THE TABLET April 13th, 1957. VOL. 209, No. 6099

THE TAB! ET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

APRIL 13th, 1957

NINEPENCE

Sensible Progress: Mr. Thorneycroft’s Budget

Religion and Apartheid in South Africa: By Oswin Magrath, o p At ter the Strikes: The Consequences for the Ship-building and Engineering Industries

Cardinal Segura : Archbishop of Seville and former Primate of Spain

111 Es Petrus : The Conclusions of the Dean of Christ Church. By Kenelm Foster, O.P.

The Bible in Lent: V I: Lifted Up from the Earth. By Leonard Johnston

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

BEHIND A STATE VISIT

UPHE visit of the Queen to Paris has called forth all the A pre-eminent gifts of the French as hosts, for what was an occasion filled- with significant overtones. When the Queen’s father and mother visited Paris, nineteen years ago, the two countries were drawing together in the face of the Third Reich, but there was in each country a great conflict of opinion, and an unresolved debate about the best courses to pursue; and the years that immediately followed that State visit were destined to see the Entente Cordiale strained beyond breaking point, and only re-established through General de Gaulle, who should have been preeminently in evidence on this State occasion. Uncomfortable as his relations were with the British Government, he became, and has remained for the British people, a symbolic figure of the Anglo-French entente.

Today the French, like the Germans, want Great Britain to play her full part as a leading European country, to accept the logic of history that only in the degree to which the European nations achieve a real union will Europe be able to count;in the world as those two other unions, the United States and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, count today.

Behind all the personal warmth extended to the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh there is a keen French desire to find more understanding and support in Britain for the lone hand France is playing in Africa. Here Britain stands midway between the French and the American attitude, or perhaps rather nearer to the American. M. Mollet is a Socialist, but he is. acting today as a Frenchman, in a French tradition that is centuries old, stemming from the time when France was the defender of the Latin Christians in the Levant. It is a tradition which survives in the existence of the State of the Lebanon, designed to give the Christian Arabs their own State, in which they are on an equal footing with the followers of the Prophet.

The French claim to be the last representatives of Europe in Africa, asserting the claim of Europe to be as good as the claim of Arabia to be present on the south as well as the north shores of the middle sea.

There is great weight in the French contention^ that the Europeans should stand their ground, and not make too headlong a flight before African democracy, when the Africans themselves may reproach us a little later on if their countries go the way of Indonesia. They will say, with much truth, that nationalism is a heady wine for the first generation of nationalists; that of course they were carried away, and wanted to be sovereign States overnight, without any conception of the difficulties before them, both political and economic, and perhaps military. They did not know, but we should have known, and had the courage of our convictions. The French are at the present time almost alone in the African world in trying to move slowly. They are acutely conscious that they may be Dushed out through lack of support and comprehension, just a generation before atomic energy transforms the barren face of the North African interior.

They have a very good illustration of what they mean in the immediate short-sighted reaction in Britain, when France included her African colonies in the common market agreed to by the Rome Treaty which has just been signed. They could not possibly have left their colonies out, and put a tariff wall between France and French Africa, at a time when they are trying to persuade French Africans to value association with. France. They thought they were making a useful contribution to the balance of European trade, and so they are. A common market will be all the better if it has some tropical territories, and the British ought to say that, while they will not dictate to countries on the verge of independence, like Nigeria, they hope there will be a general movement by States like Ghana to link their fortunes to Europe. Instead, we have pulled very long faces, exclaiming that the inclusion of colonies has made it vastly more difficult for us even to make a free trade area of a kind that will save Imperial Preference.

From our side, we can justly charge the French with not making enough effort to pass beyond a rather old-fashioned psychology and a colonial attitude which has the very effect they most deplore in stimulating local nationalism, making