THE USE OF POWER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 553, 27 January 1950, Page 17

THE USE OF POWER

THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY, by Dexter Perkins. INDIA, PAKISTAN AND THE WEST, by Perceval Spear. Geoffrey Cumberlege: the Oxtord University Press. English price, 5/each. HE Home University Library has always kept up a high standard of authority and _ scholarship. Although these two recent additions are unequal in value, both are worthy of a place in it. Professor Perkins’s style combines the breezy and the tautologous. But, except for a perhaps excessive desire to stress the altruistic motives in United States expansion, he is objective as. well as informative. The greatest triumphs of United States diplomacy have been in two main fields-the expansion from the narrow Atlantic confines of the revolutionary colonies across the continent to the Pacific (in which British goodwill was an important factor) and the establishment of a special position of leadership in relation to the other’ American States, growing from the keep-out warnings of the Monroe doctrine into the Good Neighbour policy of recent years, where blandishment rather than menace has won the support of all but naughty Argentina. Isolationist sentiment is still very strong in America. American imperialism, like British impérialism, has been involuntary, follow-* ing rather than preceding the extension of power. Britain, whose greatest imperialist adventure is chronicled with pleasant lucidity and grace by Perceval Spear, has at least in theory supported the thesis that no people is by nature unfitted for self-government, however cynically this doctrine may have been rejected in practice, He shows how the two Dominions are the creation of British rule. Britain’s application of utilitarian doctrines in the development of India undoubtedly "did good," though never perhaps quite the good which so unmaterialistic a people would’ themselves have desired. With material progréss came the political ideas of the administering power, liberty and selfrealisation, "The last triumph of the Whig school of politics was over the new middle class of Mid-Victorian India," a class called into being by the peace and prosperity of the British establishment, and which, modelling itself on British democracy, itself demanded democratic rights, India is still receiving the full flood of western social and cultural ideas. How far can its ancient traditions be\ harmonised with: European thought? : Perceval Spear’s book is realistic and impartial enough to admit fully such things as the corruption of the Indian police and the intolerable rudeness of some of the Imperial English. _ Both Britain and the United States are. old enough in diplomacy to know (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page)

that the. relinquishment of power is sometimes a way of keeping it. The "moral" of both these books is the sante, the resilience and adaptability of democracy to meet new’ circumstances. Today the United States has the heavier task. The great question now is how far the United States is ready for world

leadership.

David

Hall