British Commonwealth

ON THE WORLD TODAY

JOHN BULL, that master of political paradox who takes a Socialist-Labor Government and a House of Lords in his stride, is embarked upon three of the greatest gambles of his career. His first wager is that he can haul himself up by his own economic bootstraps by boosting exports to 175 per cent of pre-war figures. That goal has not yet been reached. Yet he is well on his way, ahead of his own schedule, and far above pre-war totals already.

The second wager is that he can reorganize the largest empire in the world during a period of global revolutionary turmoil, and hold that enormous aggregation of lands, peoples, and resources more firmly by loosening its ties. That he is working against time in this venture does not faze him. Colonial advisers and political technicians trained in the Imperial school are doggedly applying themselves to their tasks all the way from the British West Indies and Trinidad to West Africa and the Middle East.

From Great Britain a stream of officials, engineers, and administrators flows across the world to Asia to reinforce those already struggling on the spot to rehabilitate Britain’s prestige and economic position in areas lately recovered from the Japanese invader. Singapore and Southeast Asia are the receiving center for this influx. It is so sizable that back in England the Conservatives are writing letters to the Times in protest against “overstaffing” colonial regions with officials who seem to His Majesty’s Opposition “too highly paid” under a Labor regime.

But Mr. Attlee’s Government does not intend to repeat the mistake of treating Britain’s colonial areas in Asia as a refuge for broken-down administrative talents. That error proved costly in the grim days of Japanese triumph. Its aftermath among native populations continues to nourish revolts. So Southeast Asia boasts today of a regional Governor-General and a roving ambassador, and to these has lately been added the considerable military abilities of Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Britain’s third wager is equally ambitious. It is that the unity and power of the great Commonwealth can be fortified by speeding each Dominion along the paths of industrial expansion, and thereby broadening its capacity for economic independence and, incidentally, its ability to defend itself. One clear portent of this maneuver is the mounting migration of skilled workmen and industrial managers from Britain to the Dominions.

The Union of South Africa has opened recruitment offices for immigrants not only in Great Britain but in the Low Countries as well. An abundance of cheap native labor is already available in the South African Union, but management and engineering skills are scarce. Pretoria and Capetown entertain hopes that the visit of the King, the Queen, and the Royal Princesses, which is scheduled for February, may boost prospects for obtaining the 50,000 new settlers wanted from England.

South Africa’s “Ghetto Act”

If that visit is not to be attended by untoward events, however, there will have to be a modification of the explosive feuds harassing Natal. South Africa’s 8,000,000 non-Europeans, who make up 70 per cent of the population, are embarked upon the early stages of industrial, political, and social revolt against their heavy-handed white masters.

South Africa’s Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act forbids Indians to occupy or own property in certain areas of the country. It sets up a statutory basis for segregation. The Indians have labeled it the “Ghetto Act.” In a further affront to the Indian minority, the law ordains that the representation accorded them in the Parliament shall consist of white men.

This drastic segregation law, pushed through Parliament last spring, is causing ructions. Savage sentences, imposed by the courts on leaders of the huge Indian population in Natal because of their peaceful protests against this feudalistic statute, do not help matters. The President of the Natal Indian Congress, Dr. Nauker, drew six months at hard labor for demonstrating disagreement with the Government’s repressive legislation.

India has severed diplomatic relations with South Africa, and has instituted a boycott against South African commerce. India’s complaint to the United Nations Assembly indicates that the 250,000 Indians under Premier Jan Christiaan Smuts’s regime have a champion who proposes to put to practical test the eloquent professions of democracy made by that elder statesman this past year or two.

South Africa was the scene of Mohandas Gandhi’s original tryout of nonviolent resistance, decades ago. He was battling discrimination then. The Indian community is battling worse discrimination there now. Thousands of the South African Indian population have emerged from the status of indenture, under which their ancestors were brought to the country late in the last century. They have risen through the professions and established a large business community. The new law throws many of them back into the category of the propertyless.

The status of the hundreds of thousands of black African laborers is infinitely worse. Nine tenths of the 360,000 African laborers in the gold mines are indentured. The pay averages about 45 cents a day, minus some costs for personal equipment and charges for labor recruitment expeditions among the native villages. South Africa’s black labor is herded into compounds, lives in virtual slavery, and faces police guns if it attempts to hold meetings or to organize in the mining areas.

This arrangement has not thwarted the appearance of a strong union organized clandestinely. It has also begun to produce bloody strikes. During the past summer, one of these was put down ruthlessly by armed force at the direction of Premier Smuts, when mineworkers struck for a raise in pay. There have been no pay raises in the South African mines since 1914, according to the English press. The average annual profits enjoyed by the owners since 1932 have been $200,000,000, of which the Government’s share constitutes about half.

South Africa’s problems are intensified further by race feuds. These set off the English against the Afrikanders, unite both against the Jews, bring all three into opposition to the Indians, and add together all four against the native blacks. To complicate matters further, the doctrines of the German Nazis, which early found root in the country, have flourished ever since.

New markets for old

Not since Napoleon attempted to develop a Continental blockade, nearly a century and a half ago, has the Empire been confronted by handicaps in trade comparable to those faced today. The economic wreckage of Continental Europe cripples the most valuable near-by marketing area. The shift of power in the Balkans shuts off markets in Southeastern Europe for an indefinite period. The crack-up of the Japanese Empire has left a huge void in the trading community of the Pacific. Continued unrest in China closes the largest trading sector on the Asiatic mainland.

These are hard realities. Behind and beyond them all looms yet another enigma, larger and more dubious than any other: Soviet Russia. Economic need unites with political necessity in shaping Britain’s present drive for markets and security.

Trade missions flit from England in all directions. A four-year pact negotiated in midsummer ties the whole exportable surplus of Canadian wheat, together with Canada’s diminished bacon and dairy exports, into the evolving pattern of Empire and Commonwealth commercial unity. Another comprehensive agreement covers exports of Australia’s meats and dairy products. New Zealand is not forgotten. South Africa’s trade swerves sharply back again to Empire channels. West African cocoa becomes a British-controlled monopoly.

Britain’s foreign trade pacts

Britain also presses her commercial power drive beyond the boundaries of Empire and Commonwealth. While one mission was preparing to leave London for South America for a general survey of trade prospects, another emerged triumphantly from negotiations with the Argentine, bearing an agreement which gives Britain what amounts to practical monopoly over all exports in Argentine meats.

A few weeks later, Brazil joined the parade. An air transport agreement with Buenos Aires that splits business on a fifty-fifty basis between Britain and Argentina elicited protests from Washington that the Bermuda Air Pact had been by-passed.

Meantime, back along world trade routes to Africa, South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, a swelling volume of British machinery, motorcars, electrical equipment, machine tools, and other industrial essentials flows in British ships. Trade is the basis of survival for Britain and the Commonwealth. In the pressure for industrialization that is rising throughout the Commonwealth and the Empire, and outside both, the present seller’s market opens opportunities for a people willing to accept self-discipline in their own long-term interest, even to the point of meager living at home.

Britain’s recent commercial pact with Soviet Russia is a reminder that in commerce mutual business advantage, not political views, calls the tune. As a Swedish trade expert retorted recently when challenged by an American correspondent to justify Sweden’s huge credit to Russia, “The United States may be able to afford the luxury of mixing trade arrangements with its emotional likes and dislikes. Sweden cannot.”

The seller’s market throughout that part of the world which is undamaged and has funds will last only a few years, the British estimate. So, while taking full advantage of present opportunities, the Empire and Commonwealth are adopting precautions against future uncertainties. That is what the carefully contrived trade program within and among the units of both adds up to. Today this program accounts for about 10 per cent of the latest rise in Britain’s exports. The ratio may seem relatively small, but it will grow.

Major weapons for defense

Empire defense occupies an important role in the present thoughts of the Commonwealth. Development of industrial resources among the Dominions will add to the ability of each to assume its share in the common enterprise of security. In the drastic overhauling of Army training methods, the British will incorporate many American practices tested successfully during the war.

Imperial air headquarters has been shifted from Canada to the wilds of East Africa. Defense of the wide Arctic frontier north of Canada in terms of air power is going to be left to the United States, whose vital concern in that approach to its own hearth and home is obvious.

All defense plans of the Dominion are, therefore, closely tied into those of the United States. This raises delicate questions of sovereignty. The return of the great air bases and staging fields to full Canadian control is disturbing to the Dominion because of the costs of maintenance.

A vital sector in the grand design for Empire defense begins at Gibraltar and lengthens into the Eastern Mediterranean, encompassing Greece as a bridgehead below the Balkans to flank the Dardanelles. Air bases on the greater Aegean isles, notably Cyprus, will supplement this bastion. The plan involves a combination of air and sea power, developed from the experience of the war.

Palestine, the southern deserts of Trans-Jordan, Cyrenaica in Northeast Africa, and the huge new Imperial air center below the Red Sea back of the coast of East Africa, all spell out a vast strategic plan which regards air power as the major weapon of any future global struggle. Here is a setup intended to dominate every strategic point in the Middle East. Ceylon is being transformed into a center of air and sea power which will cover India from the South as well as the approaches to the Indian Ocean from the Southeast Pacific.

Empire security first

Singapore has resumed its pivotal role. Treaty demands imposed on Siam provide for destruction of the Japanese-built railway across the Isthmus of Kra and a guarantee that no canal will ever be built there. This assures again the importance of the greatest British naval base in Southeast Asia.

Development of the Malay Union, while partly an administrative experiment in colonial evolution, is tied into the defense scheme for Southeast Asia as well. The absorption of North Borneo, where the last of the historic Chartered Companies in the Empire yielded in July to the Colonial Office; the swallowing up of unwilling Sarawak, which had been an independent kingdom for close upon eighty years; and the centralization of authority among the Malay States, all fit into the defense picture.

This system of Imperial defense has its Achilles’ heel nevertheless. Jawaharlal Nehru’s speeches outlining India’s hope to become leader of the peoples of color in Asia and their champion against colonialism provide a hint as to the weakness of a defense system built on military requirements alone.

The forces of nationalism seem to have been overlooked. The strike, this past summer, in the AngloIranian oil fields points up the moral rather sharply. Upon the oil of the Middle East most of the defense system for Africa, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East itself, and Southeast Asia is clearly based. It is not Europeans who work the oil fields, but Arabs, Indians, Persians. None of these groups is satisfied with its present status, vis-à-vis the West. Nor do current policies and clashes in these areas improve the situation.

British critics of the Colonial Office contend that security and peace for the whole region, from Egypt to Singapore, can be achieved only through a policy which speeds genuine economic and political democracy among the peoples there, and destroys the opportunity that impoverishment and exploitation hold open to Russian propaganda and promises.