THE T A B L E T , April 1«, ItM©

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 195, No. 5732

FO U N D E D IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, APRIL 1st, 1950

SIXPENCE

PU B L IS H E D AS A N EW S PA P E R

TOO PASSIVE DEFENCE The Deficiencies o f a Waiting Attitude THE NEW BATTLE OF BERLIN Catholics in the Face o f Remorseless Indoctrination

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

The Young Delinquent. By Richard O ’Sullivan

A PARIS LETTER

Reconsidering the Electoral System

THE MEANING OF GOOD FRIDAY A Meditation, by Philip Hughes, and a Wood Engraving by Hans Lochmann

TH E FORM ID ABLE TASK FO RM ID A B L E ” is the appropriate word for the GovernM /ment’s Economic Survey for 1950, which describes the task in front of the British people ; and the Daily Herald proclaims that “we shall have to work hard and think hard if we are to accomplish it.” “I f we fail, Britain will be ruined.” This is strong, but not excessive, language, and when the task is described in more detail, so that we shall have a reasonable chance o f balancing our trade, it comes down essentially to this : that people must not expect either to live better or to take things more easily, or to consume more in the home market, and that all this continued austerity, which is after all only relative, is the prelude to successful exporting.

to expound Socialist doctrine, saying that no Socialist believes in equal pay and equal incomes, that all except Mr. Bernard Shaw understand that rewards must be differentiated. “What we are opposed to ,” he said, “ is not inequalities o f income, but unearned income. That is the essence o f the matter.” And so indeed it is, for Socialist theory loses sight o f the whole dimension o f human experience, when it adopts this attitude of crude hostility towards inheritance and seeks to ensure that the only people with considerable incomes shall be the individuals who have come to the front in some particular field and, serving the Government o f the day well, have proportionate privileges measured out to them. Inheritance and the Services

The Government once again, inevitably, makes its special appeal to British business to take considerable risks in foreign markets, which means laying out money in ways which, if the calculations a t any point miscarry, must result in a loss. Factories which instal new machinery to make something for a foreign market, firms which establish selling agencies and spend money trying to reach the minds and purses of foreign customers, have nothing to show for their outlay o f money and energy if they are unsuccessful ; and they can easily be unsuccessful through no sort o f defect or inefficiency—perhaps because they are too efficient and local industry in the foreign country calls on its Government to protect full employment and make the foreigner pay.

The British manufacturer engaged in selling abroad has surely the right to demand that the British Government should take the lead in attacking the element o f political uncertainty which import quotas and exchange controls represent. Our representatives a t Strasbourg should be in the very forefront in setting up an authority which will secure a market of over two hundred million people in which our exporters can make their plans with a confidence and security vastly greater than they enjoy today. There must, a t the best, remain the heavy handicaps o f the weight o f taxation and the costs of the essential services which all manufacturers must use ; transport, light and power and coal, all now expensive national monopolies. It is not reasonable to ask men to enter highly competitive fields thus handicapped, to attack and attack their profits, if they can make any, and then to withhold from them the political assistance o f a Government policy really designed to facilitate trade between peoples. That policy can only succeed if it puts the exporting interest in front of the objective of maintaining at all costs exactly the pattern o f employment which exists today in this country, and, in attempting to protect that pattern, o f using against foreign exporters the very weapons which we are most anxious shall not be used against our own.

When Mr. Strachey made his appearance as Secretary of State for War on the Army Estimates, he seized the occasion

The Army Estimates were really the most unsuitable occasion for observations against inheritance. The serious critics, Brigadier Head talking about the Army and Colonel Crosthwaite-Eyre talking about the Navy, both drew attention, not for the first or last time, to the slow process o f corrosion and attrition which is threatening to undermine both Services under the conditions that prevail today.

One of these conditions which discourages parents from encouraging their sons to make the Services their life-work is the inadequacy o f Service pay, as the men’s responsibilities increase with the years, for all except the few who are chosen for high commands. The original idea o f a Service pension, which the majority o f professional soldiers or sailors would start to draw in middle life, was that it would enable them to live in modest but adequate comfort ; and behind the calculations was the assumption that very likely they would earn something, though probably not large incomes, and that about the time they came out o f the Service, a t around fifty, they, or their wives, would inherit from parents, departing from the world around eighty, some small patrimony to support the pension. This was the pattern which reproduced itself over and over again in the Service families, and is now destroyed. The older generation themselves have long since broken into their capital, under imperative necessity, but comforting themselves and their children with the twin reflections that the money is likely to be worth increasingly less, and that the Government is certain to take increasingly more. Yet the Navy and the Army have been built by generations of professional men who have been content with much smaller incomes than they could have obtained in other occupations, but who are not content to accept the abandonment of all the surrounding standards which is now demanded. When Mr. Strachey can only reply to Brigadier Head that we simply cannot afford to make the conditions o f service more remunerative, he ought to realize how much the country has been saved in the past by the long association o f private