THE TABLET August 31st, 1957. VOL. 210, No. 6119

THE 1F ,BL1I' A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

AUGUST 31st, 1957

NINEPENCE

Diplomacy' in the Rocket Age: The Likely Political Result Ronald Knox: 1888-1957: Spirituality. Humanity and Scholarship

The Panegyric Preached in Westminster Cathedral by Father M artin D ’Arcy

Conversations in Moscow: I I : A Hunger for Ideas. By Katherine Hunter Blair

Custody of Children : “ The Welfare of a Child.” By Letitia Fairfield

Portraits of France: Mr. Schoenbrun and the Dublin Review. By Rivers Scott

At the Edinburgh Festival: By Morley Jamieson and George Scott-Moncrieff

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

EXPOSED INDEPENDENCE

TDEFORE the war anyone who read in a work on the

British Empire about the Malay Peninsula read of it as a place ruled by native Sultans, under the aegis of the Colonial Office. It was a country whose rubber and tin yielded substantial revenues, and whose only political problem was the relationship between the native Malays and the large Chinese immigration. Few would have prophesied that only ten years would be needed before the political independence of the Malay Peninsula followed on the independence of India, where political agitation had been on a serious scale for thirty years before independence came. But just as few people imagined that the native rulers of India would yield their positions in return for pensions as quietly as the monks in England had yielded to Henry VIII, so few imagined that democratic institutions would come, as it were overnight, to the Malay Peninsula. But so it is, and of all the decisions which the Conservative Government has had to take in the Imperial field, this is the most momentous for the sterling area. Malaya is a frontier country, quickly overrun by the Japanese fifteen years ago, and tempting to the Chinese today. Its immediate neighbours are countries, recently French, whose political future is in the highest degree problematical, where the anti-Communist elements rest on the support of the United States.

The independent Malaya which comes into existence this weekend is a country which will particularly need to bet on its guard against political subversion from within, against Chinese Communists for whom it would be an immense prize to bring the rubber and tin, which means so much to the sterling area in its trade with the dollar area, under a foreign trade monopoly exercised by a People’s Government.

Dr. Nkrumah faces many internal difficulties, but he has nothing parallel to Communist China to throw a shadow across the first years of his country’s statehood. We may feel uneasy about the prospects for an orderly political life for the Queen’s late subjects on the Gold Coast. But if anything goes badly wrong, it will be through the absence of a sufficiently matured electorate and political class, and because the unity of the country was a British administrative achievement, or for other reasons unconnected with the international situation. It is far otherwise in Malaya. Influence in Malaya will be increasingly the prize of a triangular competition between China, India, and what we may call, writing in London, the Western Powers, meaning the United States and Britain, not acting as a unity or an alliance, but each pursuing Asian policies of their own, which are only very partially harmonised, since both Britons and Americans are sure they know best how to get on with Asian peoples.

Mr. Macmillan, when he goes to Asia and Australasia in the New Year, will be putting to the test what the citizens of Pakistan, India, and Ceylon, the Asian Commonwealth countries, feel about Great Britain—the measure of their interest, the presence or absence of any warmth. It seems pretty certain that he will be stared at in a mood of conditional cordiality, where peoples who would like Great Britain to be wholeheartedly supporting their national views have a general impression, which is quite correct, that such support is lacking. We do not see what Mr. Macmillan can say about Kashmir, and he certainly cannot say the one thing that the Pakistanis want to hear, which is that Britain considers Pakistan is right and India wrong. What he will perhaps be able to do is to spread the conviction, among those who see or hear him, that M. Khruschev and Marshal Bulganin were romancers and mythologists in the picture they painted to Indian audiences of the capitalist West. Perhaps there are people in India who think that while the British High Commissioner is a friendly soul, who genuinely accepts friendship on equal terms, he is but the agent, and one whose personal qualities are meant to deceive them, and that men of a very different stamp take the ultimate decisions in Downing Street. No