TH E TABLET, July 24th, 1954 VOL. 204, N o . 5957

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JULY 24th, 1954

NINEPENCE

Defeat in Asia : The Geneva Terms and their Implications

The Great Debate am ong German Socialists: Their Conference in Berlin

Protestants in Colombia: An Authoritative Enquiry. By Edward Sarmiento

Last o f th e Levellers : A Recent Pamphlet by Professor Cole. By Paul Crane, S.J.

Penguin Translations : Introducing the Greeks. By Vincent Desborough

Irish Colleges Abroad: Ireland’s Continental Interlude. By Christopher Tunney

At th e Shrine o f St. James: The Great Day at Compostela. By Nina Epton

The Faith in Leeds: The Golden Jubilee of St. Anne’s Cathedral. By James V. Wilson

B o o k s , R e v i e w e d : Warren Hastings, by Keith Feiling ; England and the Italian Renaissance,

by J. R. Hale ; The Courtauld Collection, by Douglas Cooper ; The Dark is Light Enough, by Christopher Fry ; A Few Late Chrysanthemums, by John Betjeman ; Half-Term Report, by William Douglas Home ; Heart on the Left, by Leonhard Frank ; Spare the Rod, by Michael Croft ; The Poor Scholar's Tale, by H. W. Freeman ; The Deep Sleep, by Wright Morris ; and Lonely Pleasures, by Daniel George. Reviewed by Christopher Hollis, Godfrey Anstruther, O.P., John Beckwith, Gerard Meath, O.P., Renée

Haynes, John Biggs-Davison, Uvedale Tristram and Elizabeth Hamilton.

THE NEXT FRENCH POLICIES M MENDES-FRANCE goes back to Paris with increased • authority. He has achieved an agreement at Geneva which does a t any rate relieve the French of what had come to seem an unending drain of men and money. It is not, it could not be, a good agreement, or one on which any Frenchman can reflect with satisfaction. Seven years of war, and nineteen thousand dead Frenchmen, with larger colonial casualties, and so large and barren an outlay, have ended in results much less satisfactory than could have been achieved either by earlier negotiation or by more resolute expenditure a t the beginning. But all this sorry story is the epitaph of the Governments before M. Mendes-France. The contemplation o f it makes him more acceptable to French opinion. Here at last is someone who can make and carry out firm decisions which at any rate give some advantages, instead of the men, playing politics and temporizing and dabbling half-heartedly here and there, who have so often let their country fall between all the stools. In this mood the French public will watch M. Mendes-France turn to two subjects, each as im portant as Indo-China. He has made a policy for France in Asia : what will he do for France in Africa ? And what for France in Europe ?

negotiate, to seek to advance by safe paths and political techniques, that moral will powerfully reinforce the feeling in France in favour of taking up again the question of Germany in negotiation with Russia, in the hopes that a meeting less abortive than that at Berlin can be arranged.

M. Mendes-France has been equivocal over EDC, and there is great uncertainty how far he felt he needed to be supported by the opponents of EDC, if he was to have his chance as the Premier resolved to stop the Indo-China war, or how far his larger purpose is to stop German rearmament, whether inside or outside a European Army. Certainly there will be strong pressure, and not only from the French Communists, to try to apply the solutions of Indo-China to Germany ; to talk of the withdrawal o f all forces belonging to other Powers and of the international supervision of elections for a united Germany which would then stay neutral between East and West. On their side the champions o f EDC can now argue that a France relieved of most of her Asian burden becomes to that extent more of a military power in Europe, need not be so frightened of German preponderance, and would be very foolish to shoulder huge burdens in Europe while leaving the Germans to prosper in commerce and pay lighter taxes because they were not doing anything for their own defence.

Both the issues, of African nationalism and of German rearmament, will be affected by what has happened in Geneva. I f the moral is drawn that the French would have done better to recognize and support nationalism in Indo-China before the Communists could capture and exploit it, the lesson for Tunis and Morocco is fairly plain. If the moral of Geneva is that Moscow and Peking have the will and the sense to

This last point is one of the weaker parts of the Bevanite case, as stated this week in a Tribune pamphlet, It Need Not Happen. This pamphlet, written in preparation for the Party Congress in September, argues that German rearmament was only ever agreed to, in the last year of the Labour Government, under American pressure ; that the American pressure