DEBIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 393, 3 January 1947, Page 7

DEBIT

Poland and the Baltic States in collusion with the German defendents is reducing international law to the level of a lottery. And what good will it do? If the object is to impress upon the German people the wickedness of such acts, it will surely fail; the victims will sooner or later come to be regarded as martyrs and even the murderers and torturers and the promoters of medical science in the concentration camps will come to share a little of the light that | will gather round their heads. If our news services had been a bit more candid we should all of us understand this better. As it is, it has been left to a writer in The Economist to reveal that in the course of the trial the German Secretary of State gave evidence about a secret treaty attached to the non-aggression Pact which provided for the partition of six European states between Germany and the Soviet Union! For some odd reason the learned judges in summing up omitted to notice this extremely relevant fact; it is a little too much to expect that it escaped the notice of the German people. % * * HE second mistake, as I see things, has been made in India. I am far from thinking that the idea of introducing self-government into India was a mistake, but we have been going far too fast and have ended in giving way in a fit of panic to the clamour of a comparatively small class who have no claim whatever to represent the toiling masses. What. India needs is another hundred

years of orderly government; and in my opinion the only chance it had of getting this was by a continuance of British rule. In a remarkable book that has been too little read, Sir Claude Schuster and Mr. Guy Wint, in examining the proposal to democratize India, drew attention to the terrible fate of China, following the attempt to introduce democratic government in a hurry into a country that was unprepred for the change. The result in China was anarchy and civil war for 30 years, and it’s not yet over. Yet China has a deep-rooted tradition of unity and public service that India is without. Even with these things the experiment would be -hazardous; without them it cannot possibly succeed. Not only are the masses unprepared, but so are the leaders. Those who think that India can be given orderly government and that the burdens of the toiling masses can be lightened by the efforts of men like Gandhi and Nehru are living in a world of shadows. All that will happen is that they will turn us out and be turned out in their turn, and all will end in confusion. If the British retireand Mr. Nehru has celebrated his arrival in power by a bitterly hostile reference to the British civil servants which will encourage them all to start their packing -India may get one-party rule in the interests of the manufacturers and lawyers and money-lenders; but a far more probable result will be a return to the anarchy in which we found them. So much for 1946-a year of almost unrelieved gloom-and the half hath not been told.