THE TABLET, April 2nd, 1955. VOL. 205, No. 5993

HE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

APRIL 2nd, 1955

NINEPENCE

The Press at a S tandstill: Why the Challenge ? The Schools in B e lg iu m : Claims of a Predatory Secularism. By John Eppstein H om e le s s Ita lian s : Don Alberto’s Housing Drive An Oil K in gdom : Kuwait in Affluence. By Douglas Woodruff In th e Cold Lands : The Hierarchy Returns to Finland. By Hillar Kallas

H aw o r th and S teven ton : Reflections on a Bronte Centenary. By M. Bellasis M ed ita t io n s in L e n t : VII : Time and Eternity. By Romano Guardini B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Liturgical Renaissance in the Roman Catholic Church, by Ernest B.

Koenker ; Men Seeking God, by Christopher Mayhew ; Lord Liverpool and His Times, by Sir Charles Petrie ; Apollinaire, by Marcel Adema ; Charlemagne : The Legend and the Man, by Harold Lamb ; Flamingo Feather, by Laurens van der Post , The Road Awaits, by Peter Lanham ; No Joy o f Africa, by W. R. Loader ; and The World Before Us, by Lennox Cook Reviewed by Clifford Howell, S.J., David Ballard-Thomas, J. J. Dwyer, Derek Stanford, F. H. Lawton,

John Biggs-Davison and Robert Cardigan.

AFTER RATIFICATION

T HE French Senate’s final ratification of the Paris treaties confronts the Soviet Union with a new, though hardly unexpected, situation. The Kremlin, itself the sponsor of German military divisions in Eastern Germany, has had a good run for its policy of blocking West German rearmament within a Western defensive community. From 1950 to August 30th, 1954, when the European Defence Community was rejected in Paris, this policy was extremely successful, but since the speedy regrouping of the Western Powers last autumn that has no longer been the case. The Communists may have been surprised by the rapidity of the latest Western moves, but they must have foreseen that a repetition of what happened last August was not likely to occur again.

However, the signatures under the Paris treaties are not everything. With the assistance of its supporters in the West, the Soviet Union has gained valuable time. Strategical conditions have greatly changed in the past five years, and, while a German defence contribution is still necessary in principle for the defence of the West, the establishment of twelve German divisions has not quite the same significance today that it had in 1950. This discovery is bound to play into the hands of those who on both sides of the iron curtain advocate the neutralization of Germany. By concentrating on the issue of German rearmament, the Soviet Union has gained, besides time, a considerable harvest of discussions and suspicions within the Western camp. The major political parties in France and Germany, and in this country, are divided on the problem of Germany despite their Government’s signatures, and there is every reason to expect that these internal divisions will be further accentuated by Soviet policy in the near future, and might indeed in the long run constitute a serious threat to the outward unity of the Western Powers as it is now established in Europe. Moves like the “rearmament” of Eastern Germany and Eastern Europe, which have in fact preceded the present Western decisions by many years, will now be explained to Western audiences as a consequence of these policies.

The German Social Democrats are showing themselves most receptive to these arguments. They have already had to discard the irprediction that ratification of the Paris treaties would mean the end of all negotiations on German unity. Now they are saying that negotiations are still possible, but that the Western Powers must take the initiative unless they want to run the risk that the German people, in their desire for national unity, will feel betrayed by the West. The publication of the Yalta documents was, therefore, welcomed by those who want to show that the Western Powers are not now, and were not in 1945, interested in German unity. If the effect of those documents on the Germans was not quite what their extremists on the Right and Left expected, this was due to the more realistic thinking of a public which is well aware of the fact that political necessities decided the deliberations at Yalta as they will decide the fate of Germany today.

The Editor of a leading German newspaper, who was recently in London, said : “You British must understand that German unity is a matter of life and death for us, if not for you. We shall never rest until it is achieved.” But the facts are that German unity is not possible today except at