THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 170 No. 5075

LONDON AUGUST 14th, 1937

SIXPENCE

MAIN FEATURES CATHOLICS IN GERMANY

An Exclusive Dispatch

THE SPANISH BISHOPS AND THE CIVIL WAR

Abridged Text of an Important Pastoral

THE WORLD CONFERENCE AT EDINBURGH

The Catholic Attitude Towards Inter-denominational Meetings

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK the Ebbutt Affair

The German Government will certainly be making a mistake if they carry out their threat to expel Mr. Ebbutt, the Times correspondent in Berlin. Taking him over the years, Mr. Ebbutt has not been anti-German in any balanced interpretation of that phrase. But, however anti-German he may have been, it is likely that the German Government would do themselves a great deal more harm than good by his expulsion. As a recent inquiry showed, very few English people read the foreign news in their newspapers with any attention, and the proportion of readers of The Times who could explain what attitude the paper had taken towards the various recent German questions is negligibly small. The real poisoning of international relation in England is done not by the people who write the messages, but by the people who write the headlines. And in order to write headlines about a country it is neither necessary to be there nor ever to have been there. The German Theory of The Press

Modern Germany theory certainly has no respect for the freedom of the Press, and however cynical we may be about the reality of that “ freedom” in other countries, yet it would be hard for the Germans to persuade us that there are not disadvantages in their very rigid attitude. Yet the Germans claim that their censorship is by no means wholly concerned with surprising facts that are inconvenient to the regime. They are as concerned to prevent the undignified publicizing of private affairs with which journalism in other countries is so largely concerned. And there must be moments at any rate when all of us feel that the abolition of freedom of the Press would be a small price to pay if only we could be assured of a little freedom from the Press.

The Germans, for instance, took great pride in the restraint with which they, unlike other nations, refused to make sensational capital out of the British constitutional crisis of last year, and to anyone who doubts that there is a credit as well as a debit side to the German policy of control of the Press, a voyage on a German transatlantic liner may be recommended. Two news sheets are issued every day, one in German and one in English from an American source. There is certainly a very remarkable contrast between the topics chosen for report by the Germans and the trival rubbish about the rich with which the English-speaking is filled. The German Mark

Ever since Dr. Schacht has been in charge of German finances, there has been a policy of strict control of the note circulation so as to prevent a rise in prices. Now for the first time the note circulation is increasing rapidly and, according to the Reichsbank statement of July 31st, has reached 7,106,000,000 marks—-an increase of 1,754,000,000 marks since Herr Hitler came to power. There is a good deal of talk about the amount of gold coverage to this circulation, but that, with Germany on the gold standard in a purely nominal sense, is of little importance. What is important is the effect on prices. Up till the present prices have hardly risen at all—a sure proof that, whatever may be said, the production of consumable goods must have been steadily increasing under the Nazi regime. Now, however, there are signs that they are beginning to rise. The British Note Circulation

It is not only the German note circulation which is increasing. The last weekly statement shows that British note circulation standing at £498,000,000, which is what the Americans call “ an all-time high,” £50,000,000 more than that of a year ago and £90,000,000 more than that of the corresponding week of 1935. These figures must be borne in mind when we hear unqualified criticism of the banks for restricting credit. Certainly there is at the moment, what with rearmament and other things, little restriction of credit, but one feels inclined rather to ask whether the money that has been easily forthcoming for armaments might not have been found easily for other purposes at an earlier date. Or are Professor Hayek and his disciples right and are the Government’s financial methods