BOOKS —

In his day liberals

really were liberals

ay a sense (as Marx and

Engels make clear in the
Communist Manifesto) social-
ism is the child of capitalism.

It is because the struggle be-
tween the unprivileged classes
and the feudal lords, waged
in the 16th, 17th and 18th
centuries, ended not in free-
dom, equality and brotherhood,
but in: modern capitalism and
its ugly scramble for profit,
that progressives who once
spent their lives for liberalism
noxy spend them- instead for
socialism.

The story of a great liberal
whom life gradually forced
into theoretical acceptance of
socialism is told in John Stuart
Mill the Man, by Ruth Bor-
chard.

Mill was born in Britain at
a time when industrial capital-
ism was in its vigorous youth,
when fortunes were being
made out of ruthless child
slavery in factories and mines,
and when the workers were
forbidden by Combination
Laws to do anything in self-
defense.

His father, James Mill, was
an official of the East India
Company, which at that time
plundered India for British
profit unrestrained by anyone,
and one of the leading apostles
of capitalist laisse-faire.

The wonder is that he out-
grew all this. He had a tough
honesty which made him take
seriously the liberal principles
which to James Mill and his
kind were only a cloak for
their own class interest.

Malthus had taught that the
condition of the people could
never be improved because
they were always having too
many children; and the capital-
ists leapt at this as an excuse
for doing nothing.

Young Mill believed it and
did something; he went with
his friends and preached birth
control in Billingsgate market,
with the result that the police
arrested them. It was a good
beginning; and Mill had only
to learn to do better.

Later he met Carlyle, the
fiery Scot, who had no illusions
about laissez-faire and: believe-
ed in his mystical way (what
Marx was later to prove scien-
tifically) that the lies and

shams of capitalism carried
with them the seeds of their
own destruction.. Carlyle dnd
Mill became fast friends,

it 503 oe

The individual who more
than any other brought Mill
round to socialism was the
woman who, in the end, be-
came his wife, Harriet Taylor.
Her story is a pungent .com-
mentary on the lot of women in
the smug bourgeois world.

The daughter of a successful
surgeon, she married a Lon-
don businessman who was a
bad specimen of his class. But
her education, though good for
those days, did not include a
knowledge of the facts of life,
and her marriage was a total
failure.

Then she met Mill. It was
love at first sight. But divorce
was difficult then. As in Que-
bee and Newfoundland today,
it required approval of a priv-
ate bill by parliament. Both
were too scrupulous for
clandestine affair; and the re-
sult was years of misery end-
ing only with Taylor’s death.

But private troubles did not
prevent them from learning
from each other and from the
working class movement which
was growing in the world
around.

Mills Political Economy, or-
iginally written on classical
bourgeois lines, made more and
more concessions to socialism
in each succeeding edition. He
never read Marx; and Marx,
who did not know how Mill
was fighting his way. out of
the fog that had enveloped his
youth, repeatedly in Capital
criticizes his contradictions,
But Marx admits that Mill
is at least superior to “the ruck
of apologists belonging to the
school of vulgar economics.”

Mill died in 1873, eight years
before the rise of the organized
socialist movement in Britain.
Harriet had predeceased him
in 1858.

Her daughter, Helen Taylor,
was an early member of the
Social Democratic Federation
— a living link between the
most honest of the liberals and
the socialist. and labor .move-
ment of our own times.

ARCHIBALD ROBERTSON

SUNDAY

@ FOLK SINGERS

BY POPULAR DEMAND

ANOTHER HOOTENANNY

APRIL 7

641 Granville St.
at 8:00 p.m.

© INSTRUMENTALISTS
@ AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

Sponsored by
Folk Song Magazine “SING ALONG”

@ FOLK DANCERS

no seat more than 75 feet from the stage, The

Canada Day.

The traditional intimacy of the theatre will be preserved in the new Stratford Theatre,
now nearing completion. The only circul2i theatre in the world, it will seat 2,176, with

theatre will open for the 1957 season on

Two Anastasia movies based on

theme of Ru

oe Bergman and_ Lilli

Palmer have been playing
at princesses in two entirely
different versions of the same
story.

It is a fascinating battle of
beauty between two outstand-
ing actresses who have not
been seen in serious movies for
some time.

Both films purport to solve
the mystery of a missing Rus-
sian Grand Duchess who is
supposed to have survived the
firing squad which finished off
Tsar Nicholas Romanoff and
the Russian Royal family in
1918 — after the Revolution.

Both films are rattling good
entertainment.

The Ingrid Bergman Techni-
color CinemaScope Anastasia,
largely made in Britain, givesa
full Hollywood treatment to a
highly dramatic and theatrical-
ly exciting television and stage
play. It is glossy and extremely
moving. But it is so sophisti-
cated and theatrical: that is
loses in sincerity what it gains
in wit.

Yt 503 nm

The other version is a black
and white standard screen
German version made on a
shoe-string in Berlin. It’/claims
to be a strictly accurate his-
torical dramatization of the
records submitted to the Berlin
courts to prove that a Mrs.
Anna Anderson, now living in
the Black Forest, is really the
Grand Duchess.

That is why it is called Is
Anna Anderson Really Ana-
stasia? This film is deliberately
sub-titled “This is NOT a film
of the play.”

Lilli Palmer herself is con-
vinced that Anna Anderson is
really Anastasia Romanoff. In
fact she visited her recently in
Berlin when she appealed to
the courts against the recent
refusal to recognize her.. She is
now a tired old woman, with

Her role in Anastasia won an
Oscar for Ingrid Bergman
(above)

half a jaw, no teeth, a sweet
smile, and has, like all Roman-
offs, a dubious psychiatric his-
tory.

Ten million gold roubles sup-
posed to have been deposited
by the Tsar for his children
with the Bank of England are
at stake. The bank refuses to
say whether the money exists.

For years White Russian
emigres have been struggling
and quarreling among them-
selves about the claims of
rival pretenders to the Roman-
off title. Different factions
have jumped at the chance to
producing a key to unlock the
door to a fortune and also keep
their international intrigues
boiling.

Both films expose and ridi-
cule the antics and schemes of
the White Russian confidence
tricksters who deliberately try
to exploit the agony of the half-
crazed woman suffering from
amnesia who is rescued from
a suicide attempt and sent to
an asylum.

APRIL 5, 1957 —

ssian grand duchess

In the Bergman film the
wole emphasis of the plot is
bound up with the attempt of
a Cossack General Bounine
(Yul Brynner) and his collea-
sues to produce a puppet with
whom they can swing their
scheme to get the cash in the
bank. The crux of the campaign
is the highpowered attempt to
win the backing of the Tsar’s
mother, an old dragon who
lives in state in Denmark. She
is played with tart humor by
Helen Hayes.

The plot collapses because
the general, at the crucial mo-
ment, runs away with Ana-
sasia to “live in the future in-
stead of the past.”

The reality of the German
version is less theatrical, but”
the intrigues that follow the
recognition, in Berlin, of the
girl by the Tsar’s former valet,
are just as ruthless and more
realistic. She is taken to the
United States and when she
refuses to cooperate, is thrown
back into a madhouse and de-
ported to Germany. In 1945,
the Prince of Sachsen-Alten-
berg bought her a hut in the
Black Forest, where she still
lives.

ROBERT KENNEDY

' CONSTANTINE

Fine Custom Tailoring
Ladies’ and Gentlemen
Rm. 118, 603 W. Hastings St.
PA. 5810, Vancouver 2, B.C,

LT

Castle Jewelers

Watchmaker and Jewelers
Special Dis-
count to all
Tribune Read-

ers. Bring
this ad with
you. Ee

752 Granville Street

SULT Te en tt Lc

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—PAGE 13