THE TABLET December 14th. 1957. VOL. 210. No. 0.134

TH E TABLE A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

Published as a Newspaper

FOUNDED IN 184 0

DECEMBER 14th, 19 57

NINEPENCE

The Social Effects: The Wolfcnden R epo r t in the Lords

The Church in Central Africa: Im p re s s io n s 'o f a Visit. By P a trick Wall, M.P.

Those who leave Yugoslavia: A New Wave o f Refugees

All Anglican at Fatima: Misgivings Dispelled. By John Law rence

Shakespeare S Religion: T h e E n q u ir ie s of M adam e de C h am b ru n . By R obert Speaight

Meditations for Advent: HI. “ Build a C h ap e l .” By I lltu d E vans, O.P.

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

THE PRESIDENT FOR PARIS

PRESID ENT EISENHOWER'S doctors have considered him well enough to go to Paris, and, if this is a welcome evidence of his recuperative powers, it is also a confirmation of the extreme importance which he attaches to the Paris meetings. It is not always wise for Heads of States to attend such meetings ; and American Presidents have niorg reason than other Heads to remain at a distance, for they cannot, in fact, commit their country very far without the Senate, and the Senate tends to be more suspicious when the agreements are reached outside America. The classic example of a President undone in Paris is Woodrow Wilson ; but forty years ago the United States was still very new to international life, overrating the craftiness of Britain and France, and unwilling to face the necessity for an American commitment which has since been accepted and shouldered.

On the very eve of this meeting, Marshal Bulganin has sent proposals to President Eisenhower, presumably concerned with Germany, since a letter has also been sent to Dr. Adenauer. New proposals at the very last moment must look as though they were designed primarily to disrupt the agenda before NATO. But the delay may have been due to divided counsels in Moscow, and there can be no a priori reason why any quick decisions should need to be taken. The Russians are past-masters at taking their own time, in the best oriental fashion, and they may very well think that they have gained by spinning out the last series of Disarmament conversations without coming to any result, while their scientists were perfecting their rocket, and that now they can make proposals from a position of strength. The Americans, too, are tempted to think that they must first restore the balance in long-range missiles, so that they can talk, if not from a position of greater strength, at any rate not from a position of inferiority. If this continues to be a premise, both in Moscow and in Washington, no progress will be made.

In his Reith Lectures Mr. George Kennan has been arguing very cogently, and from his personal knowledge of Moscow and Washington, the case for limiting the refortification of Europe, and the creation, step by step, of a demilitarised zone. At its best this policy could leave the European peoples with small conventional forces, with which they would never be tempted to go to war, while the idea of a war fought with rockets between America and Russian would begin to look like an increasingly unreal and pointless suicide pact.

Mr. Kennan advanced very good reasons against summit talks unless they are held as symbolic ceremonies to proclaim to the world agreements patiently and secretly worked out at much lower levels of Government. He also expressed his distrust of the instinctive reaction to Russian technical progress, a reaction which calls for a closer integration of the NATO countries. He holds that alliances cannot fruitfully talk with Moscow, and that the leading rule should be the division and sub-division of topics, the seeking of small positive agreements whose cumulative effect could be to change the climate of hostility. There will still be hostility, for the Soviet leaders are conditioned to that. Mr. Kennan might indeed have gone further, and have said that the Russians need a wicked imperialist capitalist world to justify themselves in behaving as men for whom the end is so great that it justifies any means. They do not want to understand the non-Communist world, but to denounce it to their own people, and they are sufficiently conscious of the ferment among the young intellectuals to be very frightened of any real freedom of intercourse, like the exchange of university professors and students, which we should welcome. But to accept the fact of this hostility is not a reason against working for its modification, so that the peoples may be freed from the huge burden of modern armaments, even though they cannot come to terms intellectually op morally with each other.

The main obstacle to any progress is the size of the Russian Army, and the growing Russian fleet of submarines, and all the cumulative evidence that at the best the Russians are still living fearfully, with the sense that their Revolution has been attacked twice, by the British and French in 1919 and by the Germans in 1941, and that it will, in the logic of Marxian history, be attacked by the Americans: and