TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Reqina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

FEBRUARY 25th, 1956

NINEPENCE

The F a t e o f J V l u r d e r e i ' S : The Government’s Precipitation A p a r t h e i d i n P r a c t i c e : Impressions in South Africa. By Hilary J. Carpenter, O.P. N e w A p p r o a c h e s t o t h e S a a r : The Conversations in Paris. By Reginald Colby R e d b r i c k o r N o t : In Search of Pastures New. By Edward Sarmiento E c c l e s i a s t i c a l C o u r t s : The Church of England and the Privy Council W a i t i n g f o r G o d o t : “Qui Quaerit, Invenit.” By Anthony Bertram H o l y W e e k R e s t o r e d : II : Palm Sunday. By Lancelot C. Sheppard C r i t i c s ’ P a g e S : Ballet Birthday, by Arnold L. Haskell ; Glass, Tapestry and Painting, by

Winefride Wilson ; Films of the Week, by J. A. V. Burke ; Dorian Gray in Dublin, by Ulick O’Connor B o o k s R e v i e w e d : In Time o f Trouble, by Claud Cockburn ; Transformation in Malaya, by

J. B. Perry Robinson ; Science and Civilisation in China, by Joseph Needham ; The Religious Vocation, by Jacques Leclercq ; Carlyle: Selected Works, edited by Julian Symons ; The Altar Steps, by Compton Mackenzie ; The Ambassador's Wife, by Philip Gibbs ; Love at First Sight, by Naomi Royde Smith ; Girl in May, by Bruce Marshall ; and St. Francis o f Assisi, by Leonard von Matt and Walter Hauser. Reviewed by D.W., R. P. S. Walker, E. F. Caldin, J. McDonald, E. W. Martin, Christopher Derrick and

M. M. Digby-Beste

M. KHRUSHCHEV’S CONFIDENCE I N the course of his seven-hour speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, M. Khrushchev divided the non-Communist countries into those in which the Communist Party can hope to come to power through legal parliamentary processes and those in which revolutionary action will be needed to clear away the bourgeoisie. In the former category he places many Asian countries—and no doubt India is one of them, and the bourgeois Nehru is to be got rid of legally. Italy is probably another.

What was revealing about the speech is how completely its author remains the product of his education, looking out on the capitalist world through the eyes of Marx and Lenin, although the capitalist world is an entirely different place from the world that Marx and Engels were contemplating and studying a hundred years ago, or Lenin fifty years ago. Some concessions have had to be made to obvious facts which have disproved so much that Marx and Lenin confidently expected. All the great industrial movement for joint economic activity, in which America and Britain have led the way, the richer countries helping the poorer, were inconceivable to M. Khrushchev’s teachers. So he has to pretend not to see them and to concentrate his gaze on those features of the free world which Marx and Lenin knew about, the competition between different nations for overseas trade.

There plainly exists in his mind a quite mythical picture of “the worker” as a class apart, only needing the right leadership to burst his chains and enthrone Communist Parties. One reason why it will be useful that M. Khrushchev should come to London will be that it will enable him to see for the great tug-of-war going on all the time over wages is inspired by the desire everybody has to achieve what M. Khrushchev would call bourgeois standards, and to consider themselves as belonging to the middle class. The struggle of skilled men for differentials, in something that will mark them off from the unskilled, even at the expense of the unskilled, cuts right across the conceptions of the solid proletariat which Marx and Engels popularised and handed down to M. Khrushchev. Let him come to Britain and look for the proletariat. Professional politicians of the Left will perhaps be able to take him to a few places in Wales or the Scottish Lowlands, but if he is a man of any intelligence he will realise how completely unrepresentative these areas are in this respect. Dr. Arnold Resigns

The fall after ten years of Herr Arnold’s Government in North Rhine-Westphalia, ousted by an unnatural combination of Social Democrats and Free Democrats, is an event of great importance, and deeply to be regretted. It weakens Dr. Adenauer’s position, destroying his two-thirds majority in the Upper Chamber at Bonn, to which the Lander Governments send representatives of their own party complexion. North Rhine-Westphalia is lost to the Christian Democrat Coalition.

It will be a great misfortune for Europe if Dr. Adenauer should be displaced before his Western policy has had time to set. These are still the very early days of West German participation in common defence and the creation of German