THE TABLET January 19th, 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6087
THE TABLET
Published as Newspaper
A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
JANUARY 19th 1957
NINEPENCE
Europe and Power : Mr. Macmillan’s Objectives
Elections in Poland l Can the Sejm Become a Real Parliam ent?
Two Lessons from Hungary : A N a tio n ’s Rising. By A. E. de Jasay
Family Allowances : Excessive Reliance on the State. By Colin Clark
The Use of E n g lish : The Vernacular and the Liturgy. By Dom Edm und Jones, O.S.B.
Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
CHANGE AT THE TOP
"VTO doubt the economy cuts in the training of National
Service men and Auxiliary airmen had been worked out and approved before the change of Government. But that they should be the first acts of Mr. Macmillan’s administration is appropriate to the sense he seeks to impart, of a new contemporaneity, a resolve in all directions to see the world of today clearly for what it is, and to make the necessary adaptations of mind, even though many of the adjustments are painful, particularly for the Conservative Party. The abandonment of cavalry after two hundred years of pre-eminence in the Army, after the first world war, has to be parallelled in many other directions in the Navy and the Air Force, as well as in the Army, in the nuclear age. In the field of international public relations, the war of ideas, the need for change is not .less far-reaching, and we have profoundly to modify inherited and naturally congenial attitudes; and this again is more difficult for the Conservatives than for their opponents.
Not even his closest colleagues were prepared for the sudden resignation of Sir Anthony Eden on January 9th.. It was presented as the immediate consequence of a medical report, so unfavourable that it determined him to resign his seat in Parliament as well as his office. Everyone will feel sympathy for him and commend his refusal to try to hang on without possessing the health necessary to any man who would carry the exacting and arduous responsibilities of the highest office. All will hope that, with freedom from these cares, he will recover his health.
This is not the time to make any extended assessment of a remarkable political career now to all appearances terminated. It began early, for the young Captain Eden was caught up in the machinery of government within a lew years of entering the House, and went steadily forward from one office to another, till Sir Winston Churchill put him by his side and marked him out as his successor. The thirty years of his own rise were also thirty years of decline — relatively speaking; and in international life all power is relative — in the position of Great Britain ; and this is the fundamental reason for the disappointments he met with as Foreign Minister and Prime Minister. Although he1had numerous tactical successes — the securing of Trieste for Italy ranks very high among them — his tenure of office was in larger terms one filled with disappointment. Public memory is so short that even a paper as keenly interested in international politics as The Observer could, at the outset of its leading article last Sunday, write that Sir Anthony Eden resigned in the ’thirties over Abyssinia ; and the Daily Mail twice gave the same misinformation to its readers.
Political life is full of disappointments. Most men never get the chance of power, and the few who do so find that the problems that demand their attention are very unlike those with which they are best equipped to deal. Sir Anthony Eden set out from Oxford admirably equipped for a proconsular career which would have passed by way of the House of Commons to Indian Governorships and Viceroyalties. But he was soon swept into deeper waters, in the age of ideological war and revolution, and deep-flowing human currents which he was less well equipped to measure.
It can happen, it happened both to Sir Winston Churchill and Earl Attlee, that what it fell to each of them to do as Head of a Government was in the main what they wanted to do, and could do well, and the same fortunate event was true of Asquith. But it has not been true of any other Premiers in this century. It was tragically untrue of Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain : but the tragedy for these men was that they had more and more to preoccupy themselves with other matters than those for which they had entered public life. Sir Anthony Eden's tragedy has been of a different s o r t ; there were times when it looked as though his Premiership might be engulfed in economic and financial questions, as may happen to his successor, but in fact it was in his own chosen field that he encountered his great disappointment. No one is acclaiming him as having had a successful time.
Little is said as he departs of his prompt action having stopped a small war, prevented a big one, and galvanised the United States and the United Nations into life and sense in the Middle East. To say these things is to put the best face possible on the matter, but it is not an accurate or objective description of what has been achieved; and still