THE TABLET, March 1st, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 199, No. 5832

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MARCH 1st, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

THE GUARDIAN OF STERLING A Fundamental Responsibility of British Governments PROTESTANTISM IN THE UNITED STATES A Spiritual Revival and its Significance. By Pierre Janelle

“ BUILD YOURSELF A HOUSE” Self-Help Building Societies in England Today. By John M . Todd.

DUEL IN MANCHURIA Rivalry between China and the Soviet Union. By Wilfred Ryder

SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM AND HUNGER A New Book on the Problem of Feeding Mankind. By Jorian Jenks

RELIGION

An Inadequate Account of the Past

IN BRITAIN Half-Century. By A. C. F. Beales

CONTRIBUTION

THE BRITISH T HE Lisbon meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was smoothly and technically successful because it had been carefully arranged, and because the British Government had agreed to meet M. Robert Schuman’s insistence that he must have more to show in the way of a British contribution to the forces in Europe. The British have responded by promising the largest armoured contingent; and the steep rise in the Air Force estimates also reflects the greater contribution that we intend to make. We could wish that this had been done with a little more grace, but since the war Great Britain has, in fact, done much more in the economic field than her representatives have managed to make known. Both in Europe and America we have become chiefly known for our fundamental reservations rather than for our positive contributions. But the solid fact remains, though it will take more to convince the French, for Englishmen ought never to let themselves forget how Frenchmen see the debacle of 1940 as essentially due to the pathetic smallness of the British Expeditionary Force, from a country with a population as large as the French.

So many conditions have been attached to the resolutions on the European Army passed recently at Bonn and Paris that the prospect of reducing them to a common denominator cannot be called bright. The French want NATO to control the output of war materials within the community, as well as its exports and imports. Germany has accepted this condition, and will moreover agree to the further condition that no weapons shall be produced by her except those authorised by the community, which will not allow the Germans to produce heavy weapons or atomic missiles. The French proposal has also been accepted that there should be regular meetings between the Council of Ministers of the European Defence Community and the North Atlantic Council, and this is meant to maintain the exclusion of Western Germany from the Atlantic Pact while nevertheless “associating” her representatives with it on matters concerning the European Army.

NATO is now a network of committees, and it is a safe principle that every committee represents a compromise, is machinery for reconciling differing interests, and that these, differences in the end mean problems for local politicians, who cannot go further than their electorates will follow them.

How true it is that the leaders of mass parties must follow has just been strikingly illustrated in the persons of Mr.

Attlee and Mr. Morrison. They were driven to challenge Mr. Churchill on his American visit because of the feeling in their own party, and the latent danger to their leadership. Their motion proved a boomerang, when Mr. Churchill disclosed that Mr. Attlee's Cabinet had itself agreed to the American proposal for military action outside the frontiers of Korea if the United Nations forces were heavily attacked from Chinese bases. Mr. Attlee has nothing to be ashamed of in that act of high policy except seeming to have disavowed it ; but it is a measure of the difficulties which a Labour Party leader has to face, that he had to cover his tracks, so that a very different impression prevailed among his own followers, who may be excused for not realizing how great the American casualties in Korea have already been. Playing Down to Human Weakness

Far too many Labour supporters still feel like Lord Silkin, whose policy for Britain, as he announced it in the Lords, is first to fix “an agreed standard of living for our people,” possibly at a lower level, “and then devote what was left to rearmament.” This programme, with all its blindness to the gravity of the position, is so easy and attractive that it is widely popular. Vet there is no lesson more plainly written in history than that the way to invite aggression is to show yourself to the world enjoying a comfortable standard of living but lacking not only the means but also apparently the will to protect that wealth effectively.

It is getting increasingly difficult for Labour politicians to combine statesmanship and Party politics. Mr. Gaitskell has always been considered one of the reasonable and moderate Labour leaders, but in Opposition he has been writing in the Daily Min or, identifying himself with the proclamation of envy as a leading and reasonable motive for human conduct, and not, as it is in Christian teaching, one of the seven deadly sins. He attacks inheritance on the ground that it retards production, because it greatly annoys people to see others “ living comfortably on incomes they never earned or getting far better paid in much easier jobs.” Presumably the first thing Mr. Gaitskell would do would be to make the football pools illegal, because he must know perfectly well in how many homes in the country every week coupons are being filled in by people inspired with the hope of obtaining by luck a privileged position ; nor are the winners in fact regarded with bitter feelings.