TEE TABLET, May 10th, 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 199, No. 5842

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, MAY 10th, 1952

NINEPENCE

FOUNDED IN 1 8 4 0

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

HAND TO MOUTH

The Inherent Shortsightedness of Parliamentary Political Rule

APPREHENSIONS IN ITALY The Divided Front for the Local Elections THE DECLINE OF THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL

How the 1944 Act Works Out in Practice

SALMON ON INFALLIBILITY An Examination by the Abbot of Downside

THE CONTROL OF “THE TIMES” THE ROYAL ACADEMY

II. The Radicalism of Barrington-Ward

By B. C. L. Keelan

THE WATCH ON THE RHINE T HE integration of Germany into the European Defence Community must not be held up while there is a Four Power Conference with the Russians. We have every reason to suspect that the Conference is only suggested for the sake of disrupting the NATO programme, as General van Fleet finds that the Korean Communists were never serious in their armistice negotiations. It is consequently strange to find Mr. Attlee now advocating that the German Defence contribution should be postponed while a Conference is held. The West is right to make it plain that it is always ready to discuss, but that such discussion is not going to deflect or postpone the action which has been agreed upon as necessary. Mr. Attlee's record before 1940 showed him a very flexible and good party man, and while this new wind is blowing so strongly in the party, he will not be rigid in withstanding it.

By a curious irony the triumphant first trip of the Comet, a British achievement in the best tradition, while it promises much speedier travel, has meant much slower travel for one Very Important Personage. The first reaction in the American Senate was the postponement of the Foreign Aid Bill after Senator Knowland had drawn attention to the Comet. The Senators had already cut the appropriation by nearly £400 millions, and it now stands at £2,464 millions. Senator Knowland’s argument was that while America has to find this money to equip NATO countries with modern jet planes, Great Britain has stolen a march with her commercial jet.

The Germans have not yet passed through this. The Western Germans are only now beginning to find their feet, to form and express independent views, to pass beyond the fear that so far from the Allies including them, Western Defence might start on the Rhine. This still remains one of Dr. Adenauer’s great cards, that a Germany that would not take part in the Atlantic Community would be deliberately choosing to live in no-man's land, in the hope that conflict would pass it by, although it would hold in the Ruhr one of the principal prizes which both combatants would be most swift to seek to control. Dr. Adenauer can truthfully and forcefully tell his countrymen that the voices now being raised, including some British Labour voices, are the voices of sophists, that the unity and the neutrality offered are mythical unless the West is so strong that Soviet Imperialism cannot dominate Germany as it has dominated the other countries into which her power has extended : and that Social Democrats are fooling themselves who think they could be a match for Communists linked with Moscow When they themselves refuse to be linked with the Atlantic Community. The anticommunist Germans can be safe, since they are the great majority of the country, in proportion as Germany is closely integrated with the anti-Communist Atlantic world ; but they will be in danger if they fall to the temptation to detach themselves and try to stand alone. The Pensioners and the Engineers

It is the kind of argument of which more will be heard as, with each week that passes, Republican and Democratic Conventions draw near, and in controversy, which is the mother of truth, Americans look very closely at the Europe with which they have linked themselves. The world watches the Rhine, and today Dr. Adenauer is the crucial European figure, and the great question of the hour is whether he can speak for Germany. The Germans are being told, not only by the Russians, that their last chance of a United Germany will disappear if they let themselves be drawn into European Defence, but that if they refuse they can hope for a United Germany, even if it is one with a strong Communist party. Quite as important as the attraction of unity, is the suggestion of neutrality, for every people naturally plays with the idea that perhaps with luck and cunning it can contract out of trouble. The last few years have seen the Americans, the French, and the Italians as well as ourselves, each in turn reluctantly recognizing that there can be no neutrality for them, that their only safety is in unfamiliar and close alliance.

One of the most significant statements of the week was that by Mr. Osbert Peake, Minister of National Insurance, on the way the fall in the value of money is playing havoc with the actuarial calculations behind National Insurance. More than two million old people are receiving National Assistance to supplement their pensions : a very high proportion of the pensioned population. The great attraction of insurance was that the money came without inquiry or means test, and this attraction is proving illusory. The news came simultaneously with new wage demands, even a proposal in the Amalgamated Engineers Union for a demand for a £2 a week increase which would add £300,000,000 a year to the wages bill, and make the position of all insured and pensionable persons that much worse. We are in the presence of one of the recurrent features of history, that money tends all the time to lose its value, because the actual producers in any generation are in a strong position against those who rely for their consumer’s share of current production on legal and moral claims postponed from the past. Salary and wage earners in work