THE T A B L E T , December 8th, 1951.

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 198, No. 5820

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, DECEMBER 8th, 1951

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

MR. CHURCHILL’S TWO VOICES

Great Britain and the European Army THE TWENTY-THIRD HOUR AT STRASBOURG

The Crisis of the Council of Europe THE PRICE OF REARMAMENT

The Trade Unions, the Community and the Government. By Douglas Jerrold

CHRISTIANS IN EGYPT Their Position in the Present Disturbances

FORTY YEARS AT COURT Memoirs of Intimacy and Discretion. By D .W .

CHRISTMAS BOOKS SUPPLEMENT Reviews by Christopher Hollis, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, Gyles Isham, Arnold Lunn, David Knowles, T. S. Gregory, Desmond Morton, M. Bellasis, H. D. Hanshell, Yvonne ffrench, Anthony Bertram, Peter Watts, Rosemary Hughes, Anthony Milner, Lancelot C. Sheppard, R. N. Green-Armytage,

Terence Tanner, J . J . Hall, and George Scott-Moncrieff

RULE FROM BELOW

A LL over the world there is an unsolved and perhaps insoluble problem, the attem pt to organize civil society from below. I t is a new conception in history, and its idealism should not obscure the facts that it is not working, and that there is little reason, either in theory or in historical experience, to imagine th a t it can work. Americans pride themselves on their pure democracy, but the Americans owe their cohesion and their unity of purpose to a Constitution based on an older and truer doctrine o f civil society than most Americans realize.

The peoples of Asia have their worst trials before them because they are not yet really living and experiencing their professed faith, democracy in the sense o f majority rule. Today in India it is majority rule carried on by an educated minority itself moulded by Western ideas, and these Western ideas, from the Harrow and Cambridge which gave Pandit Nehru his formation, were only in part democratic.

What the educated Asiatics have done is to use their racial bond with the Asiatic masses to replace, in the name of those masses, the external European rulers, but they do not themselves embody the unchanged religious convictions, the social values, the narrow sympathies and deep antipathies o f the untutored common Asiatic. I t is the strength o f the Communist appeal, not only in China but in varying intensity throughout Asia, that it can make a direct appeal to passions and interests a t the lowest level, and to people who take autocratic rule from above as part of the natural order of things.

All these countries need written Constitutions, and several strong classes, each acting as a counterpoise to the other. Only so could there begin to be some of th a t basic sense of security which the Americans can take for granted. But it is the strongest trend o f the times to destroy all written legal safeguards, and the mentality that understands and supports them. The measure o f progress is made to be the ease and unhampered swiftness with which a majority decision can become law, however extreme the decision, however offensive to natural justice, however small the majority. Such a state of affairs is acclaimed as pure democracy, and all counterchecks are described as survivals o f feudal privilege.

We catch some gusts o f this feeling in this country whenever the House of Lords is seen playing some minor role,

or whenever it is suggested that the Crown might do so. ; voices are at once raised to say th a t these parts o f the Constitution must have only a picturesque and symbolic survival, while the true democrat will place all his reliance in the electorate and the House of Commons, governing by regulation wherever it is too cumbrous to pass new legislation. This is a very unwholesome state of affairs. The Drift to Mass Democracy

Both in Malaya, where the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Oliver Lyttelton, is, and in East Africa, to which the Minister of State for the Colonies, Mr. Alan Lennox-Boyd is going, large political changes are being canvassed.

The argument is advanced that the more plainly unprepared a people is to enter on democracy the easier it is to erect the right institutions and encourage the people to grow into them. In so far as there is this immaturity, advantage should be taken of it to implant diversified institutions under written and sacrosanct instruments, and not to drift, in intellectual indolence, into the crude pattern of single-chamber parliamentary sovereignty, and the direct election o f party candidates. Such practices amount to handing over communities whose great need is for decades o f steady economic growth into the hands of professional politicians, with the ability to organize and orate and inflame and devise programmes appealing to the most widespread emotions and appetites.

The creation o f a new political party in the Sudan, looking to India, Pakistan and Ceylon for support in a campaign for immediate self-government, is of great symbolical significance. I t underlines how near Africa is, across the Indian Ocean, to the Asiatic pattern, which will become increasingly the pattern desired by educated Africans, as the one that promises them most, and most quickly. The Last Opportunity

The measure o f the statesmanship of Mr. Churchill and his colleagues will be how far they can counter-balance measures for local political advance by the creation o f larger institutions, for which the United Europe Movement provides an extraordinary opportunity. The European Powers in Africa should combine to erect a Council for the defence and economic development of all their territories ; and, in proportion as they can make it a reality, the advance to