THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

FOUNDED IN 1840

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

MAY 29th, 1954

NINEPENCE

While Asia Watches: The West Must Not Abandon any Allies

Paralysis at Paddington: Lodging-Turns and Operational Efficiency

After the Irish E lection: Towards a National Government ?

H ow Catholic is Scandinavia ? : I : Facts and Figures

B e llo c the Poet: The Nonesuch Edition. By Robert Speaight P i l l S X : P o p e a n d S a i n t : “To Restore all Things in Christ.” By Mgr. Gordon Wheeler

St. Pius X and IModernism : Meeting the Higher Criticism. By Humphrey J. T. Johnson

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : Living Christianity, by Michael de la Bedoyère ; The Politics o f Belief in

Nineteenth-Century France, by Philip Spencer ; Oil in the Middle East, by Stephen Hemsley Longrigg ; The Interpretation o f Music, by Thurston Dart ; The Secret People, by E. W. Martin ; Nelson, by Carola Oman ; Stay Away, Joe, by Dan Cushman ; The Crooked Rain, by Gerald Gordon ; The Seventh Moon, by François Gorrec ; Mrs. Betsey, by Francesca Marton ; Footman in Powder, by Helen Ashton ; and The Mendips, by A. W. Coysh, E. J. Mason and V. Waite. Reviewed by Clifford Howell, S.J., Mgr. H. Francis Davis, A. Chisholm, Anthony Milner, Reginald Jebb,

Christian Hesketh, John Biggs-Davison, Isabel Quigly and Richard Butcher.

THE CRISIS OF EDC

W HEN, next year, it is ten years since the war ended, what will the balance-sheet be ? They will have been ten momentous years in which the Communists have vastly increased and consolidated their power, and have in consequence become more dangerous and ambitious for quicker results : years in which China, and with it much of Asia, has been lost, and in which Europe has shown wholly insufficient energy, resolution, and clear-sightedness, so that by today far too little has been done to defend and hold Western Europe, and little or nothing to restore to their rightful freedom the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.

On the credit side, the great compensating factor has been the record o f the United States, whose material progress has gone forward, and who has grappled courageously with the quite unexpected and critical tasks o f world leadership which have fallen to Washington. The making o f atomic and hydrogen bombs, Marshall Aid, the intervention in Korea, all reflect a readiness to take and implement large decisions, economic and military, constructive and defensive. I t was Mr. Ernest Bevin who seized on General Marshall’s suggestion, and secured its translation into the great reality o f a programme which has so far ju st preserved and fostered the recovery of Western Europe. There was British decision at the time o f the Berlin air lift, which yielded, as decision has generally done, great and good results.

But in general the verdict on the ten years will be that an immense opportunity th a t came with 1945 was fumbled and mishandled, and that the British to whom the leadership of Europe was so gladly offered a t that time did not know how to use it. I t was an exceptional good fortune that brought simultaneously to power three great Europeans in Dr.

Adenauer, M. Robert Schuman an d Signor de Gasperi. But Britain produced no great European, because we had cut ourselves off too deeply from the Continent centuries ago, so that our statesmen could only think in terms of positive sovereignty and nationalism, and with the advice of the Foreign Office, an institution created to protect the sovereign interests of this nation in the world.

Mr. Morrison’s speech at Strasbourg on Tuesday showed a lively and apprehensive realization that this summer is the last chance for the European Defence Community ; that the alternative, already being urged by the German FDP, is a German national Army, and that its concomitant is a separate German diplomacy, with the constant temptation to seek a special bargain with the Kremlin, and to play between East and West. Mr. Eden, visiting Strasbourg, said that the offer to associate British land and a ir forces with a European Army was “an unprecedented act of faith.” We are very glad Mr. Morrison spoke as he did, urging the French to delay no longer, because in Mr. Morrison’s own party there is a strong current running against any German rearmament, whether in or out of EDC. This is thought, from experience in the constituencies, to have high electoral value—impracticable as such opposition is if the Germans want to rearm and the Americans want them to rearm ; disastrous as it would be if they did not want to rearm a t all. So the Labour Party Executive has taken the unusual step of exempting the issue of German rearm ament from the general rule that majority votes bind all members of the Executive.

All this Labour opposition is a living in the past, highly dangerous now, as the world enters an increasingly critical phase. Why that phase is critical Field-Marshal Montgomery,