THE TABLET May l l l h , 1957. VOL. 209. No. 6103
Published as a Newspaper
A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
MAY 11th, 1956
NINEPENCE
President Coty at the Vatican : Rumours of a French Concordat
First and Third of May: Contrasts Last Week in Poland. By Auberon Herbert The Poetry of Roy Campbell : An Estimate. By F. T. Prince
1he Social Catacomb: 11: The Exaltation of the Church. By John P. Murphy Pax Romana in Rome : Catholics in World Organisations Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
SOVIET DISPERSAL
j y j . KHRUSHCHEV'S latest speech shows how seriously
1 the Kremlin is taking its policy of industrial dispersal to meet the threats of war in the nuclear age. The USSR will become hydra-headed, and plainly only to be destroyed by a long sustained attack over a very wide area—a prospect which will greatly diminish the deterrent power of threats. Western Europe and Britain have no comparable room for manoeuvre, and their defence must be in the geographical vastness of the area covered by NATO, spanning the Atlantic. But both sides have every inducement to try to save some of the immense outlay involved in an industrial dispersal which is not done for economic but for strategic reasons, and it may be that the Russians want to show what they can do in order not to have to do it. Siberia has a harsh sound, and is a harsh place to be consigned to for your working life, merely for strategic reasons; but the Russian populations are not consulted on these things.
It is a world-wide phenomenon, and it is noticeable in the new countries, that they all want to expand the governmental machinery, and are stopped by their poverty from doing so. Now M. Khrushchev has bluntly told the truth about Russia, that there are far too many Russians engaged in supervising other Russians. Slave and convict labour is always wasteful, because of the men who have to guard and watch the prisoners and see that they exert themselves, and the economic beauty of providing motive and incentive is that all this supervision becomes superfluous.
This Russian development is likely to embarrass those few remaining Socialist parties—British Labour still lags among them—who remain blind to the evil of bureaucratic superstructures. The Russians have already turned their backs on the idea of economic equality, and believe in very wide differentials; now they are going to disbelieve in bureaucracy. The rest of the world, educated in liberal economics for over a century, knows that one of the biggest handicaps under which the .Soviet system labours is the size of the bureaucracy, the unproductive supervisors of the producers. They are unproductive because, while it is true enough that supervision can be productive, like good management, it can also become an incubus, especially where it is engaged in making peasants live in a different pattern to that which they know and want to follow. Bureaucracies have their own laws of growth, of self-protection and expansion, and nowhere more than in Russia. All over the world there are people quartered on the revenue and making work for each other, compiling memoranda and answering countermemoranda inside immense departments; engaged in frontier warfare with other immense departments. The Fall of the Italian Government
It is a pity that the Italian Cabinet should have fallen just before the French President's visit, but M. Coty comes from a country which does not lake the resignations of Cabinets very seriously. He will find Signor Segni carrying on the Government during his visit, and while some rearrangement of the Coalition is worked out. The fall of the Government has come abeafT y the pressure on Signor Saragat of the left wing of his Socialist Party, who have long been restive, with the argument that it becomes increasingly difficult to explain why anyone should vote for the Saragat Socialists if they go on year after year as very minor members of Christian Democrat coalitions. Those who are working for a reunited Socialist Party know they have not a great deal of time before the elections next year. After some initial successes, they were disappointed to find the pro-Communist elements in Signor Nenni's Socialist Party after all still very strongly entrenched. If the Saragat Socialists can be drawn a little further to the Left it may be easier to draw the Nenni Socialists further to the Right. The hope is that a Socialist Government in Italy can be installed, waiting for the return to power of a Socialist Government in Britain—something that has never coincided yet.
The Saragat Socialists have been reproached for acquiescing while Signor Martino, as spokesman for Italy, showed himself much nearer in outlook to Sir Anthony Eden than to the British Labour Party. But this is a small matter compared to the spirit in which the countries of the common market are to envisage the protection of workers’ standards. Here, it might be thought, the Italians had not very much to lose, since standards in Germany and France are higher, and the free movement of men, money and goods must help the Italian economy. But it is quite possible, inside the common market, for there to continue to be discriminations, parallel to those which trade unions impose to protect their members, by which workers from another country would only find themselves permitted to take certain kinds of work,
