THE T A B L E T , September 22nd, 19HI

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5809

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 22nd, 1951

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE FAR CRY Chalcedon and the Passage of Fifteen Hundred Years THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY

An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Konrad Adenauer

A PARIS LETTER

The Third Force in Danger

THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

By Freda Bruce Lockhart

THE TASK OF FEEDING BRITAIN Possibilities of Home Production. By Jorian Jenks

TWELFTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

By David Knowles, O .S .B .

MYTHOLOGY AND MYTH

By M. C. D ’Arcy, S .J .

“SEMPITERNUS REX” AND “INGRUENTIUM MALORUM”

Summaries of Two Encyclical Letters of Pope Pius XII

THE WRONG PREOCCUPATIONS T \ / rR . DEAN ACHESON, speaking at Ottawa of “the community ; especially where there is a prospect of a new kind of citizenship, so that migration will be easier.

enormous threat that hangs over us all,” and reiterating that there could be no greater folly than to under-rate it or scamp or dawdle over defence, strikes a rather different note from Mr. Gaitskell and M. Monnet, both impressing upon the Americans that rearmament is putting a dangerous strain on the economies of Britain and France, and indicating, in short, towards the close of the year before that in which Marshall Aid was meant to end, that the Western European countries now find they cannot keep up the agreed pace without further American assistance. What Mr. Gaitskell and M. Monnet mean is that in each country there is a public opinion in whose scale of priorities defence has a high, but not the highest, place, so it is an axiom that rearmament must be fitted in painlessly, and must not seriously disturb achieved and accepted standards.

We can be quite sure that, when the General Election comes, one of the main themes which Mr. Gaitskell and his colleagues will develop is how much they have done to raise the standards of consumption ; and how reluctantly will they admit the real truth about the external help which has been forthcoming in such abundant measure. Nor are they entitled to be surprised if it is widely thought and said abroad that the root of the trouble is that British productivity, while it has increased, has not increased nearly as much as it could or should have done, and that the reasons for this are psychological, coming out of the mentality that will have to be drastically altered. I t is not nearly enough for British statesmen to content themselves with exhortations to productivity when at the same time they express and embody a social philosophy which robs those exhortations of cogency, urgency and effect.

Mr. Herbert Morrison spoke some remarkable sentences over the radio at Ottawa. “We are coming,” he said, “to realize the force of the common heritage and purpose which exists between the North Atlantic nations” ; and he looked forward to the day when

“in the fulness of time there will be a common citizenship for all peoples in the North Atlantic community with all barriers to thought, travel, trade and understanding swept away.” It is part of the significance of the Ottawa meeting that-it has been taking place on the further, richer and safer side of the Atlantic, and that nothing gives a greater fillip to the movement for European Unity than its presentation as part and parcel of something larger than itself—the Atlantic

That this should be so, that one of the main arguments which recommend a European Army should be the idea that service in it may give young men the rights of migration anywhere inside the Atlantic community, is itself a commentary on how very far the ruin of Europe went in the terrible decade that followed 1939. And it is against this background that the British statesmanship of the post-war years has to be evaluated. The Story of the Post-War Years

Viscount Grey of Fallodon’s saying, of the 1914 crisis, that “there was more in the minds of the events than in the minds of the actors,” is conspicuously true of His Majesty’s Government today. The Defence Ministers, Mr. Shinwell and Mr. Strachey, in particular, find themselves carrying out policies which they never envisaged for themselves, which they derided when they were first asked to envisage them, but which are nevertheless slowly but surely coming to pass. Such is the European Army, such is the European Assembly, and such is the intimate military alliance with the United States. And while His Majesty’s present Ministers forward these policies, we shall only remind them of their attitudes and language, two, three and four years ago, if they now pretend that these things are in a special sense their policy rather than Mr. Churchill’s.

The judgment of later historians on all this post-war period can be reasonably anticipated in some important respects. Fundamentally, the great errors of Mr. Attlee and his colleagues came naturally out of their early training and domestic interests. The party had waited nearly half a century for a political majority. Its leading men represented the aspirations, Mr. Attlee of the East End, Mr. Morrison of South London, less extreme and kinder towards the middle classes, Mr. Bevin of the less skilled trade unionists. All were preoccupied first and foremost with using the unique opportunities of the post-war period to effect social changes of which they had dreamt for decades. Using special war-time powers for purposes for which they had never been intended qr granted, the Government concentrated on looking after that half of the electorate which had returned it to power.

its first preoccupations were domestic, insular, economic, and it hardly saw the Europe that was looking and waiting so eagerly for some great imaginative leadership in building, out of the physical and moral debris of a conquered and liberated continent, new institutions more adequate to the