THE TABLET, March 27th, 1954 VOL. 203, No. 5940

THE TABLET

Published as Saper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

FOUNDED IN 1840 Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria MARCH 27th, 1954

NINEPENCE

I African C itizenship : The Capricorn Africa Society The A ttack on Savings: The Report of the Millard Tucker Committee. By Douglas Jerrold Welfare and Taxation: V : Education in a Free Society. By Colin Clark H ow Catholic is Holland ? : Il : After a Hundred Years France After Liberation: a study in Disillusion C r i m e a n R e f l e c t i o n s : War for the Holy Places. By Nigel Abercrombie E u r o p e Against Russia: The Centenary of the Crimean War. By Bela Menczer

Film Festival in Brazil: Discriminating Audiences. By Francis Koval

Lenten A led ita t io n s : The Wonder of His Mercy. By Gerald Vann, O.P. B o o k s R e v i e w e d : An Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie, by Robert Southwell ; Folly Farm,

by C. E. M. Joad ; The Bandit on the Billiard Table, by Alan Ross ; Three Singles to Adventure, by Gerald Durrell ; The Baths o f Absalom, by James Pope-Hennessy ; The Confidential Clerk, by T. S. Eliot ; and Devon, by W. G. Hoskins. Reviewed by Philip Caraman, S.J., Christopher Hollis, John Eales, llltud Evans, O.P., Ray Edridge and

E. W. Martin.

STRAINS IN THE ALLIANCE O NE main threat to the maintenance of peace comes from the existence of so many clients and satellites : small countries and weak Governments and parties which look either to Washington or Moscow, and undetermined citizens who only want to be sure of being on the winning side. The need not to lose face and to keep the support of followers and partisans in these countries accounts for much of the stiffness which makes it so hard to settle even the preliminaries of the Geneva Conference. The French Chief of Staff is in Washington, explaining to the Americans the burden that France is carrying in Indo-China, and finding increasingly irksome as the months go by and the Korean War becomes a memory. This and any other French Government can call on the Americans for moral as well as for material help in what is the sector of a common front. Part of that moral help must consist in not saying anything which suggests that the effusion of blood and money is unnecessary and that all that is really needed is the will to confer. Sir Winston Churchill’s speech in May, looking eagerly for the change that he hoped Stalin’s death had made, had unfortunate results in Italy, because it enabled the Communists to depict their Christian Democrat adversaries as more intransigent and difficult than the British Prime Minister.

munist propaganda does not, like Communist propaganda in Europe, confuse the issue by the use of partial slogans. It presents the war in black and white, with every yard gained against the French as land won for Socialism against capitalist exploitation.

Little enough is likely to come of the meeting at Geneva : its primary use in Russian eyes is to fortify the opposition to European defence, and the stronger that opposition shows itself to be in advance, the less the Russians will feel they have anything to gain by making any real concessions, when they can divide the Western world by nothing more expensive than language, and without giving anything away.

A few years back it seemed that the main problem of European defence was the material problem of paying for it. In the event there did have to be some scaling-down of the time-table at first thought feasible. But now, in the fourth year, the difficulty is more moral than material. The measure of economic recovery in Italy and France has not dislodged the Communists from their important electoral hold, while the rapid German recovery, and the small success of Communist policy there, has had a dampening effect in France.

The Communists in Viet-Nam have throughout glorified Moscow and Pekin. When, in January of this year, the Vietnamese-Soviet-Chinese Friendship month was held in Communist Indo-China, with grateful tributes to the Soviet Union and to Comrade Mao, there was an underlining of the important geographical fact that the areas of Viet-Nam which the Communists control adjoin the vast Communist Empire, with its twin capitals in Moscow and Pekin. The local Com

In a few weeks' time we shall be celebrating the tenth anniversary of the great landing in Normandy which opened the final phase of the war. That, ten years after that triumph of joint Anglo-American teamwork, the air should be so full of evidence of national Governments framing their policies towards Moscow in such loose co-ordination to each other, is a commentary on the way the ten years have been spent. They have been allowed to slip by with too little being done to put the alliance on any solid and continuous joint foundation,