THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
ESTABLISHED 1840 REG IS TERED AS A N EW S PA P E R
VOL. 170 No. 5080
LONDON SEPTEMBER 18th, 1937
SIXPENCE
IN THIS ISSUE THE HISTORIAN, H. C. LEA
By Herbert Thurston, S .J .
A TALK WITH LENIN
By V. de Korostovetz
CATHOLICS IN THE LABOUR MOVEMENT
Editorial
Full Contents List on page 372
THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Nyon Agreement
By the Nyon Agreement, England and France have undertaken to police the Mediterranean with warships which will sink submarines if those submarines attack merchant shipping without due warning and cause. The incidents which led to this agreement had not in fact been very numerous, but they were creating a sense of insecurity which the new arrangement should banish. But the real importance of the Conference does not lie in the comfort it brings to neutral merchantmen, but in its place in the intense diplomatic war now going on. It must be seen all the time in the light of those AngloItalian conversations which are due to begin when Lord Perth reaches Rome. The Italians took no part in the Nyon Conference and the area which they have been offered for their patrols, the Tyrrhenian Sea, seems much too like an offer of home waters to be acceptable. We regret this Italian abstention, an abstention chiefly congenial to M. Litvinoff, and we think it was a tactical error on the part of the Italians not to accept. But if the essentials are kept clearly in mind little harm need result, and those essentials are to be broached not in a conference of eight or nine participants, but directly between Britain and Italy. We must in the first place make it plain that we have no solidarity in the Mediterranean with France which we are not equally prepared to maintain with Italy. Common Fronts
Our handling of the Non-Intervention Committee has avoided many pitfalls, but it has lent colour to the view that when the French and Russians want one course and the Germans and Italians another, we devise a compromise which inclines more to the wishes of the French Left. What happened after the attacks on the Leipzig in the second half of June has not been forgotten. The Germans had already, following the attacks on the Deutschland, secured our agreement to arrangements for immediate consultation for joint action. We did not perhaps expect to have to act on that understanding within a fortnight of giving it. After the Leipzig had been attacked the Germans wanted a joint naval demonstration off Valencia, in which the four powers, Britain, France, Germany and Italy, would have made it plain that they regarded an attack on the patrols of one as an attack on the patrols of all. The naval demonstration was not to have consisted in any bombardment, such as the Germans had practised after the attack on the Deutschland. It was to have consisted in sailing into Spanish territorial waters and there dipping the flags of all four powers. It was an extremely moderate proposal. But the French would not agree to it, because it would have suggested to Valencia that the authorities there were in disgrace. But from a British point of view it would have been invaluable as discouraging the persistent attempts to divide the Non-Intervention Committee into two parties and to lead the British into an alignment against Germany and Italy. Franco’s Note to the League
While Señor Negrin of Valencia is presiding over the League Council (and the Aga Khan over the Assembly), the Spanish Nationalist Government has sent to the Secretary-General of the League a note demanding recognition as the legitimate representative Government of Spain. The note opens with the history of the Frente Popular Government against which the Spanish people rose, “ exasperated by Marxist tyranny,” and of its successor, now known as the Government o f Valencia. This account, starting with that Government’s violation of the Constitution of 1931 and ending with the 300,000 murders for which it is responsible, and its “ general violation of the elementary principles of natural law,”
