T H E T A B L E T , J u n e 10th, 195»

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 195, No. 5742

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JUNE 10th, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

UNDER THE VATICAN BASILICA An Illustrated Account o f the Excavations. By J . M . C. Toynbee

CONSCIENCE AND SOCIAL CONSCIENCE The Fashionable Substitution o f the Part for the Whole

THE TROJAN DOVE TAKES WING Impressions o f the Freie Deutsche Jugend in Berlin. By Auberon Herbert A LANTERN FOR THE JEWS THE NEW COVENANTERS

By Gregory Schmerling

By John March

WITHDRAWAL, AND RETURN W E have reached, amid a fine summer weather, reminiscent of five years ago, another great turning point in the relations o f Britain and the continent. We left Dunkirk in order that we might return, and we did return ; and so we must trust it will be with the Cabinet’s recoil from the French invitation to come in and help to make the European community. As we were not ready, had no sufficient army or allies, in 1940, we had to retreat. But it was a purely physical withdrawal, which left our minds and hearts still fully engaged on the mainland of Europe, because we knew ourselves to be much too close to the mainland not to be involved in its fate. We know ourselves equally involved today, when our underpreparation is mental and moral.

broad principle, and seeing how strictly or how loosely the parties concerned can agree to interpret it.

The one essential a t the heart o f the Schuman plan is political : it is that the authority shall have one particular kind o f power over European heavy industry, so that the German section cannot be developed and used by a German Government in a military direction, except in concert with Germany’s Western neighbours. Everything else, forms of ownership, extent o f competition, wage and price regulation, can be either done in concert or left to a local or national decision. There are as many possible stopping-places as the road is long. What Alternative ?

Only the dangerous irresponsibility of Lord Beaverbrook blinds him to this interdependence o f Britain and Europe and the unfortunate truths o f geography. The more he argues that the other nations of Western Europe cannot be depended upon, the more he is arguing against his own contentions. Because it is certain that Europe must be saved, and the greater the internal dangers in France or Italy or Germany, the more vital is it for politically healthier because more fundamentally united peoples, like the British and the Americans, to take our full part, and by so doing, strengthen our friends against our enemies. The particular contribution the British can make comes from our character as an imperial Power. We have had much experience in the statesmanship of diversity and unity ; and we must never forget for a moment that most o f the nations with whom we have to work are, like us, colonial Powers in Africa with the same problem.

Of the Commonwealth as a whole it is true to say that those who attach most importance to it are most anxious to see an end o f the haverings and indecisiveness that mark our policy, while those who want us to have no commitments are also determined to have no commitments to us, and to make o f Commonwealth membership a formality o f words. Mr. Menzies, who is in these issues the chief statesman in the Commonwealth today, has spoken with a well-justified impatience a t the lack o f clarity and drive in Whitehall, where we are in grave danger of having neither a European nor an imperial policy, when we could and should have both, and would find no serious incompatibilities between them.

A succession of anxiously defensive leaders in the Daily Herald reveals the discomfort that is felt ; and it is very plain how easily and enthusiastically the Daily Herald would be acclaiming as the courageous statesmanship o f Mr. Bevin and the only constructive policy the opposite decision, if the Cabinet had made it. The Daily Herald reiterates all the time that no British Government can accept anything, even “ in principle,” in advance, as though most international gatherings were not precisely for the purpose o f working out a

The Morgenthau Plan for the German heavy industry was abandoned because to try to pastoralize industrial Westphalia would be not only to impoverish all Western Europe, but to play into the hands o f the Kremlin, which controls the other great industrial area o f Silesia and pushes on with industrialization everywhere. Then there only remained two policies : to impose a special discriminatory regime on the Ruhr, or to hand it back to a German Government and hope for the best. The first course would strengthen the German national parties. Even Germans who are disillusioned about Hitler, Goebbels and Co. are still impressed by one part of the propaganda which Hitler used to acquire his ascendancy : the story of the Diktat o f Versailles. That is the propaganda which would start again in proportion as it could be said that German industrial recovery was not being allowed to take place, through commercial competition masked by professions o f apprehension about a future German aggression. No power on earth can stop the Germans from working hard, for it has always been their nature, and it is today the sanest, as well as the most useful, thing they can do in the midst of such colossal ruin and spiritual as well as physical dereliction. I f all this energy is not encouraged to flow into broad European channels, it will inevitably, and faute de mieux, feed a reviving nationalism.

The Russians stand by, offering not only German unity but a prospect of peace, and reiterate that the Western world has cast the Germans for the part o f an expendable population, not so much at the front as in no man’s land, a buffer territory ; and these arguments have a good deal of force among people who suffered much more heavily than any other from aerial bombardment in the war. The great argument against the Russians, which was the Red Army, is now the way they treat everybody they entice into their spider’s web. But the Germans who are the strongest against the Russian influence are also the ones with the most self-respect, the clearest consciousness of themselves as Europeans, the readiest to become members o f a new community. Yet they have to