TH E T A B L E T , November 24th, 1951

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5818

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, NOVEMBER 24th, 1951

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

WORK FOR STRASBOURG European Producers and World Markets MOSCOW’S TREATMENT OF CHINA The Grounds for Chinese Dissatisfaction. By Wilfred Ryder THE UNIVERSITY SEATS A ROME LETTER

By Christopher Hollis, M .P .

The News from Egypt

CYPRUS LOOKS TO THE WEST THE FREE TRADE HALL

By Sayed Edris Ali Shah

Manchester Memories

THE FAITH IN THE INNS OF COURT The Sixteenth-Century Resistance. By Richard O ’Sullivan, K.C.

ON MARRIAGE AND CHILDBIRTH The Final Part of the Recent Papal Allocution

THE GREAT WALL OF RUSSIA M R. EDEN last Monday reported to the House of Commons on how he finds life at the Foreign Office which he left in 1945. He said that “there is now virtually no diplomatic contact between East and West—either side of the Iron Curtain, I mean, by that phrase. That is, I think, something new and entirely to be deplored.” And he went on to say that, although we have missions,

defence together. Otherwise the Soviet Union would be increasingly tempted by the disparity of force to push its hostility and intransigeance just too far.

“very little business passes. Still less is there any real meeting of minds. This is something that is certainly unprecedented in my diplomatic experience. I imagine that it has rarely existed in history before, certainly not between States that have at one time or another in their history had real diplomatic contact.” Mr. Eden finds 1951 very different from the war years, in which the Russians had to make a certain show of alliance and intercourse. It would not be difficult in the history of the Orient to find a good many illustrations of the vigorous control, and almost total prohibition, of intercourse with foreigners, and in countries more important than Tibet. The old Celestial Empire supervised all foreign contacts with the Red barbarians, ourselves, with extreme suspicion, until both the Chinese and Japanese were forced, by the British and the Americans, to hold intercourse and open their countries to trade.

Mr. Eden spoke in the House to a number of interruptions which show how, even today, there are men in the Labour Party more anxious to see Communist China in the United Nations than to see Italy there. They are all that remain of what was, six years ago, a great company of enthusiastic proRussians, whom the Russians themselves have driven away. It is pertinent to reflect that if the Russians were less hostile or less formidable the progress that has been made towards greater unity among the nations would not be there, so very strong and often so unreasonably self-centred and egoistic is national feeling. The Witness of the Stamps

When he came to speak of Egypt, Mr. Eden pointed out that there is nothing lowering to national dignity in providing territorial bases for an ally, and that Britain, which asks them from Egypt, herself provides them for the United States. The whole test is, for what purpose are such bases required ? Is it a common purpose ? And the defence of the Middle East quite clearly is a common purpose.

What is unique about the present Soviet system is that it is combined with an eager unresting penetration of Western society by the devotees. Whereas ancient China or ancient Japan, for all their pride and arrogance, lacked the will no less than the means for aggression, and were content to try to live as though they had the planet to themselves, the Russian attitude remains intensely conscious of the rest of the world, continually watching for weaknesses, thinking and planning how to exploit them. The intention is not in doubt, however much miscalculation there has been, and is, in. the means employed.

Mr. Eden gave his judgment that “there never would have been a North Atlantic Treaty at all, however hard Western statesmen would have worked for it, but for the intransigeance of Soviet policy,” and when the Soviet minorities profess to regard it as aggressive they should remember they are its authors. It was simply the hopelessness of attempting to reach any understanding, and the spectacle of the steady cold concentration on more and more military power, that convinced the member States of the Atlantic Treaty that they have no choice but to rearm, and in doing so to concert their

Mr. Eden reminded the House that he was himself the British signatory of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, with Nahas Pasha, the present Prime Minister, signing for Egypt. Mr. Eden said :

“Nahas Pasha publicly welcomed it with great enthusiasm ; 1 remember that very well. So much did he welcome it that it is the only occasion on which I have ever appeared on a postage stamp side by side with him. It was an Egyptian postage stamp. I do not know what has happened to all those postage stamps now.” That there is no conflict of interest between the Egyptians and the British, either military or economic, is, unfortunately, not a ground for optimism : it only throws into relief that what is confronting us in Egypt are dark and irrational forces, which are being exploited, and of which so many Egyptians are so afraid that they judge it more prudent to seem to share these passions.

There are all too many peoples in the world who apparently feel the pathological need to assert themselves, regardless of consequences, and there results the tragic spectacle that it is still possible today, amid all the perils and all the opportunities of the world, to excite hatred of foreigners in a way