THE TABLET May 4tb, 1957. VOL. 209, No. 6102

T HE TABI ET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MAY 4th, 1957

NINEPENCE

The Church in New Societies l The Encyclical on the Future of Africa Absorbing a R ebellion : The Communist Task in Hungary. By A. E. de Jasay The Social Catacomb: The Exclusion of the Holy See. By John P. Murphy I lie Casement Diaries l Time to Produce the Originals Occult Phenom ena: Theology and Psychical Research. By Lancelot C. Sheppard The Commonwealth and the Benedictines: A Constitutional Obligation Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess

TOWARDS INTERNATIONAL INSPECTION 'T 'H IS week’s meeting of NATO Ministers at Bonn, with the German Government as host, comes in the wake of the latest Soviet disarmament proposals put forward at Lancaster House. They mark some advance on previous ideas, for they propose that very large areas of the Soviet Union should be open to international inspection. The banning of nuclear weapons is still linked with proposals for levels beyond which the size of armies shall not rise —a million and a half for the United States and the Soviet Union, 650,000 for Britain and France. Perhaps it is not too optimistic to say that at long last the disarmament discussions have brought proposals into focus from which real results can come.

There is little doubt that the successful organisation of NATO over the last seven years, combined with the rapid advance in all kinds of atomic weapons, has created a great (nervousness at the Kremlin. Compared with any other pne country, the Soviet Union has decisive advantages in fes colossal area and in the absence of a political opposition ftr a vocal public opinion. The rulers of the Kremlin Btn practice the dispersal of industry as no other country can. They can send their workers where they please. But they have not been able to organise a network of allies, countries small and big prepared to take the risks of providing NATO bases, and. seen from Moscow, the area covered by NATO, and its huge depth, both alike proclaim that the Soviet Union could never hope to put all the bases out of action.

The strength of the NATO world is its unity, but the NATO countries have every reason to reciprocate all the Soviet proposals for slowing down and, if possible, stopping the very costly and very dangerous nuclear race. It is not-only the Russians who need to be alarmed when Britain and America both announce their policy of supplying countries allied to them with missiles and rockets. This policy has not got to go very far before these weapons pass into the control of whatever strange characters the domestic politics of this or that country may throw up, unpredictable and temperamental figures such as both autocratic and democratic regimes are capable of producing.

This is the position twelve years after the end of World War II, and the rulers in the Kremlin have perhaps reflected how it is all mainly due to their late leader, Stalin, and his ruthless extension of Soviet power. He left his followers with an empire into which it is very difficult for them to invite foreign inspection for the control of armaments. The mere presence of mixed commissions charged with these limited functions will inevitably bring a message from the outside world, kindling hope that life may become easier and less harshly disciplined for the subject people, and it is the satellite States which are also the frontier States in most need of international inspection and control. But we should follow up these proposals, because it may very well be that the Russians have really decided that the cost and risks of the present policies are becoming so great as to call for changes of a kind which would have been unhesitatingly rejected while Stalin was alive.

Fundamentally, what the rest of the world wants to see the Russian Communist Party do is to cease trying to assist history ; to abandon the restless dynamic urge to hasten forward whai the creed of Marx-Leninism assures them is bound to happen through historical necessity. The rest of the world is quite happy to await the verdict of history if the Russians will do the same ; to let it be seen whether the nineteenth-century prophet was a true prophet, or whether it is not already clear half-way through the twentieth century that, while he was a man gifted with great analytical powers, less than a century since he wrote has been sufficient to disprove his basic teaching about the nature of capitalism and its inability to adapt and change itself, and to spread through the whole of society the increases of wealth that its techniques have created. Embarrassing King Hussein

With an agreement unhappily highly unusual, all the Great Powers profess to be eager about one thing, that King Hussein of Jordan should not have his authority undermined or attacked by foreign countries. The Russians say this although he is uncompromisingly antiCommunist, and (he Americans say it although even in