I

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 173 No. 5152

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

LONDON, FEBRUARY 4th, 1939

SIXPENCE

IN T H IS I S S U E

THE GOOD PAGAN’S FAILURE

A Further Essay by Rosalind Murray

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Appreciations by J. B. Morton and Violet Clifton

MEN AND BOOKS: M. DE REYNOLD ON SWITZERLAND

A LEADER ON THE LAND

Full List o f Contents on page 132.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK Trade and War • The Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Saturday ended with a masterly reference to the younger Pitt, a Minister, like Mr. Chamberlain, whose own interests were economic and humanitarian, but who found himself compelled to become a great war Minister, in a war which was protracted far beyond the expectations of anybody, and which ended in a victory for the tenacity and the inexhaustible resources of Great Britain.

by a gradual transformation of Germany’s relations with the rest of the world, a transformation which presupposes a great modification of the spirit now dominant in the Nazi Party. The Difficulties of the Reich

When Herr Hitler spoke on Monday he built his speech round the economic necessities of Germany. The trade figures published on Wednesday supplied a commentary, for they show a growing adverse balance of German imports and a drop of £14,000,000 in the exports. Like the rest of the world, Germany has suffered from the trade recession of 1938.

Herr Hitler justified, unashamedly, the dispossession of the Jews; but the German public know very well that it was the events of last November which have led immediately to the tremendous tide of anti-German feeling in the United States. The Jews in America wield an extraordinary power over the Press, and they use it to the full. It is a power in part of ownership and in part of advertisement control. Its effect is that the great American public, whose own anti-Semitism never appears in print, get all their views of Europe through eyes hostile to Germany. The recent collective fine was primarily an economic measure, but so viewed, it has been a costly one.

Herr Hitler made no attempt to conceal Germany’s difficulties. He posed a fundamental problem when he said that the world’s resources must either be held according to the strength and opportunity of the moment, or on a basis corresponding to the numbers and needs of the peoples. We live today under the first system. We would like to live under the second, but the transition from one to the other is an immensely difficult business. The historical process has generally been for those in possession to cling to everything as long as they possibly can and to lose them by war. No one is going to part with possessions whose surrender would make an enemy more formidable, unless they feel reasonably sure that there is not going to be an enemy.

Mr. Chamberlain has again emphasized that the root justification of his policy is that every country would lose by war, because war could not be a short business. Undoubtedly many people in Germany recognize that there is no solution by war for German economic difficulties. It might prove feasible to seize extra land as in the East, but in seizing it the German export trade would disappear. The only hopeful line of advance. is

The Nazi Government finds great difficulty in commanding sufficient foreign exchange for its purchases abroad, but it has open to it an apparently inexhaustible source in the stock markets of the world, which move up and down according as the Fiihrer talks peace or war. The stock markets, a modern development of civilization, are barometers, not seismographs. They are meant to facilitate the exchange of shares, valued in accordance with estimates of the future which presuppose a reasonably settled order of society. “ We must export or die, ’’ said Herr Hitler, in words curiously reminiscent of Viscount Samuel’s motto for Britain, ‘‘Export or Expire. ’’ If the rest of the world is thus essential, it places material limitations on the policy with which Dr. Goebbels is directly associated, of only wanting to be feared.

The gambling and speculative buying is a field in which rumours which can be invented and spread, play an enormous part. Whereas manufacturers need to be able to envisage the future, those who play the markets chiefly need rapid and continual movement of values. Amsterdam is, at the moment, a great centre from which