THE T A B L E T , M ay 24th. 1952

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 199, No. 5844

FOUNDED IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGINA ET PATRIA

LONDON, MAY 24th, 1952

NINEPENCE PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

A CHARTER RENEWED The Future before the B.B.C.

PORTUGUESE IMPRESSIONS 1. Lisbon, and the Sense of Achievement. By Douglas Woodruff

COAL, THE KEY TO PROSPERITY

By Geoffrey Lesson UNION AND SEPARATION

Mr. P. S . O’Hegarty’s Ireland Since the Union, reviewed by Frank MacDermot MAY IN RAVENNA THE SAYINGS OF HISTORY

By Illtud Evans, O .P .

By J . J. Dwyer

A PARTING MESSAGE A S General Eisenhower prepares to leave Europe and enter the American Presidential battle he reiterates as his parting message the primacy o f the spiritual factor. When he left London on Friday last he enumerated the three factors, spiritual strength, economic strength and military strength, and when he left Holland he amplified this message. But whereas in England he had defined spiritual strength as a passion for freedom, in Holland he went further, and said “Free Government without spiritual values and religion is impossible. D on 't be afraid to say men have souls, for if they do not, then what we are fighting for is silly.”

intercourse as an exchange of noises only conveying information about the character and tastes of the creature making them, the various forms of nihilists and the rather more cheerful existentialists, how rich is the twentieth century in variants o f doctrines which in' the end as they reach wide audiences produce an irreverent agnosticism about objective truth, morality and human duty.

One o f the main troubles of Europe is that too many Europeans have in fact indulged in doubt whether men have souls, and one consequence has been that national leaders and public men anxious to offend nobody have said as little as possible about an issue on which they know their hearers to be divided or confused. There is a melancholy uniqueness about this because in all previous eras when European men have had to prepare themselves for the possibility o f mortal conflict, they have done so fortified by religion, generally with a belief in personal immortality, or a t the least with a religion of patriotism and worship o f the nation, such as was inculcated as a false religion by the Nazis. In Holland, General Eisenhower evoked the memory o f Cromwell and his Ironsides : an image more congenial to the Protestant than to the Catholic Dutchmen. But the Ironsides served well enough to illustrate his point that men must have both a vision of the better society, which is so widely understood today, and also a sense of a personal duty to be fulfilled, a situation to be resolved by an act of moral choice and personal decision, in short, men must believe in themselves? as moral agents, and it is a great part of the weakness o f Europe that the challenge today finds so many at all levels of education equally doubtful about the worth of the individual and the collective future for humanity. There was never a time when more was said about the importance of freedom, a doctrine pre-supposing human responsibility and moral worth, by people who when pressed have to admit that they are making inherited judgments of value, which are unhappily at variance with what they believe to be scientifically true about the nature o f men.

With the philosophers who delight to deride the very possibility o f metaphysical truth, and to depict human

Much of this is a reaction not only from Christian orthodoxy, but from the enthusiasm for schemes and programmes, the application of the methods of natural science to man and society in which the two previous centuries had indulged themselves so thoroughly. Much of it is a reaction against the aimably optimistic view o f human nature which those centuries fostered ; and it is a tribute to the forms o f society prevailing iii Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, forms it is fashionable to hold in low regard today, that they enabled so many people to take so much for granted: that they thought they had only to conceive how to go forward to extend the blessings of wellbeing and security to everybody, and never thought they had to ask whether there was a risk that what had so far been gained would not in fact be retained.

The present generation is engaged incongruously enough in organizing its military defence and exploring its moral weakness. It is a necessary exploration, even though the conclusions show that something has been lost which cannot be recovered for the asking. But the first step is to see where the mistakes lay. The Strasbourg Session

The forthcoming session o f the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, which opens in Strasbourg on Monday, is likely to determine the fate of that organization. The choice is between two courses, that of a larger or smaller amount of real powers, or the Council’s continuation as a centre of debating. The alternative is frequently posed as between the Federalist and anti-Federalist schemes, and there are indeed Federalists on the Continent who, in their passion for unity, want to override the very diversity which is the soul of Europe,Just as there are still people in this country who, with Lord Beaverbrook can say : “The British people want no part in any plan for the political, economic or military integration with the Continent of Europe.” Basically, however, these are not the relevant issues.