THE TAB LET, Marth 29th, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 199, No. 5836

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, MARCH 29th, 1952

NINEPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1840

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

SOVEREIGN PEOPLE AND DIVINE LAW

The Dangerous Irresponsibility o f Secular Democracy

BONN AND BAVARIA Bids from East and West for Different Elements in Germany

THE MAKERS OF MONEY II: Cash as the Basis of Credit. By James Dandy

THE CHURCH IN POLAND Unity Maintained. By Julius Lada RECESSION IN LANCASHIRE

The Cotton Industry in Peril THE DUBLIN SCENE Painting, Architecture and the Theatre. By Derek Patmore

AFTER SEVEN YEARS T HE Western reply to the Russian Note on Germany rightly points out what a retrograde step the Russians are proposing when they talk of the re-creation of a German national Army. This note comes at a moment when Mr. Eden is proposing new ways of widening the scope of the Council o f Europe, which ought to be so much stronger today than it is, seeing that it represents the only fruitful principle for the nations of Europe.

their situation, be at all far-sighted or take wide views, which means that every statesman has continually to look behind him to see how far he is being understood and followed. The Case of Dr. Malan

Seven years have passed since, in the spring o f 1945, the German State was declared to have ceased to exist-—seven years in which far too little progress has been made in establishing European concepts and European institutions : so that today there is a palpable apprehension that in the seven years o f such great opportunity there was not sufficient statesmanship to seize and use the unforgiving minutes, and that the drift o f events is now likely to accelerate, and to carry the Germans and other peoples back into the old modes of feeling and purely national institutions which led so swiftly to disaster thirteen years ago. A correspondent on another page examines more fully the curious inchoateness of German opinion as the great issue is being crystallized and presented to them, for a choice which will be fateful for themselves and all their neighbours. It will be very largely determined by what, looking out beyond their own frontiers, they see there is for them to join.

Two great tendencies can be seen at work in the world, the one exemplifying reason and the other passion : for reason tells European men today that on every ground they have to transcend the old conception of national sovereignty inside which their fathers lived so contentedly, that they have to establish for their common defence and their common prosperity permanent habits of alliance, that this is not a century when anybody can proclaim the principle of “ ourselves alone” ; and in almost every country of Western Europe this is sufficiently clearly recognized to create a great volume of support for European Unity. But a t the same time there are a good many disquieting signs of the numbers of people there are who are still living amid the romantic conceptions o f nineteenth-century nationalism, and the current political doctrine that the only valid Government is one created and directed by political parties, drawing a mass support from electorates who cannot, through the nature of

Outside Europe passion is less counter-balanced by reason. Dr. Malan is a Calvinist preacher who is in many ways unrepresentative of this century. But he is a man of his time in his bland assumption that a political party with a small majority represents the sovereign rule of a sovereign people, and that if constitutional rules are found standing in its way the legislature should be used to bring the constitution into line. This is undoubtedly common democratic theory, such as we often hear from I.abour Ministers. So completely has the old idea vanished that the purpose of a constitution is to subdivide authority and to prevent temporary majorities from having their own way too easily or absolutely. (This matter is discussed at greater length in the main leading article this week.)

In Dr. Malan’s case the subject-matter, the rights of coloured voters in the Cape province, is a particularly inflammable one, and it ought to be self-evident that, where several races have to live side by side, a written constitution acquires an exceptional importance. The last thing the white settlers anywhere in Africa want to teach their black fellow-countrymen is a doctrine of the omnicompetence of the political majorities, for then they are teaching a. lesson which can only underline the great importance of first becoming the political majority and then rearranging the laws and institutions of the country at will ; whereas the lesson that ought to be taught by precept and example throughout Africa is not of the sovereignty o f local electorates, but the social importance of balanced constitutions, scrupulously to be respected by all groups, in order to give a basic sense of security to individuals and to property, as the great prerequisite for both economic and cultural progress. More Pay for the Doctors

Few will grudge the doctors the extra pay they are to receive, for, substantial as is the increase o f £500 a year, it will pay tax at the full rate, and surtax. Surtax is today a wholly misleading conception, so much has the value of money changed and the rate of taxation risen since it was originally