THE TABLET October 10th, 1959. VOL. 213. No. 6229

TH E TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 1840

OCTOBER 10th, 1959

NINEPENCE

The British Electorate: A Norm for the Parties

State and the Child in the Sudan: T h e C h ris tia n S chools: I. By Patrick O ’C onnor

Italian Teddy-Boys : Diagnoses and Remedies a t Two Conferences llonald Knox : Mr. Evelyn W augh's b iography reviewed by Douglas Woodruff

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

OUTSTRETCHED HANDS

J T should have been a last minute windfall for the

Conservatives that the head of the International Monetary Fund spoke as he did in Washington on Tuesday. Mr. Per Jacobsen outlined the great change which has come over the international scene. It may be broadly summed up by saying th a t the period which began with Lend-Lease and continued through Marshall Aid, in which America carried the main burden of help for other countries for their recovery or their development, is now closing. American exports pay for American imports well enough, but American reserves have been supporting the vast programme of loans and gifts, and, while it is true that the American gold reserves are very large, they are not inexhaustible, while the appetite of Governments for credits, loans, or gifts, is inexhaustible. It is now being plainly indicated in Washington that a restored and increasingly prosperous Europe must also become more and more of a lender overseas. This can be done, especially for the African territories for which Britain and France have special responsibility ; but it can only be done by countries with a favourable balance of payments, such as it is the great achievement of the Conservatives to have secured.

Mr. Harold Wilson, speaking as he is fond of doing of his burning intolerance of economic inequality, is preparing trouble for a future Labour Government to whom Africans and Asians will apply, asking if social justice is to be bounded by national frontiers. All the perorations about the rights of human beings, once born, to certain standards can be invoked to ask why the British artisan should have £12 a week when the African or Asian worker has little more than a tenth' of that sum. Talk of giving two per cent of our national income here to raise living standards in undeveloped countries really reflects just the same mentality that Labour spokesmen are fond of attacking as callous. It shows a readiness on the part of the better-off to make certain sacrifices, but not very big ones, on broad humanitarian grounds.

It will be an important day when British trade unionists really appreciate that, among many more than two thousand million people on this globe, they come extremely high in the material scale, with very few above them, and the vast majority of men fa r below them. Then they will immediately feel that their relative well-being is not something for which they ought to be abused, or of which they ought to be deprived. They will feel it is the end of a long process of developed skills and developed markets ; that it has come because they were members of a community which bestirred itself to much purpose, set its house in order, secured laws which encouraged industry and profitseeking, while the countries of Asia and Africa grossly neglected the arts of economic advance, and only began to create wealth when the Europeans appeared in their midst to show them the advantages and the methods. If they now demand to be assisted to achieve overnight the progress for which those who are to help them worked without outside assistance through a number of human life-times, they should be very diffident about it.

We are sorry that Mr. Maudling should have given such a wrong impression about the agricultural side cf the Common Market. He told British farmers that, had Britain been so misguided as to join, they would have lost their protection. There could not be the annual price review, and agricultural policy would be settled by a body in which Britain would be in a minority. A moment’s reflection should show a thoughtful farmer how unlikely it is that countries like France or Italy, where agriculture is relatively much more important in the national economy, and in the electorate, than it is here, would ever have made agreements placing themselves at the mercy of a perhaps unsympathetic majority vote. In fact the Rome Treaties allowed them great loopholes, and so many that the real danger is that in agriculture the Common Market will not come to mean a great deal. It will still be of immense economic benefit to industry and commerce, but of much lesser benefit to the consumer of agricultural produce. He will be asked to forego the advantages that might come to him from freer trade for the sake of maintaining the local countryside, and the market towns that depend upon it.