Buy British

PAUL MORAND

Will England's latest orgy of super-nationalism result in another Boston Tea Party with the colonies as hosts?

Prescott tells us that the Inca punished with death those of his Indian subjects who travelled without permission, or who consumed products other than those of the kingdom. Magna Charta still protects British subjects from being treated in this manner, but today an inhabitant of the United Kingdom who takes a ticket at Victoria Station for Italy or the Cote d'Azur is exposed to the thunders of the nationalist press. If one asks for some Gruyere cheese in a London restaurant, right thinking people look askance, as it is not only this cheese which is full of holes, as they see it, but likewise the British Budget, and through these holes the national wealth is disappearing. During this past winter the few English people who took a chance on going to the snows of Switzerland declared that they were going to Malta, but had taken the wrong train.

In 1932 the British state is very much like the bankers of today. Have you tried in recent months to withdraw your deposits from a bank? Instead of the expected cash, you will see, if you are an old customer, the president of the bank in person rushing up to you, having run down from his office four steps at a time, to reproach you affectionately but firmly. If you insist, he will lose his temper and tell you that in drawing a large cheque you are doing him a personal injury. It would take very little to make him challenge you to a duel for attacking his honor. Many governments go about it with less formality. While they, too, make reproaches, they close the doors of their frontiers behind you and you cannot get out. You must spend on the spot whatever money you possess, provided you still have any. Who would have imagined such a thing a few years ago? If England, the citadel of Free Trade and personal liberty, sets an example, it is easy to imagine to what extremes backward little countries have gone, which have behind them a long tradition of economic exactions and police interference.

If certain countries are content to plant machine guns on the frontier and to hold your family as hostages, others are a little more polite. But the result is the same. They let you remove your person, but not your money. Such has been the case in recent months in almost the whole of South America. A Chilean going to Europe is entitled, I believe, to two thousand francs. A Greek can have nothing at all. An Austrian friend of mine, though wealthy, arrived last month in Paris with fifty francs in his pocket, the maximum allowed by law. In addition to the fact that the stay of such friends is a burden on those whom they visit, the result is to nullify completely all the efforts and all the money spent on tourist propaganda. We shall see, not tourists, but mendicant monks arriving at Cannes or St. Moritz, or sick people, like the Duke of Connaught, who was obliged last winter to publish a medical certificate in the press before he could come to live in his place at St. Jean Cap Ferrat. At the present rate, in a year from now nobody will be able to spend the national wealth outside his own frontiers. We shall be obliged to console ourselves by the fireside, looking at photographs brought back from post-war trips, and we shall regret not having travelled more in the days of easy money.

If one could only make a journey round one's room! Poets and people in general who are gifted with imagination could thus escape in dream. Like Huysmans' Des Esseintes, who, without leaving the neighborhood of the Gare St. Lazare, made a fictitious journey to England by simply buying English groceries, which enabled him to reconstruct in Paris the cabs and fogs of London, to evoke the old red-coated squires in ivy-clad manors and the wind in the ruins of Scotland—like Des Esseintes, we might be satisfied with a Cheddar cheese sandwich and a bottle of stout. But tomorrow, whiskey and stout will be cut off, even in France, which remains one of the countries with the lowest tariffs, because England no longer wants our champagne and Brie. Thus, in the last analysis, the first to suffer will be the makers of Cheddar cheese and the employes of Mr. Guinness, whom the British Treasury is trying to protect.

If the statistics of Britain's trade balance are apparently satisfactory, unemployment continues to increase, and it will increase to the degree in which foreign customers make up for lost time and take counter-measures. Was it not one of the greatest joys of the traveller, next to the chalk cliffs of Dover, to be received by smiling, easy-going customs officers? There were but few of them, and these few rarely opened your luggage. One felt that one was on the soil of a Free Trade country, that Free Trade which had made Albion great. Today, British customs officers are on the alert; night and day they search one's luggage, and they are so busy they have no time to shave. They look like customs officers in the Balkans or South America.

In the train I had the unfortunate notion of asking for American cigarettes: "We have only British tobacco," said the steward. There is not an American or foreign car in the streets of London. I went to a restaurant and was again confined within the limits of the Dominions. On the menu creme Chantilly was concealed, as shamefaced as a dachshund on the Champs-Élysées in 1918. It so happens that my tastes, if not my hunger, extend far beyond the limits of the Empire. I like to eat royally, not imperially. Nevertheless, I had to eat canned Canadian salmon, South African beef, Indian curry, Tasmanian apples and—what is worse—wash all this down with an Australian Clos-Vougeot. All the cheeses proudly displayed a tiny Union Jack; with the critical eyes of a 100% British public upon me, I was afraid to touch an aged Camembert of pre(economic) war vintage.

The Rothermere papers were full of "thoroughly English" news about the Royal Family. King George wore only Lancashire flannel and, by jingo, Queen Mary always preferred Stilton to eau de Cologne. The unfortunate Prince of Wales! I felt that he would gladly have given his car with its engine on the rear axle, not to mention all his RollsRoyces, for a Ford, because youth likes what is contrary and novel, and I pitied him from the depths of my heart. Let us go to the opera! But the mere thought of listening to English singers terrified me. I opened the Daily Mail. In the left hand column I read: "Every Irish lady who was at Court yesterday must have been pleased to see that Her Majesty wore a train of Irish lace, a patriotic gesture worthy of our gracious Sovereign." In the right hand column, on the other hand, I read: "In Dublin yesterday, the Irish government, desirous of protecting national industries, decided to tax heavily British foods and drinks." The extreme but inevitable results of nationalism.

Pre-war liberal regimes of international tolerance, as exemplified by the great Powers, have been replaced in all the small nations imitatively by a strict policy of home consumption. "Buy Montenegrin!" "Buy Javanese!" What will these colonies say tomorrow, when, as in the worst days of colonial exploitation, they are compelled to buy only the products of the motherland? Will they emulate the Boston Tea Party and throw British tea into the sea, or will they revolt, like the Indians of Peru, and refuse to wear the eyeglasses which the King of Spain's representative, the Viceroy Don Manuel de Amat, tried to make them wear by force, in order to support the opticians of Madrid? What if the provinces, following Ireland, should also take a hand in the game? Suppose that, as a result of this toll war (those domestic customs houses which the French Revolution boasted of suppressing), Nice decides that she will not in future admit Breton sardines because Landernau will not permit her anchovies to enter?

The truth is, one must have a strange kind of mind to prefer to the harmonious system of exchange, the beautiful and illusory figures of the statisticians, but we all know that the people who draw up customs statistics have strange minds. In a century when natural frontiers are barely distinguishable from the sky—whether viewed with the eye of God or of the aviator—is it necessary to construct other artificial frontiers?