May 2
In taking a broad view of policy it is always dangerous to insist stringently on the significance of particular episodes. So the comment which asks London to see, in the deplorable tragedy. at Hongkew last Friday, a direct pointer to the essential difficulties of the Shanghai situation is not impressive. The critics appear to overlook the fact that! assassination is not, unhappily, unknown in Japan, any more than in Bengal. The link which the "Morning Post" seeks to es: tablish between the murder of Mr, Douglas and the dastardly.
outrage here is found, in so far 8 it recognises the existence of terrorists who take no account of policy anywhere, As a means of determining whether the policy of Japan or Great Britain in Korea or India respectively is justified such a link is useless.
Japan has her own problem in Korea, She has handled it with courage and according to, her conception of the needs of her national ¢ Japanese oF Korean: no reason to believe, on the basis of the facts available, that the misguided Korean who wrought such dire evil on Friday, was any more concerned with the rights or wrongs of Japanese policy than others of the terrorist school. The panicky argument which professes to find in the incident reason for criticising Geneva is as much to be condemned as the suggestion that revolutionary chaos in China can be made the excuse for unlimited exercise of the right of defending national interests. In this respect the panic-stricken critics might well observe the admirable restraint and. dignity displayed by the Japanese authorities in the face of a most distressingly outrage ous crime. No colour has been given by any responsible Japanese to the view that it was more than what it apparently was—the episodic misdeed of a distort-mind, It is pertinent, to consider in this connection the very import ant speech which Sir Samuel Hoare delivered on Friday in the House of Commons on the Indian It had the unexpectratifying result of "mel lowing" Mr. Winston Churchill's recent antagonism to a policy of which he was at one time a distinguished partisan. In other words Sir Samuel made it clear once again that the belief that there has been a change in Great Britain's policy in India is unfounded. Tt has suited the "Morning Post," taking to its bosom uncomfortably the person of Mr. Churchill, to pretend that between Lord Willingdon and Lord Irwin there is a great gulf fixed. Not oven the clear denial by the two principals themselves has been enough to shatter this journalistic complacency. Nor is it to be supposed that Mr, Churchill's, evident _reconversion to his broader visioned. phase will alter the newspaper's faculty for believing that modern problems in the East can be solved by the application of the Victorian doctrines so well-expounded in their most poetical form by Mr. Rudyard Kipling's "Department al Ditties" and the rest. It is regrettable that this myopia has firmly entrenched itself within that section of he Conservative Party which sits on the back benches, reads the "Morning Post" and, with it, detects in the London School of Economics the headquarters of cells of communist propaganda. 'These worthy gentlemen secure a little Jimelight at the moment but they' get cold comfort from the Front Benches wherefrom policy is expounded by men like Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare. would be well, however, if foreign opinion in'China would be chary in shaping its course by these accidental outbursts. Far more salutary would it be to note that, in India for example, Lord Willingdon's earnest efforts to consolidate the position of. moderate Indian politicians have been gravely prejudiced' by repeated assertions in England elsewhere that there has been a "change of policy," in spite of the Prime Minister's set pronouncement and affirmation, endorsed by the House of Commons, The fundamental weak-Mess of moderate politicians is everywhere recognised, whether in China, in India or Batagonia. It is not fair to them, however, leven for the sake of justifying patently obsolete doctrine, to expose them to the ridicule of the reckless terrorists who, while ldetesting liberalism or 7 it be called, delight in seizing hold of statements which, on thi face of them, purport fo belie {the confidence reposed by the moderates in the good faith of Great Britain, That is why Samuel Hoare has once again returned to the charge with an unequivocal affirmation of. the Policy arising out of the Round Table Conference and its present consequential deliberations in india, It is easy for the farmehair critic in a Fleet Street office to write at large about anarchy in Bengal, in the Punjab, in Bombay." It is not so easy for him to bring to the mind of his readers the ordered life of 350, }000,000 people to whom, spread lover plains from the Himlayas to Cape Comorin, the activities of the terrorists, the acrobatics of the Congress' and the political squabbles of Westminster are of little moment beside the plain facts of their moral and material progress. It is not possible to be quite so clear in China, Yet, even here, anarchy is a" term which has its limitations. How much of it is but the expression lof a tentative scratching of an infinitesimal portion of the soil on which the masses of a mighty population find means, scanty and precarious though they be, to live their lives and work out their own salvation in their own way? The plain truth is that policy which encourages solutions to proceed steadily out of the womb of evolution is the best adapted to such conditions. The anarchical revolutionists to such a policy are inveterately hostile; so, in no less degree, are those who would force the pace by the application of measures which, ostensibly, afford short Jeuts to "law and order" but, in reality, are selfishly limited devices for postponing the broad-based advance of true progress.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.