Tears But No Blood

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 5

Tears But No Blood

EMOCRACY enables us to change our rulers without cutting off their heads; and it does this periodically. Therefore it provides surprises occasionally, but few sensations. When it does provide a sensation, a change so unexpected and dramatic that the most cautious are caught off guard, we are worried until we find a facesaving formula. Then we settle down again-and the settling down of the United Kingdom has been almost as sensational as the upheaval. No one living can remember anything so unexpected as Labour’s annihilation of all the other parties-even in New Zealand, where half of us are still living in the glow and half in the shadow of 1935. But this article is being written less than a week after the event (August 1), and the London newspapers have passed already to other topics. There is one brief cable message to-day about Mr. Churchill’s future home, |

a briefer message (twenty-four hours old) announcing his refusal of the Garter, and one of 400 words suggesting that when Japan has been conquered there may be changes in Britain’s foreign policy --those three references and no other of any kind to the fact that Britain has just completed a political revolution, Nor is the explanation any kind of conspiracy of silence. Tears there no doubt are, and a feeling in certain places that the less they indulge it the sooner they will forget their sorrow; but no section of the community has been struck dumb, and no section of the Press forbidden to comment. The decision has been accepted with about the same degree of resignation as a change in the weather, and something like the same knowledge that weather changes work both ways, spoiling holidays, but encouraging crops. So they change seats at Westminster and shed not a drop of blood. Democracy has sprung a surprise, but not found it necessary | to give any lessons in anatomy.