T E E T A B L E T , J u m 17th, 1950

TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 195, No. 5743 FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JUNE 17th, 1950

SIXPENCE PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

UNDER THE VATICAN BASILICA An Illustrated Account of the Excavations : II. By J . M . C. Toynbee

STRAITEST SECT OF THE PHARISEES

The Narrowness of the Socialist Approach to Europe “AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE PRESENT” The Text of an Important Papal Allocution on Social Principles MOUNTAIN WORSHIP FAITH AND DOUBT

By Arnold Lunn

By Christopher Hollis done. They are not Socialists ; therefore it has to be assumed, with a bland and total disregard o f electoral arithmetic, that they do not represent the workers of their countries. Intellectual Injustice

EMPLOYMENT IN EUROPE M R. ATTLEE’S statement on the Schuman Plan in the Commons was so much more moderate and reasonable than the Labour Party document issued by the Executive the day before that it is difficult to think he approved o f the timing by which what he had to say had already been swamped by the Party document, so that he had to speak on a day on which there was pouring in both to Whitehall and to Fleet Street the news of the exceedingly bad impression that the Party manifesto had inevitably made, both in Europe and the United States. The essential difference was that Mr. Attlee continues to say that the British Government already co-operates, and intends to go on co-operating, with other Governments, even though they are not Socialist ; and this, broadly speaking, has been and is true, although within limits.

What M. Schuman has done by his large and sweeping but indefinite proposal that the European countries should pool their heavy industries under a common authority is to force the British Labour Government to define its attitude more precisely than it has yet had to do. Just because it was not prepared to commit itself even in principle to the idea o f a common authority, it was all the more important to go as far as possible in the large general scheme, which is fundamentally more military and political than economic. This is what we have done over and over again in our relations with the Dominions. This was difficult enough, and the Government were not being very successful, when the appearance o f the Executive’s manifesto came to confirm the worst suspicions that, whatever language may be used about co-operation, at the heart of Labour Party policy there is no intention o f co-operating very much with Europeans who are not Socialists. Yet the document need not have been published in this particular week, or just before Franco-German conversations next week, for its purposes are internal and domestic.

No one would imagine, if he only had European Unity to instruct him, that there were any controls over exports and imports or over the currency in Italy or France or Spain. Because the Governments of these countries are not Socialist, no good can be allowed to them or their policies. I t is not enough to say that the policies are badly chosen and will not succeed ; it is thought necessary to go much further and to pretend that these parties and Governments do not want either full employment or social progress. The document will make bitter reading for the French MRP, the Italian Christian Democrats, and indeed for all the parties of Christian inspiration, which went so very far after the war in adopting as their programme widespread nationalization and a close Government control over the national economy. For all the credit they get from the British Labour Party, they might just as well have done none o f the things which they have in fact

So there is no recognition that the unemployment problem which faces the Italian Government is vastly more difficult than that which faces the British Government. On the contrary, there is a brazen and smug assertion that Britain’s problems were the worst of all, and that only the brilliant success which has attended Labour policy has masked this fact. But the economic truth is that the Italian peninsula, with the same population as Great Britain, is vastly poorer in natural resources and has no Empire with established channels of profitable trade, and that the national income per head is about a quarter of what it is in this country. These differences are not the result of Labour policy since 1945 ; they are differences which are partly natural and partly the result of historical evolution over two hundred years.

The Economic Commission for Europe has just issued its annual survey for Europe, with a special section on unemployment, which is completely irreconcilable with the picture of Europe in the Labour Party document. I t finds there is still full employment in France and the Netherlands, and that Austria, Denmark, Finland and Ireland are faced with unemployment which is not yet on a serious scale.

There are only two countries in Western Europe with any serious unemployment—from one to one and a half million —and they are Italy and Western Germany, the defeated Axis Powers. Both countries had this problem before the war, though it was masked, as unemployment can be masked, by large-scale conscription. Germany is cut in half ; it was devastated ; the west swarms with refugees from the East ; many o f its industries have been dismantled, and the Germans are only now coming to control, and still only very imperfectly, economic policy.

There is a third country, in addition to the two defeated countries, with some unemployment, and that is Belgium. The Economic Commission criticises the Belgian Government for insufficient public investment, but it comments also on the extremely generous social security arrangements, which offer many temptations to abuses—they are abuses constantly described in the Belgian Press—which have the incidental effect of increasing the unemployment figures. But even if the most severe view be taken of Belgian policy, of the 168,000 unemployed there, by comparison with the 286,000 unemployed which is the 1949 figure for G reat Britain, that is all that can be adduced in the way o f solid fact to justify the sweeping statement that

“every country in the Council of Europe is pledged to pursue