THE TABLET May 9Uj. 1959. VOL. 213, No. «0 7

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Publish«! as & Nawspapet

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

MAY 9th, 1959

NINEPENCE

The False Antithesis : The Commonwealth and Europe Elections in Austria : The Coalition that Must Continue. By Stella Musulin

Rome and the Catholic East l Misgivings of the Mclkite Bishops. By M ark Doughty Religion in Glasgow : Dr. Highet’s Enquiry. By Mary Cavanagh

A Maker of Signs : The Writings of David Jones. By Illtud Evans, O.P.

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

TIME RUNNING OUT

E Nuclear Disarmament Conference is making little or no progress, as the most modest proposals are met with a qualified acceptance, introducing new considerations. Can there be inspection? “ Yes,” say the Russians, “ but provided the inspections are limited in number, and provided the country to be inspected has an ultimate veto on what the inspectors want to do.” So they might be hoodwinked? “ Well, any arrangements which really make certain that there can be no hoodwinking involve so much inspection and control that not only nuclear but all military preparations would be exposed to the potential enemy.”

Yet time is running out: the strontium poisoning of the atmosphere proceeds, and the French proudly announce that they at long last are ready to show that France, too, is a nuclear Power, one of the Big Four after all, and that a test explosion, guaranteed by the Government to do no harm to anybody in the vicinity, will take place in the Sahara this summer. From England it is announced that the bombs can be made more cheaply and easily than had been judged possible a few years ago.

Today’s three nuclear Powers have a common overriding interest, in agreeing to reverse their direction. They are still hurrying, for fear of being left behind, on a road none of them ought to be on. The best argument for Britain, or any other country, continuing along it is that that is the best way of persuading the other Powers to turn back. But with each month of this rake’s progress any return to saner counsels becomes more difficult. What has prevented agreement is the ideological character of the present East and West conflict. The Great Powers of fifty years ago would have reached agreement, because they had plenty of common ground. But it is the essence of MarxLeninism that the bourgeois morality is merely one of the defences of a vanishing social order; that morality consists in contributing to the historical process by which the capitalist order is replaced by a Socialist and then a Communist society; and that all means to that end are right and proper. So M. Spaak, as the Secretary-General of NATO, warns that no spoon is long enough for the supper party to which the West is bidden over Berlin, and that the slightest step towards disengagement will be judged a retreat, and quickly turned to account.

Tf this is a just appreciation, it is a strange time to talk of a British loan to Russia, to be spent on British goods which will increase Russian strength. Sir David Eccles’ mission will be seen by most of the Atlantic alliance as a further illustration of an excessive and ill-timed eagerness on the part of a British Conservative Government, responsive to a public opinion of a goodnatured commercial people who find it very hard to believe that the other party cannot be brought to see reason. In the summer months of 1939, just twentv years ago, after the seizure of Prague and the British guarantee to Poland, the Hudson-Todt negotiations for a British loan for the Third Reich were the final persistence of the British hope that business considerations would prevail.

Todav we have to pin a sood deal of hone on the cmergetice of a Russian public which, as it lives better, will acquire more self-confidence, become more critical of its own government, and want social and cultural relations with the rest of the world, and not of the severely selective and controlled type that are permitted todav. If increased trade can help to foster this outlook it should be encouraged, for the difference it might make to Russian efficiency is not really relevant to the cold war as the Russians are waging it, a war of ideas and propaganda. The results the Russians can already show are impressive enough to young students from Asia or Africa, who have seen very little of anv industrialised society. Khrushchev is a wiser man than his Stalinist critics, for he understands that the one great hesitation the students from Asia and Africa still have is the police-State character of the Russia they visit.