GREAT BRITAIN: A Great Beech Tree

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GREAT BRITAIN

"A Great Beech Tree"

Sir Oswald Mosley's black-shirted British Fascists were still a very small legion last week and the neo-Communist hunger march to London had fizzled pitifully. But with Austria sworn to a corporative state, with democracy on trial for its life in France and Spain, with its future clouded even in Britain, Stanley Baldwin stepped to a microphone in London and made the sort of speech that five years ago would not have been news but is today. "Our freedom did not drop down like manna from heaven," cried the Conservative leader. "It has been fought for from the beginning, and the blood of men has been shed to obtain it. ... This freedom is mirrored for us and crystallized in Parliament. . . . "Democracy is the most difficult form of government because it requires the participation of all the people in the country. . . . The wheels may be creaking, but are you sure the wheels of the coach of state are not creaking in Moscow, Berlin and Vienna? Are you quite cer tain they are not creaking even in the United States? "Dictatorship is like a great beech tree — nice to look at, but nothing grows underneath it. The whole tendency is to squeeze out the competent and independent man and to create a hierarchy of those used to obeying, and when the original dictator goes, chaos is the result. Democracy, it is quite true, has been a failure in many countries but democracy was grafted in those countries on the stem of absolutism, and the graft does not do well. "If the people of this country in great numbers become adherents of either Communism or Fascism there can be only one end to it and that end is civil war."

Throughout Britain still another public defense of democracy appeared last week in a manifesto signed by about 100 good Britons with good names. Admitting that democracy is on trial, they demanded "not a passive defense but an active campaign in its advocacy.'' At the end was their four-plank platform:

1) Belief in the supreme importance of liberty.

2) The determination to work through democracy as the first safeguard of liberty.

3) Immediate reorganization of both foreign and domestic affairs to secure peace and justice.

4) A conception of leadership through democracy that will present social schemes not as commands of a dictatorship, but matters to be judged on their merits alone.