THE TABLET, July 4th, 1959. VOL. 213, No. 6215.

Published as a Newspaper

TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

JULY 4th. 1959

NINEPENCE

Toleration in Moslem Lands: Keeping the United Nation*. A Visit to Berlin: Impressions by Michael Derrick. The Impact of Lord Northcliffe: The New Biography-reviewed by D. W. Autobiography of E. C. Rich: Reviewed by the Abbot of Downside. Critics’ Columns : Notebook : News, Notes and Texts has kept the Western Allies close together, so that Dr. Adenauer has taken the occasion to pay special tribute to the way Germany’s interests have been safeguarded by her NATO partners. The Geneva Conference to date has been a skirmishing reconnaissance, an affair of feints and parries, ending with no indication whether it will lead to anything more constructive or not.

France and Italy

THE VIEW FROM WASHINGTON No part of Russian technique is by now more familiar (ban the attempt to shake opponents by a. rapid alternation of harsh and conciliatory approaches. Individuals in the hands of the Russian police know this technique only too well, but it is also thought to be useful in diplomacy. After the long, unyielding sessions at Geneva, the interval before reassembling and trying again has been used by Mr. Khrushchev and his lieutenants to revive hope that some real progress may yet be made, both over disarmament and over Germany. Both Mr. Macmillan and Mr. Selwyn Lloyd have been giving the impression that they are not particularly worried or disappointed at the way things are going. But the reports from Washington give a different and less hopeful picture, of President Eisenhower resolved to be faithful to the wisdom of Mr. Dulles, and full of personal memories of the mistakes of 1944 and 1945, before he had at all taken the measure of Russian ambitions and ruthlessness. He is reported as determined not to give way an inch, whatever threats may succeed the present mild phase, and Mr. Joseph Alsop is writing with some perturbation on the way the American public has been allowed to go on, with not at all sufficient preparation for the crisis of nerve which may confront it, a crisis for which the President has prepared himself, but has not prepared his countrymen. This account of the President’s attitude may be weighing with Mr. Krushchev, and may lead him to conclude that his next move should be to agree to something that will force the American President to a Summit Meeting, designed to bring different counsellors around him, to get him away from Washington, the State Department and the Pentagon. But if that is why a Summit Meeting is so strongly wanted, it cannot be said that Mr. Gromyko, acting no doubt under instructions, has so far done anything to make any. of the European statesmen likely to help to persuade President Eisenhower that the rigidity of the Dulles’ era should give place to a more relaxed and receptive mood. When Mr. Macmillan pays an exceptionally warm tribute to Mr. Selwyn Lloyd for his work a t Geneva, it is not because Mr. Selwyn Lloyd has been able to advance matters with Russia, but because he

President De Gaulle in Italy on an official visit as the Head of the French State, kept the main emphasis in his public utterance away from the Rome Treaties which have forged the real new bond between France and Italy. He gives the impression that these economic ties, though he does not dislike them, do not interest him very much. What he is preoccupied with is the standing of France in the world, which is bound up with the position of France in Africa. The proud assertion which his brother placed over the French Pavilion at the Brussels Exhibition last year, that France is a country of over 80 million people, expresses his mind; and it is because this is his outlook that he has been called to power. Those Italians who have always thought it was too good to be true that the France of De Gaulle should be content with the European policies of Robert Schumann retain all their doubts after the French President’s visit. It has seemed much more to be a bid to persuade the Italians to accept French leadership of a European bloc that could, should the need arise, take a different line from the Americans and the British. There were assurances that France would invest in the south of Italy, but also expectations of a more active Italian sympathy for France in North Africa, with pickings from the Sahara. This is asking much of the Italians, whose historic and prosperous role has been that of traders between Western Europe and the orient, and the failure of Italian dreams of African empire have had one great compensating advantage, that the Italian, like the German, business man is welcome in Egypt and other Near Eastern countries in places where the French or British merchant is not. Italian interests to­