The Jubilee.

If your pages are open to those who do not believe in the Divine right of editors, I should like to comment on your last editorial, apropos of the Royal Jubilee.

And first a word of congratulation. When your Editor, dear Smad, though himself resident some thousands of miles from the royal domicile, assumes to speak in such confident appraisal of the "private life" of their Majesties, surely (if he knows the plain meaning of words) he intends to secure D. Bunker's bouquet for the best wisecrack in the issue. And it would be well deserved. The centre and pivot of the British Constitution is surrounded by an entourage of unequalled efficiency, and yet our naive Editor would have us believe that here at this other end of the globe we are competent to comment on the private lives of royalty.

This of course is trivial enough, but now for a word of criticism. No sixth-standard essay could have been more innocent than the soothing phrases of your Jubilee congratulations. But there are some students who have not prolonged their infancy in this manner, and who realise that there is more in this than the genuine and simple-hearted loyalty of a subject people. These students fully admire the qualities displayed by their Sovereign and his family, but at the same time are sufficiently free on blinkers to see some subtler implications in the Royal Festival. They may believe in the sincerity of their nominal rulers, but are not completely stupefied by the Jubilee incense. Put bluntly, they consider that the extravagance of the celebrations is not solely and exclusively an index of loyal feeling.

Patriotic sentiment is whipped up with especial vigour for at least three reasons which are never acknowledged. First, it welds the community into a homogeneous war machine-whether for defence or not we need not argue. The whole display is militarised from one end of the Empire to the other, but for such minor exceptions as the riotous fourpenn'orth given to school children. Secondly, it diverts attention from present economic distress, by the past, and by giving the "poor but loyal" subjects the thrill of seeing a plutocratic display of magnificence. A royal tour of the slums is appropriately followed by a "white-gloved" ball at the Palace, while the police prevent the wives of unemployed miners from meeting the Prince of Wales with their petition. Thirdly, the opponents of our system of capitalist enterprise are in this way shrewdly herded together to be branded as disloyal. The name of the King is so bracketed with the economic status quo, in some Jubilee orations, that every advocate of Socialism can be no more than a traitor into the bargain.

Patriotism is one of the most powerful weapons for liquidating class antipathy, and to-day it is so used by those whose interests are served by the present order. Without some recognition of this fact, your Editor, I suggest, in common with other sincere and simple-minded subjects (the majority of our people, after all), has been in some degree the dupe of the old device that makes economic capital out of a Royal festival, Such, at all events, is the view of those who, though they may not be red, are at any rate.

Not So Green.