IS A REVOLUTION POSSIBLE IN ENGLAND OR FRANCE?

Taihape Daily Times, 2 May 1919, Page 3

IS A REVOLUTION POSSIBLE IN ENGLAND OR FRANCE?

FOR HOW MUCH NATIONAL CHAR ACTER CO LINTS.

A revolutionary spirit is in flu* very air of Europe, and no one knows exactly when, or where, some new revolution may break out. Are Great Britain and France immune? “If anybody,” says Mr Hilaire Belloc, in “Land and Water,” “thinks that the French peasant or the English workmen has in him anything in the nature anarchy, that would produce anarchy, would catch the disease of! anarchy from the flabbier minds of the East, his judgment is bad. There is nothing else to be said. It is a question of knowing men. Of revolution in the sense of anarchy, a. revolution in the sense of the dissociation of society and the destruction of credit. France and England are as incapable as is a sober man of a drunken indignity.

WHY DID GERMANY BREAK

DOWN?

“Let us remember that the French have suffered in this war things that the Germans have not even begun to suffer, and have stood firm. The Italians have suffered things which would seem incredible to the Germans, and have stood firm. And the British in face not only of terrible losses nor of sudden military catastrophes, but also —perhaps a worse trial—of unexpected and novel strains which their history gave them no example have stood firm. The moment the same strains came upon the ignorant German Empire it dissolved. You axe dealing with temperaments in the case of the South and the West from what you are dealing within the case of the mixed peoples of the centre of Europe. A man that thinks otherwise does no( know Europe any more than a foreign tourist knows the Eng-

lish farmer or the English squire. “And there is to b e added this still more cogent argument. It is the vanquished. Even the French discipline showed a patch of great danger in the Commune. Why? Because French workeople had been defeated. Take Russia. It has dissolved. But why? Because it has been defeated. New is the new-fangled Prussian Stale dissolving? But why? Because it has been defeated. Those who arc going forward and recognising their own are not in a mool for folly, but for glory.' ’