THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 172 No. 5142

LONDON NOVEMBER 26th 1938

SIXPENCE

IN Tins ISSUE

NATIONALISTS IN THE SOVIET

Will the Soviet Union break up ?

By Lancelot Lawton

UNION

AN APOSTOLIC DELEGATE FOR

Editorial

BRITAIN

THE FINANCES OF THE CHURCH

From Our Burgos Correspondent IN SPAIN

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE ACT,

By Leo Page, J.P.

Full List of Contents onpage 696.

1938

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Political Strikes in France

The British Ministers visit France at a moment when their presence can do something to strengthen M. Daladier, whose difficulties increase as the sky in France grows darker. In a tough fight before the Commission of Finances, the French Government have secured that the Commission shall discuss the Budget, which is essential for the carrying on of public business, before discussing M. Reynaud’s decrees, which may only too easily bring down the Daladier Cabinet. A tremendous drive is now going on to overthrow both M. Daladier and the whole of the foreign policy which his Government, in strict accord with Mr. Chamberlain, is seeking, as far as internal politics permit, to follow. An epidemic of stay-in strikes, around Paris and in the northern industrial area, has broken out, and the C.G.T. met last Friday to discuss a general strike of twenty-four hours as a political demonstration. But the elimination, by votes from the executive committee of the C.G.T., of four leading Communists, including the leader in the recent building strikes, was an unexpected setback, and the representatives of Moscow are now feverishly seeking to regain their hold, demanding that M. Jouhaux, a chief of the C.G.T., shall render the unfortunate election results invalid by increasing the number of the Administrative Commission from forty-five to fifty, and by co-opting Communists to the additional places.

These manœuvres come at a moment when French industrialists are showing themselves aware of the way in which French Trade Unionism has been completely penetrated by Communist cells, so that it has ceased to be a movement primarily concerned with conditions in industry and has been made into a political machine to bring down the existing regime. Strikes are ordered or called off entirely in relation to the political situation of the moment as a form of pressure or demonstration, and not as the result of settlements or disputes of a purely industrial character.

The Action Française continues its great campaign that France shall not be led into what it calls “ the Jews’ war,” declaring that Jewish money, gold and paper may make the rounds of the French Press to buy and bend journals of all colours, but the Action Française at any rate cannot be tainted. The paper has been, from its beginning, in the forefront of the anti-German Press, but it has shown itself one of the chief opponents of a forward French policy, on behalf first of Czechoslovakia and now, more generally, of the Jewish refugees. The attitude of M. Louis Marin, the extreme Right leader in the Chamber, who is totally opposed to any colonial concessions, is representative of French feeling at the present, even among those who most warmly supported M. Daladier’s Government over Munich. Belgium and Holland

After Waterloo the peacemakers a t Vienna, faced with the age-old problem of the Low Countries, and their independence, placed what is now Belgium and had been the Austrian Netherlands, under the King of Holland. This arrangement was forcibly terminated, and Belgium emerged as a separate country fifteen years later. Since then the two small neighbours have gone their own ways with plenty of intercourse, since both are commercial peoples, exceedingly alive to the advantages