Tramp Royale (54 page)

Too little food, too many mouths. How will they be fed? Where will they sleep?

It is barely possible that you and I will be able to duck the issue; our children must solve it or be overwhelmed by it. Not our grandchildren, but our children, for the problem grows too rapidly. The crisis is with us, the catastrophic outcome cannot be more than one generation away. More probably we ourselves will face it, in the form of World War III.

Quite aside from the life-or-death practical matter of who will win the next war, when or if it comes, is the unavoidable moral problem: do we, with our acres to waste on golf courses and parks and tobacco fields, have the right to hang onto what we hold? Or are we, as our brothers' keepers, morally obligated to accept two or three million Asians as fast as they can be shipped to us?

Are the ten million Australians and New Zealanders required by good morals to let the eighty million Indonesians swarm over them? I can give one sort of answer to that one. Both of the Anzac nations are strongly humanitarian at home-but they will fight and die to the last digger, the last Kiwi, before they will let that happen.

But that does not solve the moral issue. My own ancestors came to this continent, pushed the Indians aside-or killed them-and made far better use of the land for far more people. I feel no special qualms about it now. But suppose the teeming crowds of Asia now give us the same treatment, seeing that we are making something less than maximum use of the land for maximum population. Have I any right to feel indignant?

I will not duck the issue. I have always believed that a man who accepts capital punishment should not be too squeamish to serve his term as hangman. The tail goes with the hide. I have not been able to find a moral answer which pleases me; nevertheless I know my answer-precisely that of the Australians. I'll fight before I'll let the spawning millions of Asia roll over Colorado and turn it into the sort of horizontal slum that Java is. Maybe this decision damns my soul; if so, so must it be. I don't see any solution to the problem of Asia at all, for they won't stop breeding . . . in fact, the psychological truth is almost certainly that they
can't.
But I am not willing to move over and give them room here to breed another hundred million-or half billion. We have here a pretty good nation, at least for the time being; I will not willingly see it turned into a slum.

Are we our brothers' keepers? Just what does our Western culture owe to the rest of mankind? Let us not be too humble about it. It may well be true that the potentialities of all parts of the human race are about the same. Nevertheless that minority of the human race called loosely the Western democratic peoples and consisting mostly of Caucasians even though not identical with the Caucasian race has added twenty, eighty, a hundred times as much to human wealth, human knowledge, human dignity and freedom, as all the rest of the human race put together. Sanitation, scientific farming, mass production, civil liberties-these are
our
inventions, not theirs. We have shared them, what they would accept, and that is good-but we
do not
owe the teeming rest of the world a living!

Lastly, this trip around the world cured me of One-Worldism; I have fully recovered and am as immune to it as I am to measles. The idea of one sovereign world nation, free forever of the peril of war, working together in peace and harmony, is an appealing one. I do wish we could afford it. But, the earth and the human race being what they are, we cannot. . . not unless we are willing to accept the logical and inevitable consequences. "One World" means a situation in which the United States is not sovereign, any more than one of our states is truly sovereign. That means that the United States would be outvoted . . . which just as certainly means that they would swarm over us immediately after counting the votes.

That which I am willing to fight for I am not willing to surrender as a result of counting noses in China and India. Therefore, no World State for me. It's a trap.

I could wish for a better world, but, as the stranger in the poker game told the sourdough who warned him, "Sure, sure, I
know
the game is crooked-but it is the
only
game in town."

I came back to the United States convinced that it was an even better country than I had thought it was. This our land is not perfect, but it looks just about perfect from even a short distance away. It is immeasurably a better place to live than anywhere else I have seen.

But I came back, too, convinced that our peril was very great and our friends very few. The extent and the viciousness of the propaganda campaign against us must be heard to be believed. Its prime source, of course, is Russia, but there are many ears willing to listen and many mouths willing to repeat. Envy and hate are the inevitable concomitants of wealth and power; we have been uneasily aware of this and have tried to curry favor wherever we could. But it is not possible; we are hated not for our behavior but for what we are-and they are not.

England, in the days of her strength, paid no attention to what other peoples thought of her; she acted in her own best interests as she conceived them to be and ignored world opinion. We should learn from our predecessor at least part of this lesson: never let a decision be swayed by what the neighbors will think, for they will gossip about us whatever we do. Let us be honest and brave-but not politic. We have tried to be politic for ten years now-and look at the mess we are in! We have bumbled around, an awkward giant, apologizing for our big feet and our bulging muscles, scared witless that the fortnightly French cabinet might fall or that the British foreign office might say "boo!" at us. We have had many, many chances to act forthrightly and call a halt to the world's rush toward disaster; instead, each time we have again been persuaded to pay Danegeld.

We know, as surely as we have ever known anything, that we may have but a short time more to live. The Soviet Union is determined either to nibble us to death or to smash us, whichever seems easier. On what can we depend?

Primarily on ourselves. Turkey has the resolute courage to fight, that seems certain. There are one or two others perhaps. But what of major allies? England? Suppose Bevan were prime minister, as may well be the case when the time comes. For that matter, can we reasonably expect England to risk a saturation attack of H-bombs to support us? But, in any case, will she? With Churchill, probably, with Atlee, maybe-with Bevan? The man hates us.

Will France support us? Let's not joke, this is serious.

So far as we can count on it. . . for all practical purposes . . . we already stand alone. Let us therefore get on with that "agonizing reappraisal"-but let us quit agonizing about it. We are not liked, we have few friends; therefore we should quit being afraid, stand up and assert ourselves. The only friends we will lose thereby are those we never had.

We might even gain a few. Courage is respected and admired where timidity is scorned.

If we are to die as a nation, let us die proudly, with neither head in sand nor led around by the nose, but calmly aware of our peril and fighting it with our utmost. There can be no safe course for us, but, if we deserve to win, we are more likely to win.

But let us not be afraid, not even of our friends.

SESTINA OF THE TRAMP-ROYAL

by Rudyard Kipling

Speakin' in general, I 'ave tried 'em all-
The 'appy roads that take you o'er the world.
Speakin' in general, I 'ave found them good
For such as cannot use one bed too long,
But must get 'ence, the same as I 'ave done,
An' go observin' matters till they die.
What do it matter where or 'ow we die,
So long as we've our 'ealth to watch it all-
The different ways that different things are done,
An' men an' women lovin' in this world;
Takin' our chances as they come along,
An' when they ain't, pretendin' they are good?
In cash or credit-no, it aren't no good;
You 'ave to 'ave the 'abit or you'd die,
Unless you lived your life but one day long,
Nor didn't prophesy nor fret at all,
But drew your tucker some'ow from the world,
An' never bothered what you might ha' done.
But, Gawd, what things are they I 'aven't done?
I've turned my 'and to most, an' turned it good,
In various situations round the world-
For 'im that doth not work must surely die;
But that's no reason man should labour all
'Is life on one same shift-life's none so long.
Therefore, from job to job I've moved along.
Pay couldn't 'old me when my time was done,
For something in my 'ead upset it all,
Till I 'ad dropped whatever 'twas for good,
An', out at sea, be'eld the dock-lights die,
An' met my mate-the wind that tramps the world!
It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're readin' done,
An' turn another-likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn 'em all.
Gawd, bless this world! Whatever she 'ath done-
Excep' when awful long-I've found it good.
So write, before I die, " 'E liked it all!"
(1896)