THE TABLET, July 25, 1953 VOL. 202, No. 5905

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Recjina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JULY 25th , 1953

NINEPENCE

H ila ire Belloc: I. His Life and Work. By Douglas Woodruff

II. A Master of English Prose. By Mgr Ronald Knox III. His Judgments on the Stale. By Christopher Hollis, M.P. IV. A Portrait. By James Gunn, A.R.A. V. The Apologist. By F. J. Sheed VI. Verses by T. B. Rowan and H. E. G. Rope VII. Champion of the Church. By the Bishop of Southwark

(Ecum enical P ilgrim age : Non-Catholics in Rome. By Columba Cary-Elwes, O.S.B.

B o o k R e v i e w s : By Lance Wright, Yvonne Trench, Sir Arnold Lunn, Anthony Bertram,

M. Bellasis, Henry St. John, O.P., and A. Gregory Murray, O.S.B. Correspondence from Maurice J. M. Larkin, Mgr. H. Barton Brown, Robert Speaight, H. P. R. Finberg,

the Abbé G. Marc’hadour, Florence D. Cohalan, John Tracy Ellis and Michael King.

IN THE EUROPEAN FAMILY M R. BUTLER had a difficult task deputizing for the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary in the Foreign Affairs Debate, and much o f the language in his speech was the vocabulary in which the Foreign Office traditionally likes to deal with its subject matter ; cautiously vague language, making great use of words like “aim” and “ possibilities,” so th a t nothing said today can be brought up later as proof of falsified prognostication or disingenuousness.

Mr. Butler’s main difficulty came from too many of his listeners having built far too ambitious a superstructure on the Prime Minister’s speech on May 11th, in which he suggested a general uncommitted and ranging conversational Conference with the heads o f the Russian Government. It is now widely pretended on the opposition benches that something solidly hopeful and constructive has been dashed to the ground, but this is not the position. It was never true to say that at any rate such talks, even if they did no good, could not do any harm. They could do great harm if, for fear of coming away empty-handed and unsuccessful before their own electorates, Western statesmen agreed, as they would be tempted to do, to some general communique whose effect would be to condone and accept as permanent and reasonable the Soviet Empire as it has been extended through a system o f satellite Communist Governments in Eastern and Central Europe.

We are particularly glad that Mr. Butler quoted the words of the Washington communique, that “we wish to see true liberty restored in the countries of Eastern Europe,” and said that, “ while we must continue to counsel patience and restraint, we also pay a tribute to the populations o f those countries.” These are quiet words, but their implications are far-reaching, for you only counsel patience and restraint to people whom you believe to be having an abnormally bad time, and one which will not continue indefinitely. It is important to establish that Britain, no less than America, is not in the least prepared to consider a settlement in Germany and Austria, the only great matter dividing Moscow and the Western world.

One of the worst lines of policy we could pursue would be to purchase new arrangements in Austria and Germany at the price of writing off the other peoples of Central Europe, leaving them to think we had disowned them. This would enable the Russians to say we were only interested in the Germans, and that they could have nothing to look to from the West, unless it should be, disguised under quite different names, in effect another German occupation. For this reason alone the integration of Germany, not only with Western Europe, but in the Atlantic Community, must continue to be the basis of our policy. It is quite unrealistic to talk as though the Germans could be left without alliances and without arms, unoccupied, uncommitted, in a no-man’s-land, while the world waits and watches to see what elements come to the top in Germany, what is precipitated there.

The great, broad difference between the ambitions of the Second and the Third Reich was that the Hohenzollerns sought sea-power and imperial greatness through world trade. The Germans who toasted Der Tag were imitative in the nineteenth-century tradition— imitative and envious of the England of the Diamond Jubilee, anxious to find how it was done, anxious for possessions in Africa. But they were still too much imprisoned in the long tradition of the Prussian Army not to seek to further these ambitions by the use of military power. With more restraint, a more commercial and a less military bias a t the top, an immense world system, parallel to that which the English built up, might have been organized from Berlin.

The fundamental ambition of the Third Reich was quite different, much more primitive, a return to the ideas of a land empire which had made up so much of the history of the German tribes. But whereas in history their movement had been westward, the Third Reich envisaged a south-eastward expansion, to the vast plains in the Ukraine, an empire resting on helot populations, and reaching down to the Caspian Sea. For the realization of this basic idea of Mein Kampf France and Britain had to be held off, first by diplomacy, and then by war and the occupation of Western Europe to the coast.