THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 171 No. 5095

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

LONDON JANUARY 1st, 1938

SIXPENCE

IN TH IS IS SU E

THE MAGI IN TRADITION AND EARLY ART

By J. C. Marsh-Edwards

TWO POEMS ON SPAIN

By Roy Campbell

THE NEED FOR A PHILOSOPHY

By M. C. D ’Arcy, S.J.

THE UNDER-DOG

By Hilaire Belloc

FOREIGN BROADCASTS

Danzig : Moscow : Salamanca : Madrid

Full List o f Contents on page 4.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK International Relations, Old and New

Through 1937 British foreign policy moved steadily from the fading conception of collective security under League rules towards a reversion of the old practice of free and unfettered negotiation between particular parties. The new Prime Minister made two marked gestures in this direction when he sent a personal letter to the head of the Italian Government, and when he sent Lord Halifax to visit Herr Hitler in Germany. So far these overtures, although they were welcomed by the parties to whom they were addressed, have not been followed up by more detailed explorations, but they mark a great advance over the methods of 1936, like the questionnaire to Germany, which was made blunt to the point of incivility in order to satisfy the French demand for firmness ; and 1936 was a considerable advance over 1935, the last year of full favoured Geneva language, in which the world was pictured as consisting of the law-makers and law-enforcers on one side, and the shameful aggressors on the other. In a recent speech, Mr. Eden well pointed out that war, as it is envisaged in the League constitution, is always thought of as war for a material object, for territory or concrete rights, about which a legal judgment could be given. For wars of ideas, for wars which are basically conflicts of view about human life, no court judgment is possible. Equally, aggression was then conceived in terms of territorial invasion, while it has become increasingly clear since that real aggression takes place through the activities of agents provocateurs, fomenters of disruptive movements, men whose study is the many various ways in which regimes can be undermined and pulled down from within. The Red Light in France

A few years ago the present Foreign Minister of France, M. Yvon Delbos, went to Russia He published his impressions, and they included a description of a room in the Museum of the Revolution in Moscow,

devoted to the forthcoming revolution in Spain, “ from which it is evident,’’ wrote M. Delbos, “ that the Soviets anticipate their first successes of contagion amongst our friends on the other side of the Pyrenees.” Last year, the French Government suppressed this work—L'Expérience Rouge is its title—but the moral has not been lost on the political followers of M. Chautemps and M. Delbos. In any retrospect of 1937 there is much to be placed to the credit side of the balance-sheet in Spain. A year which began with the conquest of Malaga, saw the complete Nationalist triumph in the difficult country of the north west, and in particular the reduction of the Asturias, which had been the worst centre of violence in 1934. The year closed with the Nationalist administration firmly in control of two-thirds of Spain, with industry and agriculture flourishing, and the Nationalist peseta valued, for its genuine buying power, abroad. There have been no serious military reverses, and a gradual progress towards political recognition. But the revolutionary authorities enjoyed some very considerable successes with their propaganda. In its major aim, that propaganda has, so far, failed. It has not succeeded in embroiling France and Britain in hostilities with Italy and Germany, but it has spread. In America, Britain and France a great deal of uninformed political feeling is grouped under the slogan of anti-Fascism. The name “Fascist” has completely supplanted the name “bourgeois" as a generic term for all the enemies of the Third International. Mr. Gault Macgowan writes in our excellent contemporary America, that Fascists “ are bourgeois who refuse to be killed quietly. They have had the impertinence to resist liquidation at the hands of Red revolutionists. Their organization in self-defence has been a godsend to orthodox Communists. As long as the bourgeois were their only target, the Left-wingers were making comparatively little progress. But since Mussolini broke with Bolshevik Socialism and created the Corporate State, Fascism