THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 172 No. 5135

LONDON OCTOBER 8th, 1938

SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE AFTER MUNICH

Editorial

RACE AND RELIGION IN THE SL DEI I NI AND

The Catholicism of the Bohemian Germans

SOVIET INFLUENCE IN SPAIN, 1919-1936

A DOCUMENTARY STUDY

By Marcel Chaminade

FOREIGN BROADCAST

PROGRAMMES

RACIALISM IN

GERMANY

Full List o f Contents on page 452.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Munich Agreement in the Commons

Dr. Benes Resigns

When the Prime Minister met the House of Commons on Monday, it was to explain to them the differences between the Munich Agreement and the Godesberg memorandum. In essence the Munich Agreement, though framed by Sr. Mussolini, returned to the AngloFrench plan for the gradual transference of the Sudeten territory. Because the Ministers worked under extreme haste, which was the arbitrary but calculated creation of Herr Hitler, many important matters were left over, such as the extent to which the Czech fortifications may be dismantled. The debate which followed divided the House between those who would like to have seen a much stronger attitude towards Germany and those who did not see what such an attitude would have achieved, compared with the dangers it would have invited. There is still too far widespread a desire, while escaping the discipline to which the Germans bend themselves, to take up an attitude all over the world which, if the Germans or anyone else took it up, would be at once characterized as insufferable domination. A Reshuffle

The conclusion of the Munich Agreement has been followed in every country by a realization that all existing international alignments now belong to the past. The old equilibrium has gone. There is no longer a Paris-Prague-Moscow alignment, and the post-war phase of active French leadership in Central Europe is now closed. The struggle between French and German political ambitions for the leadership of the succession States has ended, as it had to end, in Germany’s favour in that part of the world. At the moment the revolution is marked. The Czechs have to envisage a new future in which they are no longer the bastion, the key-piece, in an elaborate political system, but are a small people like the Danes or the Dutch, not naturally defended by their frontiers, and on the edge of the territory of a great neighbour.

The resignation of Dr. Benes inevitably accompanies the ruin of the attempt, of which he was a principal architect, to construct, under Czech leadership, a new country out of half-a-dozen discordant nationalities. Of Dr. Benes and of the Czechs in general, it is fair to say that they bear adversity well and much better than they bore success. The more moderate Masaryk had the good fortune to die a year ago, before the Anschluss sounded the knell of the Versailles arrangement. A younger man, Dr. Benes has lived to see the jerry-building of Versailles fall to pieces as soon as it ceased to rest on the undisputed military supremacy of the French. Down to 1933 that supremacy was decisive. The western frontier of Germany, the Rhineland industrial area, lay always open to seizure by France. It was not till 1936 that the Germans reoccupied and began to fortify it, but by 1933 it was becoming plain that the Germans were rearming, and that the new Nazi regime would make the pace of rearmament hot. The immediate French response was the tour of M. Barthou, questing for allies to the east of Germany, a consolidation of the alliance with Czechoslovakia, and above all, the preparation of the Franco-Soviet pact. 1934 saw, in short, an attempt to reinforce arms by diplomacy and alliances. The allies then sought have now been lost, for it is plain that the French are not prepared to fight for any frontier in the east. The events of the last month have shown how, in the last resort, even the politicians of the French Popular Front and the Left prefer to keep closer to Britain than to Russia.

Meanwhile, there is general agreement that the Government will be right, not merely in making a loan to the Czechs, but in making the first £10,000,000 of that loan an advance without interest and without any expectation of repayment. The crisis has cost both Britain and France something like £40,000,000. It has cost the Germans a great deal more, keeping a great