THE TABLET, July 30th, 1955, VOL. 206, No. 6010

THE TABLET

Published as a Newspaper

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUL Y 30th,-1955

NINEPENCE

More Velvet over the Iron: Prospects after Geneva

Falangists and Monarchists in Spain: Looking Ahead. By D ouglas Woodruff

The End o f Peronism o : D on Orione’s Prophecy

Jung and his Achievement: His Eightieth Birthday. By Bernard Mailhiot, O.P.

The Mass. Alas: Some Catholic Pronunciations. By Katharine Garvin 7

The Rake’s Progress: From Hogarth to Stravinsky. By Rosemary Hughes

Physician, Heal Thyself: The Paradoxes o f Mr. Nathan. By Christopher Hollis

Ivan K o logrivov: A Jesuit from the Russian Past. By C. Jesman

B o o k s R e v i e w e d : Nature in Shakespearian Tragedy, by Robert Speaight ; The Slave o f Life, by

M. D . H. Parker ; High Adventure, by Sir Edmund Hillary ; Back to Reality, by Gustave Thibon ; The Oxford Companion to Music, by Percy A. Scholes ; Police Drugs, by Jean Rolin ; Son by Adoption, by Mrs. Edward Whalley-Tooker ; Miss Harriet Townshend, by Kathleen Norris ; The Living Earth, by Sheila Mackay Russell ; and Highways and Byways in Somerset, by Edward Hutton.

•

*

Reviewed by Hugh Dinwiddy, A. C. F. Beales, Bela Menczer, A. Gregory Murray, O.S.B., Charles Burns,

Isabel Quigly and Maryvonne Butcher.

developed countries than racial politics and violent collective emotions, in which hate is always an ingredient.

OVER-APPRECIATED AMENITIES A LIST of the things being paid for on instalments in such large quantities by the wage-earning population as seriously to affect our exporting capacity and balance of payments is a list of recent inventions. Sometimes the origins reach back to Edison or into Victorian England, but the things in the main have only become available for mass consumption in the last thirty years. The minimum deposit goes up to a third for motor-cars and motor-cycles, radio and television sets, refrigerators and washing-machines, vacuum-cleaners, gas and electric fires. There are cameras and gramophones, as slightly older luxuries ; and the gas fire, though much improved in this century, belongs further back. But the broad picture is a long catalogue of the material achievements inside which people now find their comfort and live their lives ; and the list is not exhaustive. In the range of the modern larder the progress has also been striking. These are the pleasures and comforts of Western man, soon to be diffused far more widely, beyond the leading countries of Western Europe and North America : the triumphs of capitalist society. While in some sensitive minds this modem life can be objected to and submitted to a variety of strictures, it brings great contentment to those who are its beneficiaries. It is surrounded with an agreeable sense both of novelty and of individual progress ; and the moralists should look kindly at it, for it accompanies a friendly and pacific public opinion, and the spread of material well-being, individual and general, will be a much better preoccupation for the peoples of the under

The people of this country, appropriating to themselves the products of free enterprise, invention and investment, American and British, are making irrelevant much of the old political language of the Left. But they are creating a new political problem at the same time. They are determined to consume to the full, will throw out any Government which lets employment become less than full or over-full, and find that a mildly progressive inflation suits them ; and, this being public opinion, the Government which must keep up the overseas value of sterling is in a very difficult situation. When meat-producing countries show a similar resolve to keep and consume more of their meat, they can do so provided the world will pay more for what they are still ready to export. When a manufacturing country wants to consume its own manufactures, and the imports that go to their making, it cannot with equal confidence keep its payments abroad in balance by charging more for the manufactures it is prepared to export. We have to keep a close eye on German and American prices for a whole range of exports, and the number of things we can make and export is limited.

Mr. Gaitskell, and other Opposition speakers, are in quite as difficult a position as the Government. It is the people whose votes they need who want to buy cars and television sets. The successful wage-demands immediately translate themselves into a home demand for manufactures of this