THE TABLET June 6lli, 1959. VOL. 213, No. 6211

Published as a Newspaper

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JUNE 6th, 1959

NINEPENCE

Ihe Nato Counlries : The Idea Behind the Atlantic Congress I 0[>ics in the Kirk : Four Hundred Years after John Knox. By Frank MacMillan Material Progress in Fifty Years: The o th e r Half of the story. By e . l . Way Olll* .Lady OÎ Cavershaill : The Origins of the Shrine. By H. M. Gillett

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

THE BELGIAN CROWN

JT is hard to tell how much real feeling there is in

Belgium against King Baudouin or his father. But two things seem clear. Those who quite unconstitutionally forced King Leopold from the throne in 1950, after the plebiscite had ended in his favour, have felt that the fruits of their violence have eluded them. The son who took his father’s place has remained close to his father and step-mother. The three have lived together and been constantly seen together, as the royal family. It is very much to King Baudouin’s credit that he refused to be intimidated, into seeming to disown his father. What is less to his credit is his failure after nine years to master the popular arts which are expected of royalty. The Belgians, who see themselves as a people who know how to enjoy life, do not see this reflected in an intensely , serious young man, going conscientiously about his duties with so little ze'st, and showing no signs of marrying and setting up as the head of a household. But it is also probable that mixed with this irritation, which could of itself be quickly dissipated, is a smouldering anti-clericalism, such as the Belgian Socialists continue to harbour. The fuss made about the absence of a civil ceremony when the plans for the king’s younger brother’s wedding were announced indicates this. Pope John XXIII was to have married them, but this has now been changed to a wedding in Brussels, where presumably the civil ceremony which the law requires can precede the religious ceremony. This is a relic of laicism, intended to claim for the State a jurisdiction over marriage, even over the marriage of Catholics like the Belgian royal family, whereas quite plainly both kinds of marriage, religious or civil, should be equally valid before the law. It is the Church marriage which exacts the more stringent conditions and is the more public event.

The Belgian monarchy is the last of the many Catholic monarchies which used to reign in Western Europe. It was created little more than a century ago to enable Flemings and Walloons to live together in unity, as they would have found it very much harder to do under a President. For a long time race went with a social distinction and a religious distinction, the Flemish population being much more Catholic and the Walloons having much the larger share of the upper walks of Belgian life. That has been changed in this century, as the Flemish population has increased in wealth and education, and the Flemish language has achieved an equality with French which is passing into more than equality. There are zealots who hope to drive French into a very secondary position. .

The royal house still owes a great deal to King Albert, the king at the time of the first German invasion. But the position of the monarchy is inevitably affected by the changed international position of the country. When Belgium was created, largely by British policy, to keep the Scheldt out of the hands of the French, sovereign kingdoms were the accepted model for human communities. Today the monarchy is less the apex of a sovereign kingdom than a domestic institution, and its original raison d'etre has much less force inside the Common Market and Benelux, the larger groupings which the Belgians have entered. There is no longer the danger, so present in 1830, that the two races might fall apart politically. The Scheldt is part of NATO. Perhaps it is this recognition that the role of the king is different and less, compared with even twenty years ago, which has made the monarchist majority put up so quietly with so much from their ill-mannerly opponents that they should not have been asked to accept. Prospects for Singapore

The People’s Action Party, which has won forty-three out of fifty-one seats in the new Singapore Assembly, is very far to the Left. Its leaders argue that they are the only people who could possibly save Singapore, and they imply Malaya, from being engulfed by Chinese Communism. The support for the P.A.P. is largely Chinese, and the more conservative Malays are not in the least likely to want political union with Singapore, which would have the effect of greatly increasing the political importance of immigrant Chinese who cannot be expected to have, and in general have not got, any