TEE TABLET, March 8th, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

VOL. 199, No. 5833

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MARCH 8th, 1952

NINEPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

ERSKINE MAY IN AFRICA Transplanting an English Growth to S trange S o i l

THE FRANC ENDANGERED

The H is to r ic a l L e g a c y o f Hoarding INDIA FACES THE NEXT FIVE YEARS A fter the E x e r c is e o f Universal Suffrage. B y John B ig g s -D av iso n

THE SOVIET INTELLIGENTSIA

An Inquest. B y V ic tor S . Frank YOUTH WILL NOT BE SERVED Searchings o f H ea r t in the Youth O rgan isa t ion s . B y John F itzsim ons

DANTE’S POLITICAL THINKING A S tudy by P ro fesso r d’E n treves. B y Christopher H o l l is THE CELEBRATION OF EASTER NIGHT

A S ign ific an t R e fo rm . B y L an celo t C . Sheppard

THE TEST OF A NATION T UESDAY, MARCH l l t h , will be a momentous day for this country. One great political party, the Labour Party, failed to grasp the nettle firmly and do the unpopular things that needed to be done to reduce sufficiently the inessential consumption of the nation. We have a second chance in the other great political party, the Conservatives. But the portents since they took office four months ago are not particularly encouraging that they will do sufficiently better.

We have the spectacle of the French, willing the end and refusing to will the means, wanting expenditure and refusing to pay for it. Politicians can only work within the limits set by public opinion and public comprehension, and it has been the disconcerting experience of responsible men in both parties to discover in the country how much of the electorate is irresponsible and self-centred. It is dominated not merely by the cost of living, but by the expectations, which even the Conservatives, with some exceptions, must admit to having encouraged more than they should, of a basic right to live in a particular way. The public are, in their turn, not very much to blame, for their instinct rightly tells them that there has been a good deal of mismanagement of their affairs. A people who are still the centre of the greatest political and colonial system ought not to have to hear speeches about becoming a vegetarian nation and seeing meat perhaps once a week.

The change for the worse, by comparison with the housekeeping budgets and weekly diets fortunately preserved for posterity in Mr. Seebohm Rowntree’s study of Poverty, fifty years ago, point the inescapable conclusions. The present condition is worse than it need be through errors o f public policy. I f it is wholly due to outside causes, though there are few outside causes that a British Government and the British market cannot influence, then our whole policy since 1945 was singularly recklessly conceived, and far too much was spent on secondary matters like extending education and creating an immensely costly Health Service, with resources that were urgently needed to safeguard the flow of raw materials and food, both for human beings and animals, into this island.

The Budget will be introduced when already there has been some perceptible and painful increase of unemployment and concealed under-employment, where men are employed and paid but do not get or do a full week’s work, through scarcity of material in engineering, or through difficulties of markets in textiles. The temptation is not likely to be resisted on the Labour side to connect unemployment with Tory government, and to evoke again past memories whichever, however understandable, have no valid claim to be the guiding consideration to men’s attitudes today. This was clearly recognized by Mr. Alfred Robens and other Labour speakers when the House of Commons debated man-power. But there is a dangerous swell of unrest in parts of the country, and the moderate Labour leaders are now fighting a difficult battle on two fronts at once. They have to be ungraciously uncooperative towards the Conservatives if they are to stay at the head of their own movement. But if they are unco-operative, and fight a bitter party fight, the Conservatives will retaliate. Already Mr. Churchill’s first conciliatory attitude on resuming the Premiership has been effectively discouraged. The Embarrassment of Mr. Attlee

I f they cannot hope for co-operation, the Conservatives can find great compensating advantage in the embarrassments of the moderate Labour leaders. It is a natural Conservative calculation that if the left-wing of the Labour Party grows rather stronger two things will follow. The movement will be consumed with a conflict between its two wings, one o.f which passes by gradual stages o f extremism till it reaches the Communists, and the other passing, with a parallel distaste for revolutionary solutions, into a kind of Radicalism.

There are two profoundly opposed political philosophies inside the Labour Party, where antagonism could be effectively glossed over in opposition and in the first taste of power. But now that the party is seeking a new direction and a fresh programme, the issue of more and real Socialism cannot be evaded. Not only is the conflict real, but of its nature it will estrange from the Labour Party a great many non-political voters, for the English have a natural distaste for drastic political solutions. For sixty years now the Conservative Party has been in office when and because their opponents were divided, as the Liberals were after the departure of Mr. Gladstone, and again after the split between Asquith and