TEE TABLET, June 9th, 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 197, No. 5794

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JUNE 9th, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE ABIDING FEAR Catholic Prospects, and Some Apprehensions

THE STATE OF THE NATION Reflections on a Recent Social Survey. By Illtud Evans, O .P . THE IRISH ELECTION A LETTER FROM SCOTLAND

By Auberon Herbert

By Frank MacMillan

THE BEATIFICATION OF POPE PIUS X

The Scene in Rome, and the Prayer o f Pius XII THE TESTIMONY OF A CONVERT : II

The Wisdom o f Pius X . By F . R . Hoare

THE SIGNIFICANCE T HE Jews of the Old Testament, when they drove a scapegoat into the wilderness, conceived of him as carrying the sins of the whole people ; and Mr. Dean Acheson is entitled to reflect that those who are attempting to make him a scapegoat and drive him into a political wilderness are trying to fasten on him charges which can be brought in varying degrees against a high proportion of the American nation. For the main charge is that he has been and still is insufficiently aware of the degree of malignancy, and of danger that the Communist movement represents to the United States and the rest of the world. I f book after book is appearing in the United States on policy since 1939, by politicians, Generals and commentators, these books are being so eagerly read, not merely as history, for which the American appetite has always been restrained, but for the practical light that they throw on something which the Americans, as eminently practical people, know that it is vital for them to assess correctly. It is history as a guide to future action that is sought and bought and read today. This process of selfeducation can be rapid and thorough among the Americans, who excel in their readiness to revise judgments without attempting to salve national vanity.

But there is still a long way to go before the Americans understand the great contradiction, so plain to the rest of the world in their instructional policy, between their political and economic sentiments. Both in Asia and in Europe they have appeared with the torch of political democracy, and have begun with broad sympathies for parties and doctrines which have always found it easy to make a first favourable impression by representing themselves as progressive and democratic, the parties of the under-dog, of the common man, against a surviving feudalism, kings and aristocracies, and still more if they have been able to represent themselves as the George Washingtons of their own time and country, “rightly struggling to be free.” But economically the Americans have been much more conservative, much more conscious that the stupendous material achievements of the North American continent have only been possible because the constitution was written by men with the strongest sense of private property, whose secure possession, in law, custom and social esteem, is the first great prerequisite for the release and stimulation of human energy.

No amount of foreign aid is going to raise the level of average consumption in the Middle East or the Far East if no capital undertaking gets the chance to take root and grow and yield fruit without a political party, representing either extreme nationalism or extreme Socialism, overshadowing it, threatening its existence and appropriating its wealth as soon as any wealth manifests itself. The Americans have to forget and unlearn a great deal that it used to give them a novel

OF MR. ACHESON glow to think and say about European Imperialism in the different parts of Asia, and to understand better how the European Governments created and maintained, for the first time in history, conditions in Asia parallel to those which the American constitution created in the United States— law and respect for law, and an open and secure field for the private man or group. It was a great tragedy that in 1945 so little was understood in America that the Dutch were given no encouragement or help to return to the Dutch East Indies, and that almost invariably the American influence was ranged behind local political parties headed by men whose speeches and acts showed no understanding of the real prerequisites of that economic progress which they quite genuinely desired for their people, whom they had and have no intention of impoverishing, though they no doubt will impoverish them, because they embody political regimes under which confidence cannot take root. The Unrepresented Chinese

Mr. Dean Acheson, defending himself before the Senate Committee, gave a long and detailed catalogue of the deficiencies and delinquencies of Chiang Kai-shek, his family and associates, and described the leadership they offered China as the worst ever, and one that by its ineptitude and corruption destroyed the will to fight and finally spread the conviction at Washington that arms supplied to the Chinese nationalists, if they were not sold to the Communists, would easily be captured by them. The more completely a man accepts this indictment—and it can be heavily substantiated— the more reasonable is it for him to conclude that the story would have been very different if the nationalist movement had been differently led. The conclusion does not follow that if a man thinks badly of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime he ought to think as well as he can of the Communists. On the contrary, he ought to feel sorry for the Chinese people, and to conclude that the Communist victories were not due to any broad or deep appeal of their doctrines, and ought to see them as an unrepresentative minority whose only excuse for its savagery is that it knows what a small and precarious minority it is.

Progressives everywhere are naturally inclined to forget that the regime of Chiang Kai-shek was a nationalist revolutionary movement, the continuation of Sun Yat Sen and the Republic of 1911. I f thirty years were sufficient to transform so much starry idealism into a regime so riddled with personal self-seeking and corruption, one great conclusion to be drawn is that political idealism is always to be distrusted, but particularly where the tradition of the family is the strongest and, on the whole, the best element in society. There will always be corruption where the instincts and interests of family life are much stronger than the sense of citizenship, and the public