it is, I think, Russia's strongest asset. A Middle Eastern delegate said not long ago in the United Nations, "Europe represents the past, America the present, and Russia the future." The mere fact that this conviction is so widespread even among leaders who have no sympathy whatever with Communism is a fact of great potency. Russia herseH is far closer to the Asian mind and mentality than the West has ever been. The Eastern Slavs lived for centuries under the yoke of the same conquerors from Central AsiaGenghis Khan and his successors-who overran the Middle East, China, and India, and established the nearest thing to an allAsiatic Empire that has ever existed. This experience left deep marks in the Russian soul. "Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar" is an exaggeration that like many exaggerations has a core of truth. The instinct for autocracy, the innate submissiveness of the masses, the love of splendor as expressed in the public monuments of rulers, indifference to human suffering, even the courtesy extended to those who are invited to a banquet only to be poisoned, is characteristic of Asian civilization and of Russian. So is the innate contempt that the elite of the East feel toward the West. As far back as the reigns of I van III and IV-in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries-Russian Tsars and their entourages began to think and speak of themselves as the "New Rome"-

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those publications. We shall see how it works out, but it will certainly not be a slavish copy of the American way. There are encouraging signs of increasing awareness and reconsideration. In the last five years American education has been seriously debated. Many industries run by enlightened managers have become aware that the human question rather than the production problem is the critical one. How can one employ a whole man instead of a hand? How can men work as a team, creating together a whole thing, instead of being isolated digits along an assembly line? Why do men strike? Some fascinating research has been done on this question, which reveals that the ostensible causes are often not the real ones at all. If we cannot re-personalize man more rapidly than he is being de-personalized, what is the prospect for the evolution of democracy? Will its leadership not fall eventually to those who are most adept in appealing to mass mentality and manipulating the masses? Already a science of such manipulation is well advanced. "The science," it is called, "of engineering public consent." And if that is to be the evolution, why object to the Soviet Union? Or do we think that we can do it better? I think we shall not do it as well, nor under a democracy produce as able or sacrificial an elite for the purpose, as Russia has been doing for a generation. I have just returned from Russia and on that subject I shall have something to say tomorrow evening. In any case, if power, in the future, lies with the manipulation of the masses to serve the purposes of the state and the civilization it exists to further, then the West, if it strives for power in that way, will win it only by the suicide of its own character. If power lies in the re-personalization of the masses, the challenge is one the West must make to itseH and consciously accept. To meet it is still within our means. It is an internal affair. The external challenge to the West also comes from massesfrom the great masses of Asia and the Middle East. If power lies in the capacity to foresee and co-operate with inevitable historical developments, we have been laggard, where the Russians have not. Their leaders foresaw with great clarity that the effect of

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EXPRESSION OF THANKS

Mr. President, Miss Thompson, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is my privilege to attempt to express the thanks of this audience to our distinguished guest and lecturer of the evening. We live in a day when news encircles the world with lightning speed, and crowds in upon us from the four quarters of the globe. No commonplace fact is more astonishing than this, if we stop to think of it. And along with the news comes all that attendant brood of rumor, prejudice, suspicion, confusion, and wishful thinking, which beclouds issues and dulls judgment. Little wonder that the news commentator and interpreter has become a familiar phenomenon of our time. But if many feel themselves called, few indeed are chosen as meriting true honor in this difficult craft. Among these few our lecturer occupies a place of unique distinction. I heard recently a story, attached rightly or wrongly to a Congressman. Meeting an acquaintance of Einstein, he inquired, "Say, if you know Einstein, tell me something. Has he really got anything on the ball or is it just theory?" The confusion of the mystified Congressman is by no means uncommon. Miss Thompson, may I say with all respect, certainly has something on the ball, and I have always felt that in no small part it is because, in addition to remarkable powers of observation and analysis, she has deeply held theories and convictions about human society and government. Many in this audience will have vivid memories of the columns which she wrote during and on the eve of the late World War. In them the issues of democracy, freedom, the significance of the human personality, and the inalienable rights of the individual against the Leviathan and police state were driven home with profound sincerity. At their best, and that was by no means seldom, these statements rose to a level of true prophetic interpretation and moral judgment. Many too will remember her appearance at a great meeting in Maple Leaf Gardens on June 13, 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor. Her words on that occasion, as on many others, were a contribution to victory. We welcome and thank Miss Thompson this evening not least because she is from the United States. For over one hundred and fifty years Canadians have looked across the border with a strange mixture of confidence and apprehension. Out of necessity and propinquity Canadians are the world's most experienced observers of that remark-

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able process of apparently open confusion openly arrived at, by which the one hundred and sixty million most powerful people on earth reach their decisions of high policy. In these post-war years our confidence has at many points been strengthened. The United States has, in unprecedented magnitude, given aid and leadership without which the free world could not have survived. No revolution in the thinking of a people is more striking than that which has taken place in the attitude of the people of the United States toward international affairs in the last twenty years. We hope and believe that it is a permanent revolution based solidly on both self-interest and idealism. It would, however, be idle to affirm that Canadian apprehensions have disappeared, for if we no longer fear invasion as some of our greatgrandfathers did, we have questions even more serious than theirs. Can the people of the United States be counted upon to carry with patience and wisdom the colossal burden of responsibility which history and geography have laid upon them? "Freedom," wrote Tom Paine in 1776, in words that fired the American people, "hath been hunted round the globe." Today freedom, as Miss Thompson has eloquently told us, is indeed hunted around the globe. Will the United States continue to be her bulwark? Will the American people continue to serve her in the humility of great strength, so that the processes of true democracy may be carried forward into the bitter conflict of international rivalries? Or will the truly liberal impulses on which the United States was founded be crushed under the frightful pressures of the atomic age? In the answers to these fundamental questions we are all involved, and not only because they face the United States. They face us too, and it is voices like that of Miss Thompson which go far to alert, challenge, and even reassure us. Tonight she has given us again a clear illustration of her great powers of observation, analysis, and prophetic insight. May I in the name of all of us offer her our sincere and heartfelt appreciation. GEORGE

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w. BROWN

II IN THIS CONVERSATION-which I wish really were a conversation, so that you might be challenging some of the things I say and thereby modify, I have no doubt, my opinions-we spoke yesterday of the challenge to the West from within its own body, and the external challenge coming from the whole colored world, largely under the leadership of the Soviet Union. One cannot completely divorce these two themes. For the existence of the Soviet Union constitutes in itself a spiritual challenge to a civilization-the Western-which is largely empty of a vivid spiritual faith. One cannot, for instance, imagine Marxian Communism making the slightest impact upon the Europe of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, when cathedrals of transcendent loveliness were springing, as it were, like tall flowers from the ground; when princes and princesses harnessed themselves to carts to draw the stones for their erection; when, above all queens, stood Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven; when universities were being constructed from England to Italy and Prague, and though not a wheel had yet crossed the Alps, had faculties in a dozen languages, thousands of students from all parts of Christendom; and butcher, baker, and candlestick maker barred up their shops at least once in a lifetime to pilgrimage on foot, on horseback, or on litter to St. James of Compostella in Spain, and to Jerusalem and Rome. Nor can one imagine that Communism would attract the children of the early Protestant revolution, out of which Bach, with his poverty, his many children, and his God, composed immortal hymns of praise; which intoxicated men with the concept of their direct relation to God; which made religious liberty a thing for which one would willingly die, or tear up roots to brave .the stormiest seas and begin life anew in a wilderness.

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Ours is a pragmatic age, without ecstasy, in which the experiences of the soul are rejected as hysterias; in which nothing is worthy of faith unless it can be proved-which is, in itself, the rejection of Faith. As a concomitant, we look askance at intensity of conviction and feeling, finding them embarrassing, uncomfortable, somehow shy-making. But Communism does not appeal today to those whose inner lives are firmly rooted in devotion to an image of Man in his relation to God and to his fellowmen. And there are happily millions of such in our world. Yet if we are to understand the Soviet Union and the Communist movement at all, we must understand its power to appeal to the sacrificial instincts, the intense religiosity of its world outlook, if you like, its fanaticism, appearing in a world where millions are spiritually dispossessed. If Communism were, as childish minds like Senator McCarthy's like to picture it, an association of unscrupulous international conspirators and gangsters, neither you nor I would be concerned with it at all. Unfortunately, from the viewpoint of its impact upon the world and history, it is something very different. Its fanaticism is a primary source of its strength. We might remind ourselves that the word "fanatic" stems from the Latin word for "temple" and, in its primary meaning, describes the behavior of those possessed, whether of a deity or a demon. Only in the modem derivative sense does it describe the unreasoning enthusiast, or one frenzied by mistaken enthusiasm. At any rate it possesses the power to enthuse, and again, the root word of "enthusiasm" indicates possession by a god. Like all movements that attain power, it attracts persons of various impulses-opportunists shrewdly estimating their chances for advancement; discontents who assuage their vanity by attributing failures inherent in their own characters to "society"; and so forth. But it also attracts people of great purity of purpose who possess some, at least, of the attributes of saints: extreme asceticism; almost limitless capacity for sacrifice; and disciplines that are by no means only outwardly imposed but are enforced by intense 20

inner conviction. All of us who have moved curiously and fearlessly in this world have met such Communists; however profoundly erroneous we have thought their world outlook to be, we could not, in honesty, attack their characters or their personal lives and conduct; and we have also experienced the complete futility of rational argument with them. The evolution of Communism from its hyper-rational base in classical Marxism into such a faith and world-wide missionary movement is certainly fascinating. Marx, like many other German idealists-in the philosophical sense of that word-built an enormous structure of logical argument on the basis of a highly dubious premise, even the logical structure of which has been contradicted by the social developments of the last hundred years. His theory of economic determinism and dialectic materialism is the last thing upon which one would think it possible to build, as it were, a church; but this new God-denying church is not, in fact, built upon such theories. Marx was a qu~er combination of Jewish Talmudist and apocalyptic prophet. His belief that a change in the ownership of the means of production and the ascendancy of the manual workers over the bourgeoisie would usher in the rule of the saints, bring about the salvation of mankind, and transplant us all to a heaven in which there shall be no more tears, nor toil, nor sorrow, in which the lion shall lie down with the lamb and even the state wither away, has no more foundation in dialectic logic than the Book of Daniel or the prophesies of John of Patmos. It is visionary. But it is the vision rather than the dialectic which until now has vitalized this movement. Mr. Edward Crankshaw, the brilliant and knowledgeable Russian expert of the London Observer, had left Russia shortly before my arrival there last month. A man who speaks fluent Russian, and was, during the war, attached to the British military mission in Russia, he devotes his attention almost exclusively to Russian affairs, and has opinions well worth noting. He believes that Communism in Russia is rapidly losing its fanaticism, from which he anticipates a gradual settling down, and an evolution

21

more conformable with the practices of Western societies. I should not like to contradict Mr. Crankshaw, who is rather more likely to be right than I am, but that was not my impression. I had not visited Russia for twenty-seven years, when a stay of several months produced material for a short, reportorial book on the revolution after ten years. The changes are, indeed, notable and amazing. Twenty-seven years ago the revolution was struggling with almost insoluble problems and was courting the West for every kind of engineering and technical aid. The first great break in the revolutionary ranks had also occurred, which mounted, during the succeeding decade, into the purges that swept away ahnost the entire original and western-looking leadership. I was present at the last public appearance of Leon Trotsky in Moscow, at the funeral of Adolph Joffe, who had been one of Russia's most effective ambassadors abroad under Lenin, and who foreseeing the end of his career committed suicide. Trotzky was on his way to exile the next day. Stalin had been in power for only three years and had not yet begun the agricultural policy which was to create a crisis amounting to famine. But the fanaticism was everywhere obvious. One was subjected to the warmest attempts at one's conversion. It was difficult to avoid visits from young and older Communists, gathering in one's hotel room at all hours to instruct the visitor. Inefficiency, withal, was prodigious. Theoretically the visitor was under the care and guidance of what was then called the "Voks" and was headed by Madam Kamenev, who disappeared a few years later with her husband, he to his death, she to one knows not where. But one was passed from the Voks to the Foreign Office and from the Foreign Office back to the Voks, and the confusion in bureaucratic responsibilities was obvious. Obvious also was the fear of war and the preparations for it that one saw even in classrooms for small children, who were instructed in how to mount and place machine guns. The villain, then, was Great Britain, and, in particular, Austen Chamberlain, and in connection with the tenth anniversary military parade past the tomb of Lenin airplanes wheeled over the marchers, their sides painted with the motto "Our answer to Chamberlain." The atmosphere had some22

thing of that of siege, and the enthusiasm that of besieged, who would go down fighting to the last man. Everything also was experimental, each experiment mobilizing its enthusiasts. The theaters were experimenting with constructivist sets and rewriting the classics in revolutionary terms. The schools were still deep in what they called "the Dalton," having imported from America ideas of progressive educationand the classrooms were often in an uproar. New buildings were going up in the style set by Le Corbusier, bleak, much-glassed, modest; and very modern. All that has certainly changed. The visitor to Moscow today sees no outward and visible signs to distinguish Moscow as the seat of revolution. The schools, attended by uniformed school children, are conducted under a discipline that, if it recalls anything, is that of early Prussia. The architecture is gigantically palatial, combining the modem skyscraper with every form of imperial reminiscence-and marked by a proliferation of marble columns that must outnumber all that were erected in ancient Rome. The costliness of the materials used is flamboyant, and suggests a direct connection between the splendors of the Tsars, displayed in the Kremlin Museum, and the prevailing canons of taste in revolutionary Russia-which are alike in that neither, for Western eyes, turns costliness to beauty. Students in the new University, whose faculties are entirely devoted to science, live in rooms that an Oxford student might envy, assemble in a columned hall, to sit on chairs and sofas covered with gold velvet, and their eyes may wander to tall windows draped with gold-colored damask, and between classes they roam through vast marble and columned halls that have no functional purpose whatever. Delegations come daily from all the world and if they merit that rank are housed in an hotel-the Sovietskaya-which, again, has marbled and columned halls and foyers that serve no purpose except display, lighted by enormous crystal chandeliers, and rooms where every wall is of stretched silk damask and all the furniture of the most costly woods. A city of seven millions is being replanned to accommodate, it would seem, at least twenty millions. A city that has at present far 23

less automobile traffic than Stockholm is being laid out in vast squares with six-lane highways so wide that one must sprint to get across them before the lights change. Meanwhile the vast majority of the population live in half-slums-but with the expectation that within another five years apartment houses will go up along the newest, not ·yet completed boulevard to house a million and a half families! The Intourist, which_cares for those who are not official guests of the state, does not recall the bustling confusion of the old Voks. Its clerks and guides, established at desks in a large room in each of the three Intourist hotels, work with swift efficiency. Do you need a car? It will be at your disposal in five minutes. A translator? She will appear at whatever hour you request, and though she will never have set foot out of Russia she will speak your language excellently. Theater tickets? You can count on having them an hour before the performance. And the theaters are superb. There are thirty or forty of them in Moscow, four of them theaters for children, and all staffed by professional actors and performers employed for the season. Again, in not a theater I saw or a billing of a performance, could one hear or see a revolutionary note. There seems to be unlimited money for lavish stage settings, to pay the salaries of actors and dancers who definitely belong in the higher income class. The Bolshoi theater alone employs a permanent company of some 1,200 performers. The overwhelming majority of the plays are Russian and European classics-Pushkin, Gogol, Moliere, Shakespeare, and, in the children's theaters, exquisite productions of delightful fairy tales, replete with little princesses and what not. They are always crowded, and everybody pays-there are no more free tickets. Nor do the rulers of present Russia see the slightest danger in presenting the favorite opera of Moscovites, Eugene Onegin, which portrays the old pre-revolution manorial life in a highly sentimental and sympathetic way. But the fanaticism is still there. It does not press itself upon you. It does not try to convert you. It extends itself now, back, beyond the revolution to all the glories of Russian history. It reconciles itself with the great Tsars. It looks upon the revolution, not as drastic change and overthrow but as the culmination of the 24

whole of Russian and world history, and endows the Russian elite with a sense of superiority that is stifling. Russia is a country governed by an elite. That elite are the members of the Communist Party. In a nation whose population is estimated at 210 millions, it numbers only six millions, including, I believe, the Communist Youth. It is misleading to call this organization a party at all. It is a consciously selected body of people into whose hands are entrusted the carrying out of the directives of party and of the state, the maintenance of morale within the body itself, and in the public, and the propagation of the Faith. Its numbers constantly change, for there is no such thing as a life membership within it. It requires a long novitiate to become accepted, and corruption, nepotism, misconduct of any kind, can cause one's dismissal from its ranks. These vices exist-within the party and within the government apparatus that, of course, extends to the administration of all productive property, all merchandizing operations, all transport, all communications, and all cultural activities. One knows the vices exist because the Soviet press, devoted to national guidance, continually reveals them, attacking very specifically by name the persons and instruments they command. But how widespread, and how deep these vices are remains, for foreigners, a matter of speculation. What is certain, however, is that when punishment falls, it is ruthless, while the rewards for achievement are correspondingly great. This elite is constructed according to a strict hierarchy of castes. I say CQ,Ste rather than class, because Russia is not built on a class structure, deriving from inherited or transmissible titles of wealth or position. The base is democratic in the sense that anyone possessing what are considered to be the essential Soviet and Communist virtues can rise from the ranks. The present Secretary General of the party, Mr. Krushchev, began his career, for instance, as a coal miner. A very important editor on the staff of Izvestia, the principal press organ of the government, never attended school until he was seventeen years old. Even at the bottom of the pyramid the base is not wide. Recruiting for it begins in the public schools by a strict process of weeding out the reliable and competent from the unreliable and

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indolent. At this widest base level a party member may occupy a humble position in a factory or on a collective farm, but whatever his position he has a party taskto perform. At the top of the pyramid are the high functionaries of state and party, who in general are the same men. Beneath them are the commanders and top brass of the Red Army, the administrators of great industries, and cultural institutions, who, of course, command in turn the lower managerial skills, including teaching, and the administration of the arts. Throughout this whole structure compensation is strictly graded according to rank, and the law of "democratic centralism," orwhat in more familiar terms would be called absolute obedience, operates as strictly as in an army. And, as I have said, training for a role in this system begins in the public schools. Education in Russia has, during the past few years, become universal and compulsory through ten grades, although it has not been fully extended beyond seven in the more remote communities. The child goes to school at the age of seven. He or she may have previously had kindergarten experience, and many do, because every woman over seventeen-except students-and under fifty-five, like every man over seventeen and under sixty, is at work in Russia for a minimum six-day week of forty-eight hours. The first law of the school concerns conduct. Gone are the days when children sassed back their teachers. The absolute authority of the teacher is established from the outset. Control over the teachers lies with the school director and with educational councils within the party, not with the parents. On the contrary there is control over the parents of ill-behaved children. As obedience is the first law, industry is the second. The Soviet school child must work at his lessons, and the glorification of work begins in his infancy. He must be absolutely on time with his homework-which begins, incidentally, with the very first grade, and increases in assignments year by year. The idea of learning through play is rigorously rejected. 26

The curriculum is the stiffest of which I have any knowledge, including that of the French Lycee. At the end of ten years of schooling the Soviet youth is supposed to have mastered his own language, to have a working knowledge of one other, to be able to give a coherent account of Russian and world history, to know elementary and secondary algebra, plain and solid geometry and trigonometry, to be familiar with the classics of Russian literature and to a lesser degree with those of the foreign language he is studying, to have a working knowledge of mechanical drawing, and to be able to handle and construct or reconstruct simple machines. He will also have had four years of biology~botany and zoology-six of geography, and four of chemistry and physics. At the end of each year he will be subjected to extensive examinations, written and oral. Extra-curricular activities such as visits to factories and collective farms are counted as recreation. Far and away the most fascinating days I spent in Russia were in a public school where I was able to follow such of the instruction as was given in English, this including not only English classes as such but geography and anatomy. The discipline in these schools is remarkable, and the behavior of Soviet school children outside school-as one sees them in subways, in department stores, or in children's theaters-the best, in the purely conventional sense of the word, that I have observed anywhere. The marble and gold subways did not impress me; they seemed to me, like most of the public building in Moscow, evidence of senseless waste. But what did impress me, a citizen of New York, was that I never saw a child or youth sitting down when an adult was standing. Discipline is enforced by a most subtle system of rewards, punishments, and psychological conditioning by social pressures, largely from the children themselves, or the natural leaders among them. But let us have no doubts. This is not an ·education for every child, or even the average child. I am convinced that it is a deliberate means of sorting out, from the beginning, those destined to enter the elite, and those who are condemned to return to the masses-to do the heavy, unremunerative, or incon'1:1

sequential work of society. Advancement is for the strong, not the weak, for those who are able to obey orders and give them, and to exercise the most rigorous sell-control. For such youths there is, within the Soviet structure, great opportunity. They will go on to Soviet universities or technical schools, making their way into one or another of the upper castes. Relatively few children, according to foreigners who have investigated the matter, finish the ten grades. They are assigned to other schools for so-called backward children, or if misconduct is involved are simply expelled or sent to reform schools. Undoubtedly many of these join the ranks of the juvenile delinquents whose existence is frankly admitted, although I found it absolutely impossible to get any figures about the extent of this evil. Now, you may ask me, what has this description to do with the revolutions in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, and the role of the Soviet Union in intensifying and directing them. I think it has a great deal to do with them. Russia has been, throughout history, a backward nation, and in everything that represents grace, beauty, amenity, efficiency, and human happiness she is backward today. This civilization, since the revolution, has not produced a single outstanding work of creative or original art. Its architecture achieves only costly giganticism. Its economy is perpetually blocked by bottlenecks. The waste of man power-and woman power-is prodigious. And over everything hangs an indefinable atmosphere of sell-righteous and puritanical uplift, which makes even a decorous person like mysell want to throw bricks. But how does it look to an Asiatic? Is not its very backwardness and the fact that it has come late into history an asset? Russia says to the backward peoples of the earth: "What we have done, in less than forty years, you can also do. "Less than forty years ago this country disastrously lost a war. Afterward it was invaded by British, American, and Japanese troops; it fought German freebooters and Czech legionnaires. Our people were 87 per cent peasants and to about the same extent illiterate. Every great state in the world wished our doom. Among the white Western races, to which the overwhelming 28

majority of our people belong, we were the most despised. The very word Slav was translated in the minds of other peoples into slave, and we stood at the bottom among the industrial nations. "In the past thirty-seven years of our modern existence we have won a war against the same enemy who defeated us in 1917, and have recovered and extended all the territory that was won under our greatest Tsars. Our people are 97 per cent literate. The world that forty years ago despised us today fears us. And we are the second industrial nation of the world, and will become the first in another generation. "The white world of the West despises you as natives, no matter what they say. Inbred in their conscious or unconscious minds is an ineradicable sense of their superiority. But in our world outlook we recognize no color lines or bans. We are the heartland of the globe, and within our boundaries and yours lie the greatest unused resources on the planet. The future belongs to us, and to you with us." Is it so easy to answer that? The cost in human life and human suffering of this unquestionable achievement has been horrendous. Untold millions have perished. But if this has counted for little in Russia, will it count for more in the teeming nations of Asia and Africa? Has not human life in Asia always been cheaper than dirt? Have not children been exposed to die because their parents could not feed them? Has not famine perpetually stalked their lands? Have not controllable Hoods repeatedly inundated their fields, swept away their homes, and condemned untold masses to perish? Can you preach capitalism in lands without capital whose leaders are no longer willing to mortgage themselves to foreign interests? Can you introduce democracy into countries where not two in a hundred can read or write? Does despotism, if it appears under a new name, with new personalities, and new promises, deeply affront peoples who have never experienced anything else? Can the long somnolent nations of Asia be transformed, except under the leadership of a new elite who will certainly not abjure ruthlessness? In the luxury hotel where I stayed, I saw crowds of Chinese, 29

Hindus, South East Asians, Arabs, Persians, coming and going every day. That what they saw made an enormous impression upon them I have no doubt at all. Nor do I doubt that they saw its transferability. In the evolution of the Russian revolution also, a view has developed which is alluring. Whether the new Russian leaders believe it or not-and whether they practise it or not-they are saying that socialism cannot be built on an identical pattern in slavish reproduction of the Russian; that each culture must make its own unique contribution; that the Communist world must be a solid and intimate association of equals. Nothing one sees in Moscow encourages the belief that Russia expects to yield the seat of the new Rome to Peiping or any other capital. But its leaders present the Soviet Union as prima inter pares and do much to dramatize it, through great international festivals, welcoming plays, athletes, operas, musicians from Communist states, presenting them before packed and receptive Russian audiences, and depicting them in full color in glossy magazines printed in many languages. The national revolutions of the East are animated to an enormous extent by what the French call ressentiment, and which feeds the longing for equality far more than the longing for freedom. And to this three hundred years of Western colonialism have greatly contributed. For three centuries Western man has appeared in the East as master, and he has enforced his mastery. He has taken to the East great gifts, and initiated in the East great reforms. He has brought order and systems of law, introduced sanitation and promoted public health. He has trained leadersby an immense irony the very leaders who now want to throw him out. Ho Chi Minh, as an example, did not become a Communist in Indochina but in Paris, where he lived for years. Western man has also taught the East the arts of modern war and mobilized vast armies of Asiatics to fight his own wars-wars originally initiated by white men against each other. He has taken to the East modem industries. He has built beautiful new cities. But he has utterly failed to assuage the feeling of inferiority, out of which servility contends with burning hatred. 30

We may argue with truth that since the American Revolution, Russian expansion at the cost of the territory of other nations, into the Baltic, into East Europe, into Turkey in Europe and Turkey in Asia, into the domains of ancient Persia, into Mongolia, on every border and periphery has been rivalled by no other empire; But the fact nevertheless remains that within most of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, no contemporary person has ever seen a Russian, or known him as ruler. Neither Russia nor Communism created the Asian revolution. It is an eruption of the most fundamental kind. But Russia, alone, as a power, with her larger strength in the West, foresaw it and consciously and deliberately allied herself with it, while it was yet incipient. I do not see any halt in the near future to changes and developments in Asia at the cost of the power and prestige of the West. But will that, necessarily, be our doom? May it not instead bring with it a Western regeneration? Has the attempt to rule what Kipling called the lesser breeds been, on the total count, more gain or loss? A technological revolution is under way more radical than the emergence of the age of steam. It promises new sources of fuel, transmutations of materials, revolutions in metallurgy-all things than can release the West, and all other peoples, from the driving necessity to loot the world for what they need. If Communism, as a secular religion, frightens us, is it not because our own faith is too weak? If it forces us to look inward again, to reflect on what we live by and to rededicate ourselves, is that a bad thing? If it reminds us of the sin of pride and the grace of humility, will that be a loss? If it leads us to look upon Christian love, not as a nice insipid humanitarian thing, but as the source of the greatest human power, direct from God, will that be a bad thing? Should it be harder to make ourselves loved in the world than it is for the Russians, if with all our hearts and minds we begin to draw upon that source, and try to live by it? I have tried in these two talks to raise some questions. I have tried to describe. I have not tried to say what we should do. I 31

think, perhaps, we should not think so much about doing-and often doing in haste what we must repent in leisure. Being and doing are intimates, but being, or at least so I think, despite the behaviorists, is primary. We act as we are. What then should we be? That each will answer for himseH. But for myseH and to myseH I say: Though stripped of every armor, be a warrior-a warrior of the spirit, for what the spirit knows. All life is struggle and if for the West, the struggle for mere physical existence is largely at an end, does that not demand that we lift the struggle to higher planes? Be a lover. Is not this millenial West something to love and make more lovely? Are we not heirs to a breathtaking endowment, of thought and spirit, wisdom and beauty, grace and joy? And have we not elevated as the incorporation of God, the Man who was all love? And have we not been and are we not still a singing civilization? Does not one hear that song? In Manhattan and Iowa and Oregon; in Nova Scotia and Toronto and Vancouver; in Paris and London; in Florence and Rome; in Stockholm and Copenhagen? Be a song.

32

EXPRESSION OF THANKS

Mr. President, Miss Thompson, Ladies and Gentlemen: For all of us Dorothy Thompson was no stranger before her appearance in this hall. For most of us in middle age she was well known from at least the mid-thirties, when, as Professor Brown reminded us last night,- she was writing, either directly from Europe, or from New York about Europe, those penetrating and courageous commentaries on the real meaning of Hitlerism, Fascism, and other very ugly things. She was doing so at a time when some people in exalted positions thought that they knew much better. We, of course, remember her especially in the clouded years from 1939 to 1941, when she was one of the boldest champions on the continent of the cause to which Canadians were attached. Our memories of her insights in the past have now been refreshed and quickened by the two brilliant lectures to which we have listened. She has in person fulfilled our highest expectations. We have admired, not merely her thought, but the grace of her delivery and the felicity of her language. It is easy to see why Dorothy Thompson has been such a challenging interpreter of the contemporary scene. It is not merely because she is an acute observer; it is not merely because she is-as she once described herseH-a "peripatetic brain picker" who discerns the course of history by picking the brains of those who shape it. Valuable as these accomplishments may be, more important is the fact that, for her, writing is not the mere exercise of a ready pen. She is a humanist who passionately says and writes what she thinks about human beings, whether it is popular or not. The ground of her comments is a belief in those simple values that have created the best part of our civilization in the West, individual dignity and individual liberty in thought and expression, combined with an abhorrence of what is cruel and intolerant. Her stock of indignation is inexhaustible when she sees individuals callously persecuted by holders of power. For all this we are in her debt. She makes us realize how demanding is our liberal democracy. A discerning Frenchman once remarked that "institutions are destroyed by their triumphs." Civilizations are similarly destroyed by their victories. Today the real peril of the West has been its successes in the past, successes within its own community, and successes in contact with other communities in the world. Within itself it has made

remarkable progress in theoretical and applied science, in the arts and modes of production, and in conquests over nature, all of which brought to the masses comforts and amenities of life unparalleled in history. Also they brought an assertion of influence and power over other peoples in the world. These victories in the sphere of material things have bred a dangerous pride and complacency. The ascendancy of the West, as Miss Thompson has so well illustrated, is now under severe attack. Since Western states cannot assert their former power in the rest of the world, they seem to be at a disadvantage. They feel embarrassed and stumble in attempting to lead communities that they once appeared to dominate. It is imperative that they achieve a partnership with the Asiatic peoples and the colored races, but this requires, on their part, a ruthless self-examination, and a transforming of attitudes to square with new facts. In recent years such a transfoimation in attitude has begun at least within the British Commonwealth, where Asiatic and Western dominions meet as equals to discuss common problems and to co-operate in common projects. Dorothy Thompson's analysis of the crisis of the West goes to the heart of the matter. She has done what she set out to do-asked the important questions and offered salutary warnings. To her, therefore, we express our abundant gratitude and thanks for her courageous writings and opinions in the past, and for her cool, perceptive analysis in the present Long may she continue to remind us of our dangers and our possibilities. Af.EXANDER BRADY

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