THE TABLET, December 4th, 1954 VOL. 204, No. 5976

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FO U N D ED IN 1840

DECEMBER 4th, 1954

N IN EPENCE

C h u r ch i l l a t E igh ty : The National Recognition

The T ragedy o f Valka: For the Attention o f the Germans. By Auberon Herbert

England and th e Im m a cu la te C o n c e p t io n : n : By wuiiam Burridge, w .f .

The E nglish P op e : Adrian IV after Eight Hundred Years. By Helena M. Chew

M e d i ta t io n s in A d v e n t : II. : “People o f Sion, Behold.” By Sebastian Bullough, O.P.

CHRISTMAS BOOK SUPPLEMENT B o o k s R e v i e w e d : George Orwell, by Laurence Brander ; A Thousand Lives, by Iris Morley ;

Mrs. Siddons, by Yvonne fifrench ; Anna Cora, by Eric Barnes ; The Young Augustine, by John O’Meara ; Why I Entered the Convent, edited by George L. Kane ; The Springs o f Silence, by Madeline de Frees ; Shepherd's Tartan, by Sister Mary Jean Dorcy, O.P. ; Candlelight in Avalon, by Augustus Muir ; All in Good Time, by G. B. Stern ; Dead Man in the Silver Market, by Aubrey Menon ; Downside By and Large, by Hubert van Zeller ; The Book o f Beasts, translated by T. H. White ; Sportsmen in a Landscape, by Aubrey Noakes ; Quite Early One Morning, by Dylan Thomas ; The Wit o f Sir Winston Churchill, by Geoffrey Willans and Charles Roetter ; A Bunch o f Errors, by Salvador de Madariaga ; Fantasy and Fugue, by Roy Fuller ; The Blind Man, by Walter Jens ; Unfinished Woman, by Francis Scarfe ; Dances o f Mexico, by Guillermina Dickins ; Dances o f Argentina, by A. L. Lloyd ; Spain, by Martin Hiirlimann ; and a selection o f books for children Reviewed by Christopher Hollis, the Lady Hesketh, Isabel Quigly, Nigel Abercrombie, Augusta L. Francis,

Roland Hill, Nevile Watts, D.W., G. S. Bremner, Maryvonne Butcher, B. C. L. Keelan, Anthony Lejeune, C. A. Burland and T. F. Burns

POLITICS AND S IR WINSTON CHURCHILL, at the happy ceremony in Westminster Hall on Tuesday, spoke of the honour paid to him by Parliament as “the most striking example I have ever known of that characteristic British parliamentary principle, cherished in both Lords and Commons, ‘Don’t bring politics into private life’.” What he meant, of course, was the tradition of restraint ; of keeping on cordial personal terms with one’s political opponents and not carrying the exasperations of debate or the frustrations of opposition outside the Chamber or away from the public platform. For there is an obvious sense in which politics have plunged more and more deeply into private life these hundred years past, so that now political decisions affect private life at every turn. The most private of all lives outside the cloister is that of the housewife or the old age pensioner, and these are the people whose attention is sought most eagerly by the politicians. But there is another and deeper sense in which the British tradition has on the whole successfully observed Sir Winston’s principle. If it has not kept politics out of private life, it has done something which is more important ; it has kept them out of the realm of ideas and on the empirical level, and away from words like “Kulturpolitik” and “ Weltanschauung” and “ideology.” That is the reason for the

PRIVATE LIFE lack of political success of the ideologues in this country, whatever they may sometimes be able to achieve in practical terms when it is a matter of industrial agitation.

It is this part of the British political tradition which is the special envy of continental Europe, more than any constitutional arrangements. In Britain no one has ever had to talk very seriously of Christian political parties because there have never been political parties characterized by an intellectual opposition to Christian belief. It is because such parties exist on the continent that Christian parties have had to exist there also. Nothing in recent years has better shown how necessary such Christian parties have been and remain than the discriminatory policies practised against Catholics by the Government which came to office in Belgium after last April’s elections. It is a policy which has been carried to the most petty lengths. For instance, two Belgian representatives attending a recent meeting in Rome of the Catholic chaplains-general to the NATO armies were obliged to pay their own expenses and were given no official recognition by the Minister of Defence, M. Antoine Spinoy. There are extremely few Protestants in Belgium, yet a Protestant army chaplain attending a similar meeting of Protestant chaplains-general in London had his expenses paid by