THE TABLET, J u n e 27th, 1959. VOL. 213, No. 6214. EMERGENCY ISSUE'

P u b l i s h e d a s a N ew s p a p e r

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

P ro Ecclesia Dei, P ro R eg in a e t Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUNE 27th, 1959

NINEPENCE

Rome and the Orthodox: P r im a c y and C en tra lisa tio n

The Centenary o f the Curé D ’Ars: By Lancelot S h ephard

The Romanesque: P ro fessor C onant’s S tu dy. By A n th ony B e r tram

Critics’ Column : Notebook : News, Notes and Texts

MORE SNAKES THAN LADDERS The Foreign Ministers’ Conference, although not formally dissolved, has broken off for three weeks, and if it reconvenes, it will be, in effect, a second conference. If it is to have better prospects than the first, something must happen in those three weeks, and it does not look as though anything would. Mr. Krushchev has just reiterated the positions which he has been stating for many months past. While he professes a readiness to go on talking he has been quite explicit that when Russia has signed a Peace Treaty with the East German Communists, Russia will stand behind them when they attempt to exercise the rights of a sovereign power over access to and departure from Berlin. This is the crisis that looms only a little way ahead, which, because it did not come last month, has been allowed to recede too far from the public mind in the Western world. It is very grave, for it will confront the NATO governments with a test of their resolution and firmness, very much greater than at the time of the Berlin airlift. Their problem will be how to protect two million West Berliners with inferior conventional forces without succumbing to the temptation to be the first either to threaten or use weapons whose indiscriminate destructiveness should disqualify them from the repertory of civilised powers.

difficult to understand why Mr. Krushchev does not judge it advantageous to be less intransigent as the American Election draws near. He can see the Democratic Party anxiously looking for a foreign policy different from President Eisenhower’s, but they find little encouragement any more than the British Government has done: and so far Mr. Krushchev has been playing all the time into the hands of Dr. Adenauer and the American Republican administration illustrating their conviction that there is nothing to be done but to stand firm on every legal right and every practical position of strength. Probably the truth is that by Russian standards, Mr. Krushchev considers he is being flexible and accommodating, as when he offers to attend anywhere not one summit meeting but several, to give way over immaterial matters like when and where; but to be unyielding in all matters of substance, and not even allow discussion of the fundamental question whether the German Communists have any claim to be considered a government or as anything other than Russian agents, people who would disappear from the scene tomorrow if Russia was not standing behind them. President de Valera

Seeing that Dr. Adenauer is Mr. Krushchev’s special bugbear, Krushchev has missed a great chance, for he could have made Adenauer’s position very uncomfortable if he had given the Western world any reason to think that the German Chancellor was standing in the way of a genuine easing of tension. There are plenty of people anxious to think that, and the Daily Express is still eagerly looking forward to a summit conference, but the world in general has now little expectation, less than it had four months ago.

Here it can be noted that the other conference at Geneva on stopping the tests has not been so bleakly disappointing as the conference on Berlin, and a number of articles have been agreed. There might yet be a useful treaty, although it must be recognised that during these long negotiations manufacture and stock-piling of these weapons has been going on, and the treaty makes no provision concerning what has already been done. It is

Mr. de Valera, at the age of seventy-six, becomes President of the Republic of Ireland, a constitutional and honorific office based on the traditions of constitutional monarchy. It might have been thought that as very much the most eminent of Ireland’s public men, the position was his for the taking. But, in fact, he has won against General Maceoin by only five to four, which suggests that he will be a controversial character to the end and perhaps he would prefer it so. Nearly half a century separates the calm of 1959 from the Easter Rising of 1916, which was the Irish answer to the English Unionist opposition to Home Rule; and a Conservative majority in the House of Commons found itself having to agree in 1921 to a much wider and deeper separation than it had refused to agree to in 1914. In retrospect, the opposition to Home Rule stands out as a great misfortune for the people on both sides of St. George’s Channel, for it prevented a friendlier evolution than