THE TABLET, June 4th, 1955. VOL. 205, No. 6002

TH E TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUNE 4th, 1955

NINEPENCE

H e ld t o R a n s o m : An Unjustifiable Strike I n d ia a n d t h e C a th o l i c C h u r ch : Mr. Nehru’s Forthcoming Visit to the Pope H O W C a th o l i c i s G la s g o w ? : A Survey of Religious Practice. By Frank Macmillan I n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f E v o lu t io n : The Teaching of Humani Generis. By Philip Fothergill A c t i v a t e I t I : A Question of Voice. By A. H. N. Green-Armytage B e a u ty a n d t h e B e a s ts : Mr. Osborne and Critics of the Arts. By Dorn Illtyd Trethowan B o o k s R e v i e w e d : Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth, by Conyers Read ; Executive

Discretion and Judicial Control, by C. J. Hamson ; A History o f Worship in the Church o f Scotland, by William D. Maxwell ; Medieval Cornwall, by L. E. Elliott-Binns ; The Measure o f My Days, by Sarah Gertrude Millin ; Bull Fever, by Kenneth Tynan ; Welsh Legends and Folk-Tales, by Gwyn Jones ; Legends o f Ireland, by J. J. Campbell ; Naples and Its Surroundings, by C. E. W. Lalande ; The Last Hunt, by Milton Lott ; The Dutch House, by Susan Gillespie ; William Conrad, by Pierre Boulle ; and Sheep's Clothing, by Austin Lee. Reviewed by J. J. Dwyer, F. H. Lawton, Peter F. Anson, E. W. Martin, J. C. Marsh-Edwards, Derek

Stanford, David Ballard-Thomas and Anthony Lejeune.

REJECTION OF SOCIALISM N OT for nearly a hundred years has an outgoing Government come back with an increased majority. Last week’s vote was in part a fair-minded recognition of the record and character of the Conservative leaders, and of their superior claim to direct international and national policy. But the vote has, we may reasonably think, a deeper and better significance. The curve on the graph is continuous, and 1955 has continued the course which 1951 and 1950 began—a movement all the time progressively away from that acceptance of the Socialist creed and outlook which was at its height by 1945. In so far as there has been a swing of the pendulum, it is on a larger time-scale than between Parliaments of four or five years’ duration. The partial acceptance of Socialism was a gradual process, which gathered great momentum for exceptional reasons between 1935 and 1945, as it has been losing momentum in the ten years since. And what is happening is at. a deeper level than is suggested by those who talk of the present election as a surprise due to apathy. The rejection of Socialism must take time. But the process of rejection is going on, and we hope and believe there will be still less of it five years from now. The positive movement of votes last week was small ; but the drop in the total number of votes cast for Socialism was very marked, and was, as Mr. Morgan Phillips said, a chief reason why his party did so badly.

servatism to appear before the electors offering a better brand of progress, one that involves much less bureaucracy, and, more important, one that does not involve any element of class warfare. That conception, which is the essence of Bevanism, is something for which the country is too civilized and too prosperous. The majority of the electorate have what Communists call a bourgeois mentality ; have achieved or are rapidly achieving comfortable middle-class standards, and are no longer easily persuaded to think of the community as divided into contending factions. They are justly and sensibly proud of the way in which, even in much more difficult earlier times, we have avoided importing into this country the class antagonism on which continental Socialism has reared itself. When Mr. Attlee, in the moment of defeat last week, still repeated the old misleading antithesis between a community planned for the general advantage and one organized, or left unorganized, for the private advantage of the few, he was repeating party clichés which have had their day. The electorate, if it is becoming more middle-class and responsible, is also an electorate with a keen eye for differentials. The moral of the railway strike, as of the recent newspaper strike, is how little real desire there is for the levelling process ; that, on the contrary, anyone who believes he has an advantage of skill or indispensability is only too insistent to have it recognized in status and practical reward.

The truth is that a great deal of the stock platform language of Socialists has become irrelevant, and does not sound true or interesting. While it is the spirit of the age to look forward and want public policy to be progressive, the Labour Party is so deeply rooted in the old conceptions of State Control and the class struggle that it is allowing a renovated Con

The Socialist meetings were in general more poorly attended, especially by the young, because there is no one left for the Socialists to denounce as they could be denounced in Lloyd George’s Limehouse days. It is clearly understood, much more clearly than it was before the war, that in every modem