THE TABLET, October 23rd, 1954 VOL. 204, No. 5970

THE TABLE A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

FOUNDED IN 1840 Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria OCTOBER 23rd, 1954

N INEPENCE

The Moral State: The Right Alternative to Secular Democracy

H indu Castes and the Catholic F a ith : By the Bishop of Allahabad

Industrial Harmony : Some New Trends. By John Fitzsimons

English and American Conservatism : III : Religion and Culture. By Colin Clark

The B irthplace o f Xavier: A Visit to Navarre. By Nina Epton

Lord Melbourne: Lord David Cecil’s Biography. By Christopher Hollis

Books R ev iew ed : The Poetic Drama o f Paul Claudel, by Joseph Chiari ; Church and State

Through the Centuries, by Sidney Z. Ehler and John B. Morrall ; Leda and the Goose, by Tristram Hillier ; Collingridge, by J. B. Dockery ; The First Night o f Twelfth Night, by Leslie Hotson ; The Oxford Junior Companion to Music, by Percy A. Scholes ; The Satanic Mass, by Henry T. F. Rhodes ; The Narrowing Stream, by John Mortimer ; Charlotte Fairlie, by D. E. Stevenson ; Brotherly Love, by Gabriel Fielding ; Pleasure with Paper, by A. van Breda. Reviewed by Ernest Beaumont, J. J. Dwyer, Peter Watts, Godfrey Anstruther, Robert Speaight, A. Gregory

Murray, Letitia Fairfield, and M. Bellasis.

FLEETING TENURES

P ARLIAMENT reassembles with the dock strike still casting an ugly shadow as each day increases the threat to the livelihood of many people, those who work with imported materials, those in the export trade who will lose orders in proportion as this country is thought of abroad as liable to sudden and protracted interruptions. Mr. Arthur Deakin has roundly charged the Communists with the major responsibility and readers of Jan Valtin’s Out o f the Night will recall his disclosures of the way the Communist international between the wars concentrated on the docks and the great ports throughout Western Europe, as the strategic points to attack. But in the general pattern this Communist malevolence mixes with and trades on something else, as it always seeks to do. Sometimes Communists can concentrate on exploiting inter-racial tensions, sometimes on weak links in organization, and in England they have found a weakness in the size of the Empire Ernest Bevin built and Mr. Deakin has inherited a t the head of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The present strikes are more a challenge to that Union leadership than to the employers in an industry where Mr. Bevin himself had introduced so much of the national control which was intended to make troubles like the present out of the question.

Because this is near home and has large implications, it naturally distracts attention from the events of a busy and important week in Western Europe. The London Conference was a starting point not a settled achievement, and since it dispersed, if M. Mendes-France has had rather less trouble than he anticipated, Dr. Adenauer has been having rather more. The lesser members of his coalition have become more restless and exacting ; first it was the Free German Party, now it is the Refugee Party judging the moment suitable to raise their price.

Sir Austen Chamberlain received the Garter after Locarno, Mr. Eden receives it after a much more decisive and, as we hope and believe, more fortunate act of association of this country with Western Europe ; he receives the highest order of English chivalry on the conclusion of the most European action of his career. It is a moment excellently chosen, to show the rest o f Europe how what has happened is no perhaps impermanent improvization, parallel to the offer of jo in t citizenship to French in 1940, but the settled acceptance by the nation of the new conditions in the world which have called so imperiously for a radical revision o f many of our long-cherished ideas.

The kind o f general post which has taken place in the Government enlarges the experience of Ministers, but it also diminishes their authority. All the men taking up new duties do so with the knowledge that they are not likely to remain more than perhaps eighteen months ; even if their Party wins the next election the probabilities are th a t there will be a further general post. This has its compensations, for the individuals, but it is one contributing factor to the general trend o f Ministers to become constitutional rulers while their departments have a life of their own, pursue their own policies and regard their political chiefs as birds o f passage against whose personal wishes time is always a t work. The famous Vatican superscription on difficult files “Wait till this Bishop dies” is based on a long experience that on an average, by the time a bishop has become difficult he probably has