WHAT WAR HAS DONE TO BRITAIN.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 June 1917, Page 9

WHAT WAR HAS DONE TO BRITAIN.

A SHREWD AMERICAN'S VIEWS. A few months ago the Metropolitan Magazine of New York sent Mr. William Hard, a foremost journalistic authority in the United States on business, political, and social organisation, to London to find an answer to tltc question! What is going to happen after tlm war? The first of Mr. Hard's articles is published in the April number of the Metropolitan, and tlio subject or text appears to have been suggested by 'Lord Northcliffe at an interview he gave the author. "Been to the front l ?" asked Lord NorthclilTe. "Not yet," said Mr; 'Hard.' "I'm trying to find out what's happening in England itself." '•'Excellent," said Lord NorthcliD'e. "Look at it; this way: just put down the changes that are happening in the English people. No matter what the details of peace may be, those changes in •Britain are going to last—changes in 'our institutions and even changes in our character. There are lots of them. Get them together." s And that; is what) Mr. Hard has done: lie says at the outset that the war lias made the English gentler an"3 kinder. "It has made, them, in a good sense of the wo,rd, softer. I am convinced that one reason why the English have xjot been brutalised iB that tliey have riot been militarised. To have militarism it is necessary that the military shall he top dog. But the military 'are no lUtarer being top dog in England to-dav than they were in August, 1914." To illustrate this he describes the tribunals which administer the Compulsory Service Acts. The tribunals he considers the most English institutions he has ever seen in England. They are ridiculous from the standpoint) of militarism. They are not appointed by the Army, they are not appointed even by the nation. Labor is given adequate representation ; so is every other important local interest. They summon the prospective soldier before, them. They summon the Army Representative, who has no vote, 'but is there simply to argue for the Army as a barrister in court. The decision is made by an assemblage of local civilian interests. Yet, as ho points out, although the English "are actually administering national conscription on a sort of local option bass.." the Army does somehow, get the men. INDUSTRIAL RE-BIRTH. Mr. Hard has a good dcalTo say about the Declaration of London. "It wa» the climax," he says, "to the trustful period in English international history. The tentative signing of it by England, the final rejecting of it by England, and the ■present loathing of it by England, will ■explain much in the character of the 'English people. . . If ever there was a pro-German document it was not Mr. Wilson's Peace Note —it was the Declaration of London." But the trustfulness which was dominant in England in 1909 has departed. IThe present indications are that never again in our lifetime will any representatives of England put their names to any document which would place new impediments in the way of "tho old, thoroughly humane, but genuinely effective, unabated use of English sea*powcr." The war has given England's industries a new speed—a new enthusiasm for organisation, investigation, and education, '''really almost a new life," says Mr. Hard. "If ever there was a case of the case of a phoenix rising from its ashes it is the ease of this England the mother of modem industry, very old and very tired, rising from the pyre of war and again renewing its youth. "I have seen 1 a 'battleship of first-class size and of. more than first-class enginepower stealing to the Grand Fleet ready for action' on the twentieth day of the twenty-first montli from the day on which the drawings for her were received by the shipyard." •The war has produced a system in England which Mr. Hard calls the "scientific management' idea" unknown two years ago. The industrial future of England is. he considers, an assured success. It had 110 chance in 1914. Now it lias been ''ereaied off-hand," almost as a side issue, while the air is still full of shells, by an England really energised.

Air. Hard Relieves tliat "the war lias put British labor in a position in which it may take a longer and quicker stride ■toward industrial democracy than has ever before been taken anywhere." It began when, as he points out, "tlie trade unions of Great! Britain stepped up to the altar of the war and placed on it all their hard-won rules and rights and privileges, all their "restrictions' on 'output' and on ■'employment.' . . In thousands of factories all over Great Britain there was a revolution in methods of production." AIODEL OF A WOULD-STATS. But the new revolution is in the hands of Labor, for Labor lias obtained a pledge from Parliament in the .Munitions Act which lanilot be. "misunderstood or disregarded. The words of the Treasury agreement made between the Prime Minister and the Labor representatives in March Wls are incorporated in tin? Act, and they run as follows: "Any departure during the war from faie practices ruling in our workshops, shipyards, and other industries prior to the war shall be only for the period of the war."

"In other 1 \vor3s," as Mr. Hard explains, "everything must be put hack just as it was before, back into the old slough of slackness, as far as Labor is concerned, if Labor says so."

In the meantime Labor is silent and makes no proposals, and so, despite the fact that England to compete must be efficient, we are faced with tlio possibility that after the war has ended Capital may be bound by the Government's pledge and required to hand over to" Labor its pound of flesh. But Mr. Hard pictures an ideal compromise. Ho conceives that Labor might say in effect-. well. We will modify, we will abandon old habits. We will accept new arrangements for increased output. We will put our backs into our jobs. It will be a case of Britons all. But you will have to take us into a genuine joint-control of wages, hours, and other conditions. Trade unionists will have to sit on boards of directors.

Mr. Hard's last Change, as ho puts it, "reaches out to both' sides of the Initiator and into both hemispheres to give the whole world intimately a new spectacle and a new example. The. war has presented the British Empire with the [Opportunity of making the world's first great experiment in international government."

The over-seas soldiers of the Empire made a deep impression on him. He sees in them different peoples, "not hostile, much friendlier than really foreign nations could ever be to one an-

utiicr—and yet essentially and pcrmauI'litlv different." lie ' differentiates between the "democratic" Australian, the "conservative'' and ✓'capitalistic" Canadians, "more like the Americans," Undemocratic lint more "disciplined' New Zealnrulcrs, tlio South .Africans who use the Dutch language in London and in llieir official Stale documents—a "doii-ble-htnguaged, double-blooded, doublecharactered nation," as he calk them. The problem, according to Air. Hard, is that each of the five nations wishes to be independent. Nevertheless each wants (in Imperial foreign policy for war and peace, and that imperial foreign policy cannot be left, to Britain alone. Therefore, to prevent secessions and a, repetition of the Colonial War of 1 SI2 there must be a new union, an Imperial Parliament, an International Government. "In other words," he writes, "'the thing in View might be called a sketch or a model for a final 'World-State.'" And be sees in this last change in British life the, profoundest world-change wrought Iv the war.