THE TABLET January 12th, 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6086

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JANUARY 12th, 1957

NINEPENCE

What Money Cannot Do: What Else is Needed? Prospects for Hungary: Who Can Speak for the Nation? By Bela Menczer Limiting Atomic ^Varfare : The Danger of Slogans. By Eugene Hinterthoff The Responsible Society: Protestant Social Thought. ^By Michael P. Fogarty Home and School : The Harm Done by Conflict. By the Bishop of Salford Nicholas d Oresme: A Modern Economist in the Fourteenth Century. By L. Degado

Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

THE PERSIAN GULF PROTECTORATES PRESID ENT EISENHOWER will soon learn a good A deal about the limitations of money grants as a policy —discussed more fully in our leading article—when the King of Saudi Aurabia arrives to be his guest, coming from the kingdom which sought to impose on the officials of Aramco, the American Oil Company from whom it receives £100 million a year, conditions of residence which include abstinence from alcohol, since they are working in a Mohammedan land, and a prohibition for women to go about unaccompanied. He can hardly be said to need extra money, and he will certainly not agree to take help that he does not particularly want, if there are any strings attached, or if any code of conduct should be suggested of a nature incompatible with his ambitions as the most important of the Arab rulers. His house was runner-up, so to say, when the British were looking for Arab chiefs to make into* kings, forty years ago. They chose his father’s rival, King Hussein, from whom come today’s Kings of Iraq and Jordan. We know very well what he is likely to say in Washington, chiefly about the need to get rid of the British Protectorate in Aden and the special British political positions in the Persian Gulf, relics of the time when Great Britain’s Indian Army threw its shadow across the Gulf, to keep the Russians away, even before the oil had been found. Much will be said of the Yemen, and of the R.A.F., with the hopes of finding once again sympathetic American listeners. Here we may surely hope to find President Eisenhower, if not Mr. Dulles, refusing to accept the bold proposition that in all this desert land there is only one interest to be conciliated! and considered, what is now called nationalism but is just as much xenophobia or religious intolerance.

repulsion, that the Lebanon has been left in peace when to a great many Moslems it is an artificial creation, one of so many, carved out of Syria in order to prevent the Christians from being swamped by a permanent Moslem majority, a sort of six counties in the Levant, where the frontiers of the Lebanon were drawn at their pleasure by Britain and France only in 1943, but in an age now left behind. When Mr. Selwn Lloyd goes to Rome, on January 16th, to return the Italian Foreign Minister's visit to London, he will find an Italian Government and Press which have both manifested a strong sense of European solidarity, including Britain with Europe. He will see what an immensely good thing it was that in the end, and so largely through British negotiation, Trieste was returned to Italy, for Trieste had an extraordinary power of exciting, especially among the young students, an Italian nationalism that is at present happily quiescent for lack of an irritant. Rome is becoming more and more a great international centre, a natural stopping-place for all the political travellers between America and Asia and Africa. It is the Western European capital most conscious of the return of Islam all along the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Madrid also would be, and in a few years’ time, we expect, feeling there will be very unlike what it is today. The mood in Madrid is still an unwillingness to cut losses, an idea that surely ten years and more spent cultivating the Moslem states must be about to yield some valuable results. This illusion will pass. To the Moslems the Spaniards are the quintessence of militant Christian Europe, and in no sense neutrals pre-destined to serve as a bridge between two civilisations.

So far only the Lebanon has given what can be called a welcome to the American offer of aid, and the Lebanon is in no way representative of the Arab world. It is fully half Christian, and because it is half Christian it has not accepted the joint command which Syria and Jordan accepted under Egypt. Indeed, it is only because Israel is there, to draw the fire and be the main object of fear and

Of all the countries of Europe long concerned with Africa and Asia Minor, Britain remains the country most likely to adapt itself to the wholly new situation. The countries of Latin Europe—Italy, France and Spain—are the ones in whose traditions of dealings with the Moslems the role of armies plays the greatest p a r t ; both advance and retreat through the shifting history of the frontier with Islam were military. But the British interest in the Levant