THE TABLET,November 6th, 1954 VOL. 204,»No. 5972

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

F O U N D E D I N 1840

N O V E M B E R 6 t h , 1954

N I N E P E N C E

E gypt, Israel and B r ita in : The Bad Prospect

A T ru ce in th e D o ck s : The Two Principal Issues behind the Strikes

The Way t o P eace in K enya: A Priest Looks at Mau Mau. By P. F. McGill

D r . E vatt’s D i s c om f o r t : The Setting. By D. P. O’Connell

The S tu dy o f H i s t o r y : I : “And As I Dreamed . . By T. S. Gregory

The Russian Church a t G en e v a : A Byzantine Touch in Calvin’s City. By A. D. McLean

C hurches in S a a rb rü ck en : Some Examples o f Experimental Architecture.

Salus P o p u l i R om an i : Last Monday’s Ceremonies in Rome

B o ok s R e v i e w e d : The Golden String, by Bede Griffiths, O.S.B. ; Rendall o f Winchester, by

Canon J. d’E. Firth ; The Interior Carmel, by John C. H. Wu ; The Meaning o f Holiness, by Louis Lavelle ; Greece in Photographs, by Roger Viollet ; The Bach Family, by Karl Geiringer ; Beyond the Glass,by Antonia White ; The Valley, by Dorothy Charques ; Antonia, by Naomi Jacob ; The Newel Post, by Rachel Ann Fish ; This is Sylvia, by Sandy Wilson ; More Winners for Winsome, by David Murphy ; and The Art o f Coarse Cricket, by Spike Hughes. Reviewed by Illtud Evans, O.P., Colin Clark, Desmond Schlegel, O.S.B., Vincent Desborough, Anthony

Milner, M. Bellasis and B. C. L. Keelan.

AMERICA AND GERMANY

I N the middle o f an American President’s four-year term there come Senate and Congressional Elections, ju st as three-quarters o f the way through interest shifts to the forthcoming Presidential election, and the nomination o f candidates. Generally in the mid-term election there is some shift away from the Government in power, but internationally this is not very im portant today, while the two parties keep so much in common ; and in any case it seems clear as we go to Press that the Democratic prognostications of sweeping victory this year have not been realised.

Perhaps the Democrats can substantiate a claim to be pre-eminently, from the time o f Woodrow Wilson, the party that has been first to understand that the United States must play a big positive role in the world and assume an increasing leadership. It was the Republicans who rejected the League o f Nations, and under Roosevelt th a t America became a leading Power in world politics. But the Republicans can point out that their last two Presidents, Eisenhower and Herbert Hoover, both made their reputations in Europe and on the international scene; th a t Roosevelt’s foreign policy, in all its more important developments of his later years, was a jo in t policy ; and that in the last election the differences between Eisenhower and Stevenson were no more than one o f emphasis and nuance, although each party had a strong temptation to denigrate the other—the Republicans to blame the Democrats for tragic failure to comprehend the nature and ambitions o f Communism, the Democrats to charge the Republicans with a secret hankering after selfish nationalist policies which would not even achieve their own limited and inadequate objects. In practice there is continuity, and where American policy has made mistakes, they have come out of American education and American preconceptions about the rest of the world which are not the property o f the Democrats alone.

Perhaps the American Democrats would be temperamentally inclined to move more warily than the Republicans over German rearmament ; but both parties are at one in wanting to do what can be done from Washington to sustain Dr. Adenauer and further his European policy. Both regard direct American and German relations as a second best, imposed by the French refusal to take part in a more fullblooded European policy.

Dr. Adenauer has clearly scored a point with the offer he made in Washington of a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. It is the kind of thing one would have expected to come from Paris rather than from Bonn. He has seized upon an issue which his opponents and the European neutralists have so far considered their own special preserve. He is adjusting himself to the new situation by which the NATO-Brussels arrangements have been substituted for the European Army. He is also following the wise principle enunciated by St. Thomas More, that “ if you cannot turn something to the good, you must at least try to turn it so that it becomes not very bad.”

Co-existence is a desirable ideal if it is not based upon illusions. It is not Dr. Adenauer who entertains these