THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 173 No. 5167

LONDON, MAY 20th, 1939

SIXPENCE

IN T i n s ISSUE

LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

THE RELIGION OF CHARLES DICKENS

By Alfred Noyes

CHRISTOPHER SMART

By David Jones

RELIGION IN MEXICO

A Concluding Article by Evelyn Waugh

Full List o f Contents on page 636.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The King and Queen in Catholic Canada

The King and Queen have begun their tour in North America by landing at Quebec. No part of the Empire better exemplifies the merits of the British system. The French Canadians, who have lived for 150 years, guaranteed in their religion and language and national culture, under the British flag, are the most rapidly growing population in the Dominion o f Canada, and will play a great part in the future. F o r most o f those 150 years, the British Crown, to which they owe allegiance, and France, their mother country, have been, at the best, very much less close to each other than Britain and France are today. For much of the time relations between Great Britain and the United States have been more competitive than co rd ia l ; but today the King and Queen are being welcomed in Quebec, and are later to be welcomed in Washington, and the old controversies in which the French Canadians, under Sir Wilfrid Laurier, stood for close relation with the United States, in opposition to the Canadian imperialist party, are now a chapter of long past history. Quebec escaped the influence of the French Revolution, and the secularist path o f the Third Republic diminished French-Canadian sympathy, but today when Catholicism is fast reviving in France, the French Canadians can rekindle their ancestral pride and can rejoice fully in the Anglo-French Entente. The Plan for Palestine

The Government have declared, in the White Paper on Palestine which was issued on Wednesday, that ■“ I t is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past, that the Arab population of Palestine should be made the subjects of a Jewish State against their will. ’ ’ When the Palestine Round Table Conferences broke down earlier in the year, the British Government announced that it would produce its own plan. Since then the German absorption o f the Czechs has transform ed the international situation, and has led to the British guarantees abroad,

and a rapid strengthening everywhere of the British diplomatic front, culminating in the very important agreement with Turkey. The largest considerations of the maintenance of peace, and the safety o f the Empire, have now dictated the decision announced in the White Paper. There is a clear acceptance of the basic Arab contentions. Jewish immigration is to be limited to 75,000 in all, over the next five years, so that the Jews shall not be more than one-third o f the total population. In a jo in t Arab-Jewish State, to be given increasing self-government over ten years, Arabs will have most o f the posts. This is a complete abandonment of the ideas o f the Peel Commission for two States, and it is inevitably a bitter disappointment to ardent Zionists, who understood the promise o f a national home to mean th a t under British ¡egis the Jews would gradually become the dominant race in Palestine. The White Paper quotes declarations as far back as 1922 which disclaim this interpretation. The Importance of Arab Goodwill

It is not surprising that the Jewish agency expresses its intense dislike for the proposals, but it is more surprising to find the school of opinion of which the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald are representative taking the same line. Those papers are the organs of opinion most insistent that Nazi Germany is a menace to the world, most emphatic that a peace front must be built everywhere, and that nothing can stand in the way of strategic necessities. Yet there could hardly be a clearer case than there is for this settlement with the Arabs. The Arab States have long been in particularly close relations with Britain. They have much more to fear from the ambitions and methods of the Axis Powers in the Near East. The one source o f poison, the one festering wound, has, for these many years, been Palestine. It has for long been apparent th a t there was a tragic miscalculation in the Balfour Declaration. Thinking o f Palestine as a small part o f the conquered Ottoman Empire, Lord Balfour and his colleagues grossly underestimated the reality of Arab national sentiment, not only in Palestine, but in the surrounding States. It has long been obvious to all who can look at