THE TABLET October 19th. 1957. VOL. 210 , No. 6126

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

OCTOBER 19th, 1957

NINEPENCE

Mr. Dulles and the Arabs : The Heavy-handed Approach The Significance of Syria: The Turks and the Tension. By Derek Patmore

The Catholic Press : The Fifth World Congress in Vienna. By Douglas Woodruff

Among the 44Scugnizzi : With Padre Borelli in Naples. By Bruno S. James

AUTUMN BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by D.W., Roger Sharrock, Robert Speaight, D. B. Wyndham Lewis, René Hague, Aubrey Noakes,

A. H. Armstrong, A. C. F. Beales, L. Johnston, Sister Mary Jordan, O.P., Conor O’Brien, T. F. Burns,

Maryvonne Butcher, Frank Littler and Janet Bruce

Critics* Columns : Notebook : Talking at Random : Letters : Chess

RUSSIAN INITIATIVES

JMT KHRUSHCHEV has taken an unusual course in writing to members of Socialist parties everywhere on the ground that they have always manifested a genuine desire for peace. This has not always been the commonest view of them. In the old days they used to be denounced as misleading the workers with a pretended Socialism that was really in the interests of bourgeois capitalism.

While it would probably be a mistake to regard M. Khrushchev’s letter as no more than a piece of tactics devised to isolate the United States and Turkey, there can well be a genuine element of apprehension on both sides, as both Russia and the United States fence for a position in a part of the world which is new to them both as a sphere of effective influence.

It very commonly happens—we saw it in the Spanish Civil War—that the great Powers look at an authentic local struggle much too exclusively in terms of their rivalry with each other, and the United Nations can be much the most useful forum into which to carry the question of Syria, whatever its defects. The General Assembly is now overwhelmingly full of people animated by a new and raw nationalism, and anxious to see new States like Syria free from outside pressure, and if M. Khrushchev’s protestation that the Russian interest is essentially a negative one, as is the American, to see that another imperialism does not dominate the Arabs, it should not be difficult to relieve the tension.

The Russian satellite gave the Dean of Canterbury his chance to suggest that this is the first fine fruit of a universally high education carried on till seventeen, rather than the achievement of a small number of scientists who have been given every priority. We hope it is true that the level of education in Russia has risen in an extraordinary fashion over the last forty years, because the higher it is the less likely is it that an educated nation will let itself be kept by its Government in the straight-jacket of a crude nineteenthcentury materialist philosophy.

But it is not all a self-evident proposition that Scientists and technicians can only be produced in sufficient numbers if general education is stepped up. British science has vast achievements to its credit in the period between 1890 and 1930, a period when by modern standards a general education was being starved and kept totally inadequate. What is wanted is a sufficient number of ladders, so that any boy of exceptional scientific bent can reach the laboratories. We hope that a quickened sense of the importance of education which the Russian achievement may communicate will not be used as an argument for forcing uncongenial studies upon children in general, most of whom have no aptitude for them. Spending money on education—and both, parties love to boast how much is being spent—cannot be equated with raising the educational level, and there are only too many implications in the popular Press and in television programmes that the majority interests and tastes remain much as they were. It can be claimed for television that it is proving a most effective teacher—that the combination of seeing and hearing and the modern methods of presentation are widening the' interests of many young people, since the great factor in learning is interest, and the free choice in the evening has a great advantage over the classroom.

Bellman and True

Mr. Macmillan made an imaginative choice when he selected Lord Hailsham to be chief of the party organisation; and Lord Hailsham justified the choice by his performance at Brighton, for it comes quite naturally to him to be an ardent party man, which is the first requisite of a party chairman, and to show a warmth and fire increasingly rare in the Conservative Party. He talks with spontaneity, and he has the rare and happy gift that if occasionally he says what might have been phrased differently, it is not held against him. Like another Bellman, in The Hunting o f the Snark, he inspires the crew, we hope with happier, results.