I HE TABLET, March 12th, 1955. VOL. 205, No. 5990

Published as a N ew sp a p e r

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MARCH 12th, 1955

NINEPENCE

Bom bs for Everyone ? : Valid and Invalid Reasons for Making Them

U n so lv ed Crisis in M o scow : The Struggle for Power. By Victor S. Frank

Socialists Out o f Step : Credit Policies Here and on the Continent

Parental R igh ts and th e Law : The Duties o f Educational Authorities

Wariness in Trieste: Europe’s South-Eastern Defence

D u tc h C a tholics in P o l it ic s : A Socialist Group and the Bishops’ Wishes

The M ed ie va l Papacy : A Contribution to Scholarship. By David Knowles

General Janvier as Traitor: A Russian Centenary. By Béla Menczer

M ed ita t io n s in Lent : TV : History and Judgment. By Romano Guardini

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : Georgiana, edited by the Earl o f Bessborough ; The Scholar and the Cross,

by Hilda Graef ; Edith Stein, par une Moniale Française ; The Theme o f Beatrice in the Plavs o f Paul Claudel, by Ernest Beaumont ; Laureate o f Peace, by G. Wilson Knight ; St. Benedict and His Monks, by Theodore Maynard ; Iran, by R. Ghirshman ; An Angel's Name, by Louise Collis ; Daughters, by Doreen Wallace ; Young Mrs. Burton, by Margaret Penn ; and Collected Poems 1954, by Cecil Day Lewis. Reviewed by J. J. Dwyer, Roland Hill, Paul Foster, O.P., Patrick Braybrooke, T. F. Lindsay, Sir Rupert

Hay and Isabel Quigly.

BEVAN’S BID

C ONSIDERABLE courage is being shown by the Labour Party in its stern treatment of the latest rebellious behaviour of Mr. Aneurin Bevan. Nonconformist pacifism is something with very much deeper roots than Tribune Bevanism, and it is to that that Mr. Bevan is appealing at the moment, rather than to his political camp-followers. By no means all of those described as Bevanites joined in the present rebellion, but many Labour M.P.s did so who were either pacifists already or who felt that the hydrogen bomb had driven them into pacifism. Such people are very much more important electorally than the authentic Bevanites ; their appeal is to a religious tradition that is remembered and understood, and not to academic politics which are hardly understood at all. It is commonly supposed that an election is now not very far ahead, and if Mr. Bevan fights it on a “Ban the Bomb” platform he will, we suspect, produce not less but more straining at the leash of Labour Party discipline.

It is a curious reversal if Mr. Bevan is now well on the way to securing the support of some of the very people in the Labour Party who ten years ago most disliked him. His views on strategy have not in the past been such as to promote economy in human life, and ten years ago this was very well remembered. Mr. A. L. Rowse wrote to the Manchester Guardian the other day to recall his campaign against the wartime Government, when he was calling for a second front in Europe before a second front was possible. If Mr. Bevan’s advice had been taken then, Mr. Rowse comments, it “would have meant sending thousands of men to their deaths and losing the war against Hitler.” Mr. Rowse goes on :

“ I have never forgotten the wicked and cruel irresponsibility of it. It is obvious that this man’s judgment is not to be trusted where the life and death of the nation, the lives of fifty million people, are concerned.” The Communists were grateful for Mr. Bevan’s support for what they were themselves vociferously demanding, but there was no popular support in the country. It was not difficult for anyone to understand that a premature D Day would mean disaster. Now it is quite different. The Communists are once again grateful ; they would very much like an assurance that nothing that the Soviet Union does without nuclear weapons will be resisted with nuclear weapons. But it is much less easy now for those reading, for instance, what Mr. Bevan wrote in the News Chronicle on Wednesday to know that to grant what he asks for would be to invite disaster. Many people, sickened, as we all are, by what they read about hydrogen bombs, simply conclude that Mr. Bevan is the man who wants to make sure that hydrogen bombs are not dropped.

It appears, meanwhile, that the leaders of the Labour Party are at least not going to allow the pressure for a meeting “at the highest level” with the rulers of Russia to be a Bevanite monopoly. It is perhaps not even a monopoly of the Opposi­