THE TABLET, April 23rd, 1955. VOL. 205, No. 5996

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

APRIL 23rd, 1955

NINEPENCE

Gleams o f H o p e : A Budget Facing the Right Direction

A Curtain Falls in Indo-C h ina: I : The Hour Approaches

II : Report from Saigon. By Elizabeth Reid

Skill and Wages: The Acute Question o f Differentials

Rule o f L aw : An Enquiry into the Powers o f Administrators. By Philip Bell, Q.C., M.P.

Tribute t o Einstein: Relativity and the Absolutes. By Peter E. Hodgson

A rch o f C o n s ta n t in e : A Study in Decadence. By J. M. C. Toynbee

P. Teilhard d e Chardin: The Search for Human Origins

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : St. Thomas Aquinas : Theological Texts. Selected and translated by Thomas

Gilby ; A Woman o f Vienna, by Joachim von Kiirenberg ; Portrait o f Saint Luke, by A. H. N . GreenArmytage ; The American Nation, by John G loag ; A History o f the United States, by D . C. Somervell ; Keats, by J. Middleton Murry ; Moonraker, by Ian Fleming ; The Picnic at Sakkara, by P. H. Newby ; Coromandel, by John Masters ; The Moving Waters, by John Stewart Collis ; Myth or Legend? by G. E. Daniel and others ; and Milou's Daughter, by Mrs. Robert Henrey. Reviewed by T. S. Gregory, Isabel Quigly, Mgr. John M. T. Barton, A. C. F. Beales, A. O. J. Cockshut,

John Biggs-Davison, D . B. Grundy and M. Tschoeberle.

THE DOMESTIC ISSUE

A LTHOUGH Mr. Shinwell heckled the Government about high-level talks with the Soviet Union, it seems unlikely that the Opposition will be able to make much of this as an election issue. Too much has happened in ten years for anyone to echo Ernest Bevin’s slogan in 1945, “The Left can speak to the Left.” That was a masterpiece of deceptive ambiguity, parallel to the opposite senses in which Communists and their opponents use the words “democracy” and “freedom,” and a slogan on which Ernest Bevin’s subsequent record at the Foreign Office was a sufficiently eloquent, and redeeming, commentary.

A more effective line for Mr. Attlee and his colleagues may be to suggest that Britain with a Labour Government would cause the American Republicans to pause and speak and act more carefully in their handling of the supreme question overshadowing the world. But then there remains great uncertainty about what, in fact, a British Labour Government’s policy would be ; whether it would be Mr. Morrison who returned to the Foreign Office, and whether the fact of a Labour victory would not strengthen the left wing of the party, where there are people as dangerously addicted to wishful thinking as this country has seen in any previous decade. The strong probability is that the leading party figures will use much the same restrained language about the international scene, and that the Election will be fought on the cost of living ; on whether the Government could and should have done more, on whether they have not a very creditable record to stand on.

Three and a half years is rather a short period, when the life of a Parliament is fixed at five years, and the Election is not coming now because of any breakdown in the machinery of the Whips’ Office. The feat of governing with an exiguous majority, first demonstrated by Mr. Attlee, has been repeated for over twice as long ; and in each case the dissolution has been prompted not by strain in the Chamber, but by the clouds that can be discerned coming up in the sky. It is the same old balance-of-payments difficulties which are the recurrent trouble facing the nation, and calling all the time for remedies and correction of a kind that the Conservatives can apply much more easily than their opponents can. The answer to the cost of imports can only be found in expanding production, and here the Government can point to many favourable signs when they ask for a renewal of electoral confidence.

The electorate today is so large, the turnover of a few thousand votes in some sixty marginal seats so decisive, that no one can predict the final figures. But the very modesty of Mr. Butler’s Budget concessions, discussed elsewhere, is itself presumably a reflection of Conservative confidence that, as things are at the moment, they can count on being returned to power.

Mr. Gaitskell lost no time in showing himself once again ingrainedly hostile to the business community, deploring that they are to have any relief, and this indicates the line of demagogic appeal which the Opposition, even the so-called moderates, apparently propose to follow.