THE T ABLET, January 6th, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 199, No. 5824

FOUNDED IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, JANUARY 5th, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE EUROPEAN ARMY

Some Progress Before Lisbon A BATTLE WITH TIME

What the Government Can Do to Fight Inflation. By Douglas Jerrold

THE PAST YEAR IN SPAIN Changes for the Better in Various Fields

CHRISTMAS IN ROME THE PEACE OF THE WORLD The Holy Father’s Midnight Mass The Holy Father’s Allocution

THE APOSTLE OF VIENNA

The Second Centenary o f S t . Clement Maria Hofbauer. By Walter C. Breitenfeld

RETURN TO CHESTERTON

The First o f a Series of Extracts from the Forthcoming Book by Maisie Ward

FEEDING THE ISLANDERS T HE year just opening is likely to be preoccupied with prices, with every Government, and particularly our own, engaged on the same battle to prevent them from rising, which is another way of saying that every Government will be trying to restrict consumption and increase production. The National Coal Board has been able to give the country, as a greeting for the New Year, the news that 220,000,000 tons were secured last year, a total slightly above the estimate in the Economic Survey fo r 1951 ; and while this is not yet sufficient, because we desperately need to be able to export coal to help pay for essential imports, it marks very definite progress.

Marketing Board devoted a good deal of attention to this question, and to the slogan, misunderstood in some quarters, “The Empire as a Home for Pigs” ; and the basic preoccupation was sound. Mr. Rowntree took 3,500 calories a day as his standard, and found plenty of men not consuming that number of calories in their diet, though this was often a matter of choices, of what foods they and their wives were preferring. Today we have become so calory-minded that the nation is living on foods of a heavy starchy kind because they are calorifically correct. This question of diet, so fundamental in the long run, is at the heart of any good national policy, but it is, like so many questions today, one in which a longer perspective is necessary than the three or four years in which the electoral system compels Party leaders to think and plan. The Necessity for Long Views

The Chancellor of the Exchequer gives 46 per cent as the figure by which food production will soon have increased since before the war. This again, like the coal figure, is good as far as it goes, but is insufficient. Both political parties will, in the end, and quite rightly, be judged by their food policies ; by their ability to make a variety of food, including meat, available in the shops. The resources are there. We have political and economic control over a great deal of the earth’s surface. We have many friends in the Commonwealth, and outside it, very ready to supply so large and steady a market. The war brought a shipping crisis which imposed siege conditions, but these have disappeared, and th a t the rations six years afterwards should be no better than they are is the chief reflection on the planning of those who have been in charge.

The British public is proverbially patient and long-suffering, and anyone who will read the Appendices to Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s famous study of Poverty made fifty years ago in York will get a shock. Mr. Rowntree collected not only the weekly housekeeping but the actual menus of the food consumed through specimen weeks by the families living at or below the poverty line he had chosen, and these budgets and menus and prices remain, giving their testimony to how the very poor, at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, expected to eat, and did eat, meat twice a day ; while the great majority, living in varying degrees of comfort above the poverty line, fared, of course, proportionately better.

There is nothing ultimately recondite about either pigs or poultry. Both, left to themselves, show every readiness to increase. The task of agricultural statesmanship is to find the places and the food whereby they can increase, to find all the ways round the objection that feedingstuffs are costly and bulky. Twenty years ago, just before its demise, the Empire

Mr. Churchill has said that no one will be able to judge whether his Government has made things better or worse for at least three years, and such a term, which seems long to any opposition, is really irrelevantly short for projects of food production here or in the Empire, especially at a time when capital investment has to be slow. I t is not without reason that the grandiloquent autocracies talk in terms of five-year plans, and, as soon as one five-year period has ended, announce the next. What they are really doing is by instalments unfolding projects requiring twenty years to develop and mature, and it is a great defect in our constitutional arrangements that there is nobody in the State with prestige and authority to hold up before the public these long-term schemes, whereas there are plenty of people, on platforms and in the Press, calling for immediate results. Undoubtedly one of the reasons for the groundnuts fiasco was that it was something conceived politically, by politicians in a hurry for something to show.

Mr. Churchill shows himself rightly preoccupied with the great jeopardy facing fifty million people, grappling with the serious problem of how to secure for the world the high standard of living they have come to take for granted and as a right, if they will not forego the luxury of a continual deep division about the whole structure of their society. Unfortunately, it has become a vested interest on the Socialist side to broaden the area of division ; to suggest that by voting and legislation society can be altogether transformed. However clearly the more moderate leaders understand that,