T E E T A B L E T , October 6th, 1951

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5811

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, OCTOBER 6th, 1951

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE LAITY IN CONGRESS The Significance o f a New Fermentation THE REALITY FOR THE CHURCH IN HUNGARY

Matters that Escaped some Visiting English Clergymen

THE UNITED STATES AND SPAIN Military Conversations and Economic Relations THE CROWN THAT DID NOT FIT

The Duke o f Windsor’s Personal Story

THE ELECTION IN WALES

By H . W . J . Edwards

“ PARTAGE DE M ID I”

By Robert Speaight

CLOUDING F ROM every great reverse, said Napoleon, some great advantage can nevertheless be derived, and it has become sufficiently clear what kind of advantage Mr. Attlee calculates that he can derive from the great British reverse in Persia. The advantage is the abundant proof his Government have given of their extreme desire for peace. The more humiliation is felt, as felt it is through the length and breadth of the land, the more does the conclusion follow. I f the issue can be phrased, in terms of the question beloved by the Daily Mirror and all the unpolitically-minded women with whom the Daily Mirror has influence, “whose hand do we want on the trigger?” the answer can be that Mr. Attlee is certain not to fire. Mr. Churchill’s finest hour, his war-time leadership, can thus be turned against him to suggest that, precisely because he was a great war minister, with a natural aptitude for war, he must be kept out of power in a world where foreigners can be so provocative and it is so very difficult to maintain the peace.

The Conservatives must not under-estimate the strength of this argument. Broadly speaking, every General Election since women became first a great part, and then the majority, of the electorate has been fought on some variant o f the issue of security—the security of savings in 1931, collective security in 1935, the security of peace and plenty in 1945 and since. The weakness of the Labour argument is two-fold. It is partly th a t Conservatives have, if anything, a greater interest in peace than the Labour Party, for it is always war that brings collectivism in its train. The second great weakness is that it by no means follows that the way to maintain peace is to show the world that there is one great country, at any rate, which can be despoiled with impunity. It is a particularly disastrous impression for Great Britain to allow, with so many British interests over great parts of the globe.

Some time ago Mr. Attlee showed that he had been reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall o f the Roman Empire, and we wonder whether it ever strikes him how close is the parallel with those bad later days, when the rulers of Rome thought only of placating the Roman proletariat, and maintaining the standard of living in Rome, by whatever means, for a time at least. When Mr. Attlee states the issue of the election as “what kind of society” the British people are to move towards, his hearers will do well to remember that no people in the world can so ill-afford to sit down and ask themselves what kind of society they choose to have : because no other people’s lot is so closely intermingled with what is happening beyond their shores, where the writs of British Governments do not run.

It is common form for political parties to claim too much credit for themselves and to attribute too much blame to their

THE ISSUE opponents ; to invoke world causes as their own defence, and to refuse that plea to their adversaries. The truth shines out above the hustings that world causes, sometimes pleasantly and sometimes painfully, have much more to do with conditions in this island than any palliative actions or stimulating actions that Governments can take. The unemployment of twenty years ago, and the full employment since the war, were both primarily reflections of the state of a world market ; and the conditions of that market are beyond the dictation of the British Parliament, though British measures are one of the contributory factors to the market’s state. The electorate, if it is wise, will not let itself be distracted by dwelling on any part of the past, and will insist upon concentrating attention where political concentration properly belongs, on the immediate future. What are the policies, the attitude of mind in the men directing the governmental machine, which will give the people of this country the best chance of being able to buy the imports they need, and need not so much to live well as to live at all—the basic food, the basic raw materials, from which British manufactures can be made for sale abroad ? The Irrelevance of the Rich

It should be clear that British industry could not conceivably flourish under the more extreme part of the Labour movement, whose exponents have just emerged as the first choices of local Labour parties for the party Executive. Mr. Bevan, before these results were known, made it plain that, while there must be a common front to win the Election, he would resume his campaign to drive the Government further to the Left as soon as the Election was won. The electorate ought to recognize that, once the Election was won, the campaign would be renewed with every probability of the more moderate Labour Ministers losing the battle, and preferring extreme measures to the alternative of seeing themselves superseded and dropped.

There was a strong tactical reason for the Government, which should not alienate a single middle-class voter, to dress itself up as moderately and quietly as possible. But it has not done so, because it has had to make concessions to the argument that the party will lose its dynamic and its idealism, and will cease to attract devoted voluntary workers, unless it says more about despoiling the possessors of wealth. Such sentences have been included to make it plain that one of the mainsprings of the movement is to benefit those who have more votes than wealth, a t the expense of those who have more wealth than votes. When these propositions are announced, the English, who are natural moralists, tend to ask themselves whether or not they like the idea of rich