THE TABLET August 25»h, 1956. VOL. 208, No. 60*6

TH E TAB! El A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

AUGUST 25th. 1956

NINEPENCE

CARDINAL GRIFFIN An appreciation, and a record of his life, with a portrait Europe and Asia: Tile Larger Issue Beyond Suez

Anglican Orders : Two New Books. By the Abbot of Downside

Critics' Column : : Book Reviews : : Chess

CUSTOMERS IN AGREEMENT

/T ,iHE Conference of main users of the Suez Canal has with ■*- but three dissentients, Russia, India and Indonesia, and two more half-hearted abstainers, Spain and Ceylon, approved the general plan put forward by Mr. Dulles, speaking particularly for Britain and France, whereby an international authority should be in charge of the efficient and fair working of the world’s most important artery. This is a very considerable success for the British and French Governments; they have quickly mobilised an impressive range of weighty opinion behind their basic contention. For their part, they have wisely changed and modified their emphasis, and accepted the majority view the next step must be to make formal contact with Egypt, with no note of an ultimatum. It is recognised that the central feature of the Dulles proposals is for an international body to exercise effective authority of a kind President Nasser has said he cannot and will not accept. But he has also recognised that Egypt has obligations to the rest of the world and is prepared apparently, if Egyptian sovereignty is recognised at the outset, to limit that sovereignty by formal undertakings under the United Nations.

We refer further in the leading article to the larger question of what sovereignty should mean in the modern world, with special reference to Asia. The Conference, much more than partial mobilisations by indignant customers, is an effective reminder to the political leaders of these new countries that they are all members of a larger society, and have obligations as well as rights.

President Nasser has ostentatously gone on holiday, basking in the sensation very agreeable to the Egyptian public, that an Egyptian has fetched the Foreign Ministers of half the globe dropping their other preoccupations to hurry to London and discuss how best to handle him.

Meanwhile, we can note with satisfaction signs of the commercial approach, notably the arrival in South Africa of Sir Eric Millbourn, adviser on shipping to the Minister of Transport, to arrange for South Africa to handle much ■more sea traffic from Asia and Australasia. Broadly speaking, the smaller a ship is the more profitable is it to use the Canal, but the larger the ship, the less important the shortest route becomes; and the tendency on many other grounds is anyway for ever larger ships to be built. The

Egyptians need to catch a glimpse of what, given sufficient incompetence and illwill, the future might be, of a derelict water alley, silted up and overgrown with debris; there is nothing in the world more melancholy than a disused canal.

President Nasser has much more reason to fear the disappearance of the highly trained pilots and other servants of the Company he has so abruptly dispossessed, than he has to fear the sudden descent of British troops. Against the British troops he can easily arouse passionate Egyptian national sentiment, and the active sympathy of neighbouring countries. But to proclaim the nationalisation of the Canal and then not be able to keep it open is to cut a ridiculous figure, exhibiting to the world the poverty of Egypt’s own technical skill at the present time. The strong language used against him has helped him, has made friends for him in the Middle East and further afield in Asia, offsetting the natural tendency of these countries to be highly critical of a man and a nation who are talking too big. He would be a much more anxious man if the Canal was quietly ceasing to function through the unwillingness of the staff of the old Company to serve a Government which has nol got a good record for its treatment of British and other officials whose employments had been terminated in the post-war years; and if the main users of the Canal could be quietly seen reducing their use of it, not angrily and politically, but quietly and commercially, making their plans to develop alternative sources of oil or by alternative route for the oil from the Middle East. Faced with such a situation, no one would get excited in India or Ceylon or Malaya, but the Egyptians would be extremely anxious to find on what terms compatible with their national pride the users of the Canal, the customer who is always right, would come back to full strength.

It must be recognised that there is still a seriously wide gap between what may be called the Western proposals pul forward in studiously moderate language by Mr Dulles, for international authority established with the consent of Egypt but under the umbrella of the United Nations and President Nasser’s newly expressed readiness to commit Egypt to a code of conduct in operating the Canal any breach of which would be accepted by all parties as an act of aggression entitling the United Nations to act. But there has been pro­