T E E T A B L E T , August 12th, 1950.

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 196, No. 5751

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, AUGUST 12th, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

YUGOSLAVIA AND SPAIN A Perverse Bias in Western Statesmanship

TITO’S TOTAL STATE Impressions o f a Visit in July, 1950. By Auberon Herbert A LETTER FROM BONN A LETTER FROM VIENNA

The Story o f Herr Gerst

Writers and the Occupation

THE MIRACLE OF THE VISTULA After Thirty Years. By Major-General Richard Hilton

TELEPATHY AND THE SAINTS

By Renée Haynes

LIGHT AND DARKNESS

By John Bunting

DREAMLAND DESTROYED T HE destruction by fire of so much of Margate’s Dreamland has its parallel on a much grander scale, for it is a dreamland of the imagination which is today being destroyed, and a new mood of resolution and fortitude for the ordeal of the next two years replaces, in the cold morning light, a comfortable dream. No one would wish to dwell on past mistakes and on the great responsibility which Mr. Attlee and his colleagues admit when they have to come and tell the country of the extreme danger into which it has teen allowed to drift, after being lulled by those whose duty it was to make them alive to the harsh truth, if it were not that we cannot as yet feel confident that these are the men who will devote themselves with the necessary singleness of mind and heart to the great business before them. They have the warning of Lot’s wife, who lingered and looked back, and yet there is every temptation pressing upon them to relax at the first pretext, to do too little, to reflect again the mentality which now makes the Budget of April, 1940, with its great anxiety not to disturb a still recuperating economy, look today a classic example of political short-sightedness.

because it was different to other wars, and did not fit the definition we carried in our head, we failed to recognize it for what it is. Many people still do, as the speeches of the Liberal Summer School have shown, and there is a continuing reluctance to recognize the enmity of Communists, if they are our fellow citizens, for the operation of war that it is. There is instead an amiable but altogether misplaced anxiety still to classify Communism as one more political party entitled to all the appropriate rights of such parties in a country which believes in many parties. It goes against the grain for men who took the lead in the hour of victory in proclaiming to the more uncertain people in Europe that they must take Communists into their coalitions if they wanted to prove their own authentic democracy, to admit that the political classification was always wrong and that the domestic policy of the British Labour Party, which will have no truck with Communists, was the only sensible course. The War Already in Progress

This divided preoccupation is something which the French encounter in a more serious form than the British. Their Ministers tell the Americans what are the limiting conditions inside which Frenchmen will prepare to fight for their lives and liberties. A priori, it would be thought that life and liberty are such transcendent goods that in a time of great peril there will be no limitations. But the French explain, and the British reasoning is not dissimilar, that a certain standard of living must first be safeguarded, and the Americans must help to safeguard it before anything serious can be attempted in the way of defence. This is something quite new in history, very extraordinary and profoundly disquieting in its implications about the quality of today’s leadership and of the mentality which has been induced in large sections of the population.

I t is wonderful good fortune for these European political leaders that the United States is there, so immensely rich, through a century and a half of private enterprise, that it can carry, like Atlas, the burden of the globe. But it is a most unhealthy symptom that there are large numbers of people in Western Europe who have to be approached about their own salvation in this very tentative and gingerly way, with assurances that it will not make much difference to their standard of living, and half-suggestions that they will not have to work harder nor consume less. We are in great danger of repeating the mistake which lay at the heart of the old enthusiasm for the League of Nations, the notion that it was an insurance company to which we were subscribing instead of a fire brigade we were volunteering to join. For all too many years now the Communists have been waging their war against us, and

We have to press on with policies of exclusion and rigorous supervision, or we shall discover that the destructive inventions of science are increasingly used against us, and not in the form in which we most envisage them, of a war in which we can retaliate. We shall endure them in forms which will look like natural catastrophes or local sabotage, for which no responsibility can be attributed to the people who, thousands of miles away, have prepared these calamities as operations of war of a kind to which we leave ourselves exposed and they do not. This is, perhaps, the basic reason why time presses, and why time is against us. The natural course of scientific progress is going continually to extend the capacities for mischief anywhere in the world of men who conceive of their relation to us as one of war, a war declared against great odds, a lifetime ago, and carried on with so much success that they very understandably think the final prize of world dominion is within their grasp.

The greatest weakness of the western world is not its weakness in armaments, which can be and is being made good, but its heritage of intellectual and moral confusion, the fruit of liberalism in religion. The battle is half lost before it is fought if we go to the peoples of Europe and Asia and Africa denying in effect the profounder teachings o f our or their religions and try to rally them under the banner o f secular progressive illusions. To tell very poor and wretched and uneducated men anywhere that not only are they the masters because they are many, but that they are wise and good because they are many, and that again because they are many they have the right to live well and have been abominably exploited in the past, is to smooth the path of the Communist organizer among them. He has only to start