THE TABLET October 24th, 1959. VOL. 213. No. 6231

TH E TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER & REVIEW

Published as a Newspaper

Pro Ecclesia Dei, Pro Regina et Patria

FOUNDED IN 184 0

OCTOBER 24th, 1959

NINEPENCE

Political Parties and Moral Purposes: Pitfalls fo r Labour idealists

Spaill and Nato : Participation in the Defence of the West. By Eugene C. Hinterhoff

State and Child ill the Sudan: The Christian Schools: III. By Patrick O 'C onnor

I he Cause ol Cardinal Newman : An Historical Commission is Constituted

AUTUMN BOOK SUPPLEMENT Reviews by illtud Evans, O.P., Lord Pakenham, David Knowles, J. M. C. Toynbee, Robert Spcaigbt, D.W., Lctitia Fairfield, Leo Gradwell, RoL. McEwe n, A. Gregory Murray, O.S.B., Thomas Gilby, O.P.,

Edward Quinn and Denis Brass

MOSCOW AND BONN

AFTER the interruption of the British General

Election, preparations are going rapidly forward for a Western summit, and preparations for the meeting with the Russians. The contents of M. Khrushchev’s letter to Dr. Adenauer have not been made public, but they produced an obvious change and the Chancellor showed himself less dour and doubtful about the value of any negotiation, and reminded his countrymen that a people which starts and loses a war has to pay for it in more ways than one. A war started to make the Reich much bigger ended by leaving it much smaller, and those who would have accepted the fruits of victory are not entitled to be surprised or outraged at the fruits of defeat. Dr. Adenauer, as a far-sighted man, is clearly resolved not to expose Germany to blame if the negotiations lead nowhere, as he may well think they will. Nothing would suit the Russians better than to be able to blame the West Germans for a lack of results really due to their own determination to keep everything Stalin was able to seize. The cause of the East German Communists could be notably advanced by such tactics, the Russians playing on the old memories in the countries that fought the Germans to suggest that once again the Germans were showing themselves impossible colleagues for the Western world, egoists only interested in rebuilding their national power for dubious and undisclosed ends.

What Russian diplomacy wants to do is to change the conception of West Berlin and its population. Today they are seen as courageous democrats, conducting a spirited international trade under big difficulties, an anti-Communist colony surrounded by forcibly Communised territory ; people whom the whole Western world is resolved to stand by. What the Russians would like would be to see the West regard West Berlin as the first step in the resumption of Germany’s drive to the East, a way of wrecking the development of East Germany, a bridge-head for reunification, to be followed by the recovery of the lost lands of Prussia, and then who knows where the progress would stop if some German leader should arise to take up the cause of German greatness where Hitler was compelled to leave off. The picture does not reflect German realities as they are today, but then German history has been full of startling surprises every twenty years. The Germans in 1913, 1923, 1933 and 1953, present such a startlingly different image to the outside world that only a very bold man would care to prophesy what the image of 1973 will be like.

In nothing has the German image changed more in twenty years than in the attitude to foreign trade. Dr. Schacht is still living, but the policies of protection of bilateral trading, and the forcing of what Germany chose to export on those who had to sell to Germany, are at the opposite pole from the policies of Dr. Erhard, conceived in an anti-protectionist spirit that would have gladdened the heart of Richard Cobden. Where there are special trade agreements, such as that just signed with Australia, they are broadly drawn, to include the widest categories of goods. Australian wine may enter the Rhineland. The favourite device of stipulating in the bad old days for a certain quantity of specific manufactures—mouth-organs was often one—has increasingly lost favour. This move back towards freer trade in the middle of the twentieth century is in marked contrast to the way between the wars country after country, faced with unemployment, sought to diminish it by one form or other of protection. We have now recovered the spirit and outlook of the Trade Exhibition of 1851.