T B S TABLET, April 1th, 19A1

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5785

LONDON, APRIL 7th, 1951

SIXPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1 8 4 0

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

FRANCE AND FREEDOM The Improved Climate of Opinion for the Church THE DURHAM COUNTY COUNCIL DISPUTE

Art Alarming Episode. By Christopher Hollis, M .P .

THE CONVERSION OF MANNING Reflections after a Hundred Years. By the Abbé A. Chapeau

BLUE PENCIL ON THE RED DANUBE

Books Banned beyond the Iron Curtain

WHERE SMUTS WAS BLIND THE TWO POVERTIES

By Michael Penty

By Neville Braybrooke

ARMS AND THE INNER MAN T HE fifth of what has become an annual series of Economic Surveys, published as a White Paper on Tuesday, begins by drawing attention to the nation’s achievement of the last four years, in which it reasonably describes as “dramatic” the improvement that could be recorded in the external balance of payments, so that by the end of 1950, when the decisions to rearm were finally taken, the nation was fully solvent and, for the first time since the war, able to dispense with outside aid. But the sharp awakenings that came in Korea, and particularly at the end of November, when early hopes of success there turned into the portents of disaster, the whole picture was altered.

food perilous and to forget about the farmers when the submarines have gone ; but the dependence on imported food, necessary to some degree, will have to be reduced whether there is war or not.

The main consequence of rearmament, and the main lesson of the Survey, is the acceleration of the rate at which the terms of trade are in any case moving against this country. Stockpiling by other nations will restrict imports of raw materials, and the rate of increase of our national productivity must therefore decline, while the prices of the goods we must import must rise even more rapidly than they are in any case doing ; these are the chief facts underlined in the Survey. By February of this year the prices of our imports were already 25 per cent higher than the average for last year, and the forecast is that this year we shall have to pay about £3,200 millions for imports, compared with £2,350 millions last year. But while the sums we have to pay for imports are in any case rising all the time, and will rise more sharply as the rearmament gets under way, our capacity to export is hampered by shortages of raw materials and the demands of our own rearmament, in a time when the value of our exports is in any case declining as the people to whom we export become more and more able to produce or make for themselves the things we send them, or as other countries develop their production and can compete for our markets

This is a country which developed a high prosperity through being first in the field for the export of manufactured industrial products, and the Great Exhibition was the great party which an exultant nation gave to celebrate the situation. But the industrial revolution has spread far beyond Manchester since then ; the overseas investment of the profits then made contributed a good deal to its extension ; and today, rearmament or no rearmament, we live in a world in which the prices of what we sell are all the time falling and the prices of what we buy are all the time rising, and the party given now to mark the centenary of the Great Exhibition is given in quite different circumstances.

This is the unanswerable heart of the argument for giving more stimulus to British agriculture, which does not—or ought not to—depend on any apprehensions of war or any relation to rearmament. It is the habit of this nation to look urgently to its farmers when submarines make the import of

The agricultural estimates published last week provided for a general increase of farm prices, with special incentives given—not surprisingly !—to those farmers who will produce meat ; but they are only such increases as will enable the farmers to meet about two-thirds of their own increased costs, as they have to meet not only rising wages and higher prices for almost everything they need to buy, but also the withdrawal of some of the agricultural subsidies. The other third of the increased costs will come out of the farmer’s profits, and once again they seem to come off badly by comparison with others whose role in the national economy is of fundamental importance. They are not receiving a fair share of the national income, and unless they do agriculture will not in fact be as efficient as it must be.

The Government has, of course, its eye all the time on the less tractable parts of the community—the trade unionists whom it is asking to accept the stabilization of their wages at present levels, when the T.U.C. has already asked for increased cost-of-living subsidies. The great question for the coming year is, how far will food prices and the cost-ofliving index rise, and how will this affect wage-demands ? The Economic Survey at least provides the data for an opinion, and it leaves its readers with the further political question, which is how this future is going to affect the Government’s electoral prospects. A “ Schuman Plan” for Agriculture

While the Schuman Plan awaits approval by the six Foreign Ministers and their Parliaments, the French have shown the initiative again in proposing a plan, named after the French Minister of Agriculture, M. Pflimlin, for the creation of a common West European agricultural market, initially for wheat, sugar and dairy produce. The French are naturally anxious to find new consumer markets for the surplus of their own fields, and they want to increase the agricultural output in Europe generally in order to save dollars and raise the standards of farmers and agricultural labourers in Europe. The French Government has accordingly asked the Council of Europe to convene a Conference of the eleven member nations, together with Portugal, Switzerland and Austria ; and there will be some lively opposition from the representatives of the peasantry, who have always resisted efforts to raise output, for fear of the concomitant rise in capital expenditure and fall in agricultural prices. M. Pflimlin seeks to meet these critics with a common subsidy and price maintenance programme, as it is nationally already in force in some countries on the Continent, and in Britain.