THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW
ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER
VOL. 171 No. 5099
LONDON JANUARY 29th, 1938
SIXPENCE
IN THIS ISSUE
POPULATION PROSPECTS
II. The Decline and the Standard of Life
By E. R. ROPER POWER
THE SPANISH NATIONALISTS AND THE PRESS
An English Visitor’s Experiences
THE REUNION MOVEMENT IN THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
A full Report of the Speeches at the Caxton Hall
NEWS FROM GERMANY
Full List o f Contents on page 132.
THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Hundredth Meeting
We do not expect any particular results one way or the other from the hundredth session of the League Council. It is particularly charged with considering the often postponed question of League reform. But here the last week or two have witnessed a certain hardening of feeling. The smaller Powers continue to be anxious for their responsibilities under the Covenant to be diminished. They see themselves belonging to what is now in essence a bloc. They would not have wanted to join a bloc headed by France, Britain and Soviet Russia if one had been created, and yet they find their inherited membership of the Geneva system makes them, in fact, the adherents of a group. The interest of a small Power is to keep its hands untied, and to secure by appropriate bargaining its own immediate interests, knowing that it can make no material contribution of a military kind away from its own frontiers, and that in the end it is military contributions that matter, and the Great Powers which decide policy.
There is some impatience among British advocates of schemes for reviving the League at the attitude of those Scandinavian Powers which now want to recognize Italy in Abyssinia. It is pointed out that these Powers lent strong moral support to the case for sanctions when sanctions were applied. But it must be recognized that much has been learned in the last two years. In particular the responsible statesmen in charge of the interests of those small nations have not failed to be disquieted at the extent to which British foreign policy is at the mercy o f British party politics. At the time of the Hoare-Laval proposals, they saw the National
Government compelled to tack and to abandon the course its own better judgment advised, in deference to Press and platform agitation, in favour of an extreme doctrinaire policy. They know that what happened in 1935 might happen ag a in ; they can envisage Left Governments in Britain and France mobilizing the League behind Barcelona. They know they may find themselves compelled to dance to a tune called in Britain by people singularly sheltered from, and ignorant of, the dangers on the Continent. Lines of League Reform
There are two directions open for League reform. From the beginning there have been advocates of regional leagues for South America, for middle Europe, for Western Europe, because in such smaller settings each Power, even if it is a small Power like Holland, really does become a factor of real weight. But such a regional league is not different from a system of regional understandings, such as is being, in fact, envisaged and pursued. Alternatively the sanctions clauses can be modified or dropped, in order to make the League a body primarily concerned with humanitarian and other activities which need an international centre and joint action. It might then be possible to persuade the Powers which have left it to come back to it, and the United States to take more and more of a part. What is quite certain is that any refusal to modify the Covenant will mean that the League will continue to be no more than the grandiloquent name for a particular grouping of Powers. It is understandable that the French should be particularly loath to weaken terms o f agreement which give France a certain claim on most of the other
