THE TABLET, August 20th, 1955. VOL. 206, No. 6013

THETABL A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

/ Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

AUG UST 201h, 1955

NINEPENCE

N o t P a y in g O u r W ay : The Writing on the Wall A f t e r C o l o n i a l i s m : Separation or Integration. By Adrian Hastings I t a l y ’s N e w -F o u n d W e a l th : Natural Gas as Industrial Fuel On B u y in g a M o u n t a i n : The Achille Ratti Climbing Club. By the Bishop of Sinda C a th o l i c i sm in E d in b u r g h : The Faith in the Festival City. By Frank Macmillan F o l lo w e r s o f D e F o u c a u ld : The Contemplative Life. By Lancelot C. Sheppard N o v e l i s t o f D e c l in e : The Mind of Thomas Mann. By Roland Hill P a x R om a n a a t N o t t in g h a m : The Pope’s Letter and the Delegate’s Address B o o k s R e v i e w e d : My Political Life, Volume III, by L. S! Amery ; The Problem o f Jesus, by Jean

Guitton ; The Young Worker o f Today, by Karl Bednarik ; Selected Poetical Works o f George Meredith, edited by G. M. Trevelyan ; Upon This Rock, by James Kirkup ; James by the Grace o f God, by Hugh Ross Williamson ; The Spear, by Louis de Wohl ; and The Searchers, by Alan Le May. Reviewed by D.W., Desmond Schlegel, O.S.B., John Fitzsimons, A. O. J. Cockshut, R. C. Scriven and

John Biggs-Davison, M.P.

“NATURAL HOSTILITY”

T HE Coal Board would have made a small profit in the first quarter of this year but for its need to import and subsidise several million tons of foreign coal, and this turned what would have been a profit of nearly £6 million into a loss of about £Ai million, the heaviest quarterly loss for three years. In the mines in this country the output per man-shift has fallen, and the total output is three million tons behind what it was a year ago.

The Derbyshire miners, coming out against the introduction of Italian miners into the pits, not only invoke the usual argument that the men would have to be trained and so on ; they go on to quote “ the natural hostility towards foreign labour,” in a way that would make the old preachers of international solidarity among the workers of the world turn in their graves. “Unnatural hostility,” they would have said, and they would have been more nearly right, if the nature of man is properly considered. What is disquieting is that in the middle of the twentieth century, and at a time when so much has been said and experienced about the need for men to recognize that they belong to one great community as well as to separate national communities, this feeling can be expressed with the apparently confident belief that it will recommend itself to public opinion.

The nation has progressed beyond the days of “Here’s a stranger, heave half a brick at him,” and beyond the kind of abuse and violence that was offered to the Venerable Dominic Barberi in Staffordshire a hundred years ago, just for being different and strange. But there is obviously present among the coal miners not only an insular attitude of mind, but something which would on the Continent be described as anarchosyndicalism. According to this creed, whose chief home was

Spain, the central Government was to be kept as weak as possible, and each factory and mine was to be a little cooperative republic of the people working in it. These ideas had their attraction, since it was argued that all evils that came through the existence of States and rulers, with armies and ambitions, would be avoided. But these ideas have never got far in England, where Guild Socialism was firmly knocked on the head in favour of State collectivism in the programme of the Webbs. The idea that the miners were the proper people to own mines, which had a good deal of following before 1918 and the Labour Party programme of that year, was firmly set aside in favour of State ownership, and then the propaganda was for a generation that the nation must own its mines and mineral wealth. How far can it be said to do so, when it cannot obtain access to that wealth at a time when it desperately needs to do so, because the miners stand in the way and say that only as much of it shall be brought up by people whom they will choose to allow to extract it ? The miners ought to be asked if they replaced the coalowners as the legal proprietors of the coal, who have in the last resort the right to the final say how the mines shall be worked.

Of course, there are always historical explanations reinforcing material motives ; and so it is here, and the public ought to know the history of organized and unorganized labour over the last hundred years, and particularly the events in the coal mining industry thirty years ago, in order to understand what otherwise looks a singularly indefensible, dogin-the-manger attitude, keeping willing workers from work which urgently needs to be done. History needs to be known so that attitudes which it has created or influenced may be the