THE TABLET November Ofh. 1957. VOL 210. No. *129
TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW
Published as a. Newspaper
Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria
FOUNDED IN 1840
NOVEMBER 9th, 1957
NINEPENCE
Without a Middle Class: The Afro-Asian Political Experiment
Soviet Communism after Forty Years: Retrospect and Prospect. By Ion Ratiti Faymen oi New Orleans: The Resistance to Racial Integration. By James McCawley Padre Pierre of Baghdad: Catholics in the Arab Countries. By J. E. Alexander As Others See us: Mr. Drew Middleton on the British. By Colin Clark
The Outsider's God: Mr. Colin Wilson on Religion. By Christopher Hollis
Critics’ Columns : Notebook : Book Reviews : Letters : Chess
THE CALL FOR COHESION
TV/IR. MACMILLAN, speaking on Tuesday in the
Commons, made it clear that the Government intends to press forward with its European plans, turning to account the enhanced prestige which the Soviet Union now enjoys to reinforce the case for unity of purpose, and what he calls interdependence, military and economic. Political consequences will follow successful developments in military and economic collaboration. This is a recognition that, while the non-Communist world still greatly out-weighs the Communist bloc in area, population and resources, it suffers from the great weakness of political division. In every country there is a very strong pull all the time against collective policies, and there is always a response for the politician who speaks for national interests, even when those interests are much too narrowly conceived.
Mr. Macmillan reminded the House and the country that the main objective of the Russian Communist leaders remains what it has been from the beginning, to see the extension of their system throughout the world. Even when they were a very small party, fifty years ago, Lenin and his associates always held the international view. They saw capitalism as virtually universal. They grew up under the nineteenth-century achievement of an international financial order, of models and norms of government which were set by Europe, and primarily by Great Britain, to which all countries were expected to conform, and to which most countries paid at any rate lip-service. They dreamed of an entirely different system, and they have had no reason to abandon their dreams of a complete transformation of human society. If they have travelled so far in fifty years that they have now pul the non-Communist world on the defensive, they do not draw from historical experience any reason for revising their ultimate hope. But they have learnt that the way to realise those hopes lies in a very different direction to that which Marx and Lenin indicated. World Communism will not come about by inciting the oppressed workers of the world to unite and throw off their chains. The great hope of extending it is by preaching, particularly in Asia and Africa, that only the Communist method of all power to the party, using the machinery of the Moslem
State, can give the economic results which electorates in a hurry expect.
Here the great weakness of Communist propaganda is that the mass of the Russian people are living at a level so markedly below the level enjoyed wherever industrial capitalism is the order of the day. Where there is a high standard of consumption and security there is also a public opinion which is not so easily either gulled or cowed, and if the standard of living rises inside the Soviet Union, there should come with it a public opinion with which the handful of men who now decide everything will have to reckon.
Mr. Macmillan’s reference to the need for the closest Anglo-American co-operation was doubly welcome, coming at the anniversary of the period last year when the Government of which he was a leading member tried to act on a very different principle and “ go it alone." The Stable Pound
The Queen's speech indicated a wide range of activities for the Government, much of it outside the field of legislation, and it seems likely that the Macmillan administration in the two years remaining to it will make a number of memorable and enduring changes alike in the composition of the Upper House and in the responsibilities of senior Ministers, and that junior ministerial office will become at once more responsible and, as it should be, better rewarded. The development in the post-war period of the intermediate office of Minister of State has foreshadowed this development.
The most important sentences in the Queen's speech were those dealing with retirement pensions, not because they are of natural interest to an ageing population, but because they bear directly upon the great obligation lying on this as on all administrations, to keep the currency reasonably stable. Those who obeyed the prudent maxims of the copybook and saved over the last forty years have had a poor recompense in what the money will buy, compared to what it would have bought when they resisted temptation and set it aside. It is no good Conservatives and Labour Ministers competing with each other with pen
