THE TABLET, Juns 11th, 1955. VOL. 205, No. 6003

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUNE 11th, 1955

NINEPENCE

Force or R eason ? : The Nation and One Industry

N apoleon in B e lg r a d e : After the Visit o f the Soviet Leaders

Germany’s Foreign M in ister: Impressions o f Dr. von Brentano. By Kees van Hoek

Flow C a th o lic is G la sgow ? : A Survey o f Religious Practise : II. By Frank Macmillan

“ L ondin ii in U rb e” : Ealing Abbey Church as it will be

The C hallen ge o f S c ie n c e : An Address o f Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy

The Irish in England : Cardinal Griffin’s Pastoral Letter

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : The Retrial o f Joan o f Arc, by Regine Pernoud ; K2 : The Savage Mountain,

by Charles Houston and Robert Bates ; Obedient Men, by Denis Meadows ; Philosophy and Analysis, edited by Margaret Macdonald ; English Dolls, Effigies and Puppets, by Alice K. Early ; The Oracles, by Margaret Kennedy ; The Charming Boy, by Mary L. Hacker ; The Cone-Gatherer, by Robin Jenkins ; Major Thompson Lives in France, by Pierre Daninos ; Little Cabbages, by George Mikes ; and Cambridgeshire, by N ikolaus Pevsner. Reviewed by Sir John McEwen, A. C. F. Beales, Joseph Christie, S.J., Laurence Bright, O.P.,

Aubrey Noakes, M. Bellasis, Anthony Lejeune and Richard Butcher.

THE REAL SUMMIT

W E do not understand why the Western Powers, inviting the Russian Government to talks at the highest level at Geneva in the middle of July, should express the wish to limit the talks to three days. That there must be a time limit is clear enough. Conferences in which the Soviet take part easily acquire the timeless character of a negotiation in an Oriental bazaar. But three days means a very few hours only of conversation ; hours halved by translation. These short conferences can be useful when everything has been arranged beforehand, but it is not at all that kind of conference which is envisaged, but something much more akin to a social meeting, all the Governments being anxious to show the world that the fault does not lie with them if international tension is so great : and from that point of view, if statesmen are to meet at all, with the eyes of the world upon them, they ought to spend a week in each other’s company, or the proceedings will be purely formal.

Mr. Dulles has issued a warning that the United States will continue to live as a nation imperilled and must not let the desire to see tension relaxed result in watchfulness being relaxed even in the United State. He hopes the conference will serve to identify the causes of tension, but this would involve a survey of Communist dynamism in all the varied forms it takes both inside the Soviet Union and in other countries where Communists are at work. Three days can easily be spent presenting to the Soviet leaders an annotated account of all the things they have done to heighten tension and force the armaments race in the last ten years, of all the subversive activity of which Moscow has made itself the ultimate headquarters, and of all the official barriers imposed to prevent normal and human intercourse between peoples under Communist rule and the rest of the world.

Time should be made for a discussion on ways to bring the University of Moscow and other Communist centres into proper intellectual relations with the Western academic world. There ought to be the most exhaustive and public disputation, in the medieval manner, on all the basic propositions of the teaching of Marx and Lenin which have been used to such effect to cleave the world in twain. As the professors of this doctrine claim that it is highly scientific, demonstrable and verifiable, they should not decline the fullest debate, from which Western thinkers are confident it would emerge shorn of its authority—a mixture of half-truths and dogmatic falsehoods generated in the special conditions of the nineteenth century and only maintained with difficulty, in a hot-house atmosphere, being in itself, in its materialism, so inadequate as an account of human nature that it would soon go the way of Comtism and nineteenth-century positivism and be seen as itself a part of the historical process which it professes to sum up and explain for the first and last time.

The word “neutrality” enjoys a certain popularity in the United States today, and one might have wished that Mr. Dulles’ recent clarification about its irrelevance, in Western eyes, to the German problem, could also have been heard from the President. It is the weakness of the Western democracies that their policies are so dependent on the fluctuating states of public opinion, to which they have constantly to adjust their formulas, so that at this moment the trend in the