TEE TABLET, February 3rd. 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5776

LONDON, FEBRUARY 3rd, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE BATTLE OF LAKE SUCCESS The Momentous Role o f American Public Opinion

THE CAMBRIDGE MOVEMENT Reflections on a Biography of John Maynard Keynes

THE DUTCH POLITICAL SCENE The Background to the Cabinet’s Resignation OUR LADY AND HER ASSUMPTION “ The Only Figure o f Perfect Human Love.” By Graham Greene

VERDI AFTER FIFTY YEARS An Assessment. By Rosemary Hughes civil war. But there do exist, in both countries, a great many people whose main concern is entirely personal, to be on the winning side ; and the greater the strength which American support enables each Government to display, the more of these undecided citizens will support them, even though they may be people who for a variety o f reasons voted for a Communist deputy at the elections.

FRANCE AND AMERICA I N announcing their plans to call up selected reservists the Government ought to have made a much fuller justification o f the very short period envisaged. Mr. Attlee gave the total strength o f the armed forces on April 1st next as 800,000 men, but went on to say that there was no sufficient reserve o f officers and men to fill out skeleton formations in an emergency, and that the fifteen days’ summer training o f men who have already served in the Army is a refresher course ; but it seemed to Mr. Attlee’s hearers that the main advantage o f the call-up will be as a kind o f boat-drill, to see how the arrangements would work. The period, with the inevitable slow tempo o f preliminary formalities, will be too short for much fresh instruction o r useful practice. But it has its great value, without being more o f a derangement than the normal period o f territorial training.

It expresses something more o f a sense of urgency than has yet been forthcoming.; yet Mr. Attlee should a t the same time have made a fuller defence o f the present National Service arrangements, for the reservists affected by the call-up are very well entitled to ask what is happening to the very large numbers o f younger men who have performed their military service but about whom there is a widespread uneasiness that a great deal of their time is wasted at a time o f life when intensive instruction is most easily absorbed. Those to be called up from the Z Reserve are only, as it were, a sample o f the great reservoir o f trained and partly trained men in whom the nation is a t the moment singularly rich, and this is the kind o f concealed asset which we did not possess in 1914 or in 1939, and an asset o f particular importance, as modem warfare has taken on an increasingly technical and specialized character. Mr. Attlee has to encounter opposition from his own followers for the very reason that the Government is, albeit reluctantly, facing the situation as it is, and not as we would all prefer it to be, and what commends the announcement to the rest of the nation, its reflection o f a determination to follow the hard but the essential road, is the root o f the objection o f the Labour opposition.

But Mr. Attlee’s difficulties are a t any rate very much less than those that M. Pleven and Signor de Gasperi are facing in their respective countries. M. Pleven on his visit to President Truman has been assuring the Americans that they can rely on France, and it is the need to convince the Americans o f this that strengthens the hand o f the French, as o f the Italian, Government in dealing resolutely with Communist demonstrations and attempts to foment strikes or plan sabotage. The French and Italian Governments have to convince the Americans that the very large Communist votes in post-war elections do not mean that there is anything like that number o f real Communists, or that either country would really be faced with anything o f the dimensions o f a

There is no doubt in Paris that M. Pleven’s visit has been well-timed, especially if General Eisenhower was disappointed. Since the time o f their own independence (which they owed so largely to the French sea-power), the Americans have always looked on France as the great Power with a great Army. The Americans are not alone in this ; it is the French themselves who have been exceptional and slow to understand how completely the state o f the French Army, its morale, efficiency and numbers, is to the outside world the barometer of the state o f Frence. We shall know that the French have recovered when the French Army becomes again the great pride o f Frenchmen. M r. Bevan’s Mythology

The great Catholic principle of subsidiary function came very well out of the B.B.C. “Focus on Charities,” on Tuesday night. This was an informative survey o f a great question which the Government has appointed a Commission to study, the future of charities in the Welfare State, in which people who give feel that the State now takes so much of their income to give in their place, and those who receive consider it a grave scandal that there should be any real form of need for which there is an insufficient public provision.

The hospitals are the leading example of a transference to the State of something which used to command and tap an immense reservoir o f benevolent energy. Those who argue, as Socialists do, that wherever there is a real need it is a reproach if the Government does not cope with it, ought to understand that there are more ways in which Governments can cope than by the direct substitution o f State initiatives and control for the work o f private associations. The way to retain certain invaluable things, the sense of independence and creative scope among the devoted men and women whose lives are always found embedded sacrificially in the building of every important charitable work, is for the State to respect voluntary organizations, and to give them money for them to use, with no more control than public policy now requires in order to see that charities which go to the public for money are using it to achieve their professed objects.

It is the existence of this very large margin above necessity, a long established, general and most welcome feature o f the British scene, which makes irrelevant so much o f the old Socialist argumentation, such as Mr. Aneurin Bevan indulged