COMMUNAL LIVING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 16 September 1942, Page 4

COMMUNAL LIVING

IN WAR-TIME BRITAIN ACCEPTED AS A MEANS. REJECTED AS AN END. (By Barbara Ellis Browne in the “Christian Science Monitor.”) Millions of people in Britain today are living fully communalised lives. In camps, in training schools, in workers’ hostels, they find their rooms to be identical little cubicles, the grooves of their lives cast entirely (except for leaves) in the functional camouflaged buildings, which, grouped together, often in lovely countryside, form their whole universe until after the war. Every hour of their time is scheduled and regular. Their meals are cooked and served to them, their rooms are often—in the case of hostels at least’—swept and their beds made; entertainment, theatrical and cinema, is provided in the assembly halls. From them all, responsibility for decisions is lifted, for the present. They are on absolutely equal footing. They have but to go merrily on, little cogs that they are, and all will be well with the whole vast national machine that is labouring for victory. And after Victory, what? That is what many people are wondering. This experiment, on an immense scale, in communal living has been thrust upon the people. They have not only accepted it, they have embraced it, not for its own sake, but for victory. From all that one can gather, the individual British men and women remain strongly individualistic and are fully conscious of putting up with an interim of communisation in order that they may be free of it after victory. That is what they are fighting for. That is what they are sublimating their lives for through these years of war, when all thought of leading a normal life has to be put aside. . , n I have talked to them, on airfields, in camps, in offices, in town halls, wardens’ posts, in blitzed areas, in seaports, in military hospitals, in shops, in their own homes, in schools and in places to which they’ve been evacuated and I have found in them a willingness to bear communisation as a means but a clear and definite rejection of it as an end. They still want their own hearth and home and their own self-chosen way of life. The people of Britain on the whole —there are, of course, exceptions—give the impression of understanding democratic government to be an evolutionary one and they have preferred it that way ever since the famous Magna Charta year of 1215 and through all the years they have been developing free institutions and representative government. Through the centuries Britain has evolved “a system which reconciled three things that other nations have often found incompatibleexecutive efficiency, popular control, and personal freedom” (G. M. Trevelyan in “History of England”). Many millions of people in Britain are now experiencing for themselves the fact that complete socialisation or communisation while retaining the first two must inevitably forfeit the allimportant third—personal freedom. But what if, in the peace, a tight economic, nation-wide scheme is found as necessary to keep the country, afloat as it is in war? What then? Will the people submit to Hot only robot work but robot lives? Naturally there are extremists who urge them to it, confusing, not altogether innocently, equality of opportunity with communisation, willing indeed, to topple their world over the edge of democracy, over the edge of personal freedom. Democracy and complete communisation or socialisation are antagonists on this third point of personal freedom much as they may work together for “executive efficiency and popular control.” Democracy is gearing itself to totalitarian tempo to wage war in this trial for its life. That should give us hope that it will also be able to ‘•ffive the economic problem which will carry over into the peace. The tendency to plunge into the current, “the revolution.” if yielded to, would only carry us over the falls back to slavery —a new kind, it is true, but old as Nineveh. But if we understand democracy thorough- , iy enough, and if both electorate and leaders apply this understanding intelligently enough, we will be able to canalise the current and turn it. into a well-planned system of irrigation by which our world may become as a watered garden. In Britain the millions of people who are voluntarily . submitting to communised lives are finding in that experience that the third point-personal liberty—is vital, . and is the supreme ingredient for which they are fighting.