A FRESH START

BY the time these words are read the country's great decision will have been made. And to say now, before the event, that the nature of that decision is relatively unimportant (unless it be a near-deadlock) is not inconsistent with what was previously said iu this column, namely that this Election has been a test, above all,
of the elector. .
Far more important than the fact of a Conservative victory or the fact of a Labour victory is the quality of mind and will in the electorate whose decision has been made.
If a Labour victory represents no more than a determination of an electoral majority to hang on at all costs to an easy life, both in the benefits it enjoys and the indifferent quality of work it gives, reckless of the real good of the whole country, then such a victory would be disastrous.
If a Conservative victory is only a swing of the pendulum caused by fear of the social advance of the workers, by personal and petty grievances with the rougher side of the Welfare State, and by a determination to hang on to what one has got, then such a victory can also only prove disastrous in the long run. The truth is that the essential needs of the country today remain the same, whether Labour or Conservatism wins the day, and only if those needs are courageously met by the next Government, within its general aims and scheme of volues, can there be any hope for the country.
FoR our part, we cannot deny our sense of profound misgiving, whatever the result.
The vocal part at any rate of the electoral contest has not been reassuring and neither of the two great contesting parties has had the courage to tell the electors the truth. If an occasional Tory candidate has dared to call in question any detail of our present industrial relations, the inflexibility of an outdated Trade Union system, the sanctity of the five-day week, the need to apportion rewards according to work, skill, cost of training, fundamental importance of Olfaction, a howl of indignation has been set up from the other side. If a Labour candidate has admitted that foreign policy today is a matter of infinite patience and realisation of totally changed conditions in the world, this has been exploited as weakness, incompetence, cowardice and the spirit of Munich by Tories.
IT may not be amiss in the circumstances to draw the attention of our readers to the interview with Salazar which Mr. Douglas Hyde reports on another page. No one would pretend that there is much similarity between the conditions of Portugal and the conditions of Britain today: yet in a certain sense Salazar was faced with a state of Portuguese ireffectiveness and selfishness that bears certain analogies at least svith Britain's stagnation today.
He tackled his problem without prejudice and essentially experimentally. and he attached the first importance to the whole question of spiritual and moral regeneration in the broadest sense of those terms.
Restoring to his people a corporate sense of pride and hope, he was able to treat the great economic, domestic and social questions of his country on their merit. Because of this first things came first. Portugal had to live again within its means. Work, organisation and production had to be got going again without respect for vested interests and prejudices of either labour or capital, but the first social needs, not least housing, were attended to, again without respect for vested interests and doctrinaire theories, in the same breath as production and work were reorganised.
DOUBTLESS these things are easier in an authoritarian State, but such States have their own grave handicaps and Portugal's mess was far worse than ours.
Surely it is not beyond the capacity of a democracy under real leadership to do as much as, indeed to do much better than, authoritarianism, even if the way is very different. But the same courage is needed, the same determination to put first things first, above the same resolution not to be eternally hound by vested interests of the past, old prejudices and fears, and doctrinaire theories.
Indeed, it seems quite certain that whatever party be in power. Britain's future must depend precisely on these qualities which themselves must rest on a new faith, on a general shaking off from ourselves of the dust and habits of the past. And this will never happen until our imagination, our vision, our will, our feelings are stirred again by some quality of spiritual regeneration. If the leadership of tomorrow, whether it be Labour or Conservative, falls short of this height, our future must be considered precarious.