Sunset Gun

The nations battle overseas, The missiles scorch, the tanks advance, While we continue at our ease With cattle-show and floral dance. Great powers must come To frightful doom: Only the impotent but gay Can hope to face the world today.

With this bit of elegiac poesy, Punch last week began five pages of sardonic advice to its readers on "Britain's New Role: Learning To Be a 2nd Class Power." Instead of sighing for the golden days of Empire, Punch urged that Britons look to the wonderful possibilities of the future "once it has been established that Britain is operating in the second division."

Some of the promised goodies:

P: "Second-class powers are not ashamed of being poor, of being too poor to shoulder the white man's burden or to compete with first-class powers in providing aid for uncommitted countries." Best of all, when a second-class nation needs help, it can declare itself uncommitted: "Response is prompt. The West suggest a loan of countless dollars repayable over two thousand years: the East offer the free labor of twenty million skilled Siberians. Second-class powers can hardly wait for China to become fully first-class. Three sources of foreign aid are better than two."

P: To be definitely second-class makes things pleasanter when traveling abroad. "It is no longer necessary to preserve British prestige. The loud, peremptory tone of command, once obligatory, may be dropped to a cringing mumble." Bravery is never demanded of citizens of second-class powers: "The day is over when a single cry of Au secours! put six British swimmers in the sea as one man. Any secours that's wanted can be furnished by Americans--or Russians." And one need never again dread "the anguish of handing over a fistful of lire, conscious of being done but fearful to make a scene. Make scenes. You can be mean and haggling."

P: There will be changes at home, too. "Folk-art of all kinds has a pleasantly second-class air. Looms should be brought to cottage doors, old men should plait osiers in full view of the traffic, and smithies must have wide-open doors. The riding of bicycles by royalty should be introduced gradually, in an unobtrusive way. Rioting by students at universities is already well under way, but there is still too much namby-pambyism. The use of stones and tear-gas by the respective sides is overdue. One or two professors must be killed." Parliament needs shaking up: "There are still far too few ex-Prime Ministers. Governments must change repeatedly. The formation of parties pledged to make the constitution unworkable will help. Oil must be discovered in enormous quantities, except between the hours of twelve and four, which will be observed as siesta time."

To be really first-rate citizens of a second-class power, Britons, says Punch, must throw off centuries-old habits and 1) "master the art of boasting," 2) practice "indifference to the welfare of birds and animals," while "almost everybody must use the rank of colonel or count, to make both the Army and the Aristocracy look ridiculous."

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