THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 174 No. 5182

LONDON, SEPTEMBER 2nd, 1939

SIXPENCE

IN T H I S I S S U E

THE SUPREME ISSUE An Editorial on Great Britain’s Stand

WAR AND THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION

By Philip Hughes

CATHOLICS, NAZIS, AND THE MOSCOW PACT

By Our Central European Correspondent

CARDINAL NEWMAN AT OXFORD: HI Father Henry Tristram continues his Account, from New Material

Full List o f Contents on page 296.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK Standing Fast

The only gain of the last seven days has been that the embattled ranks have paused and talked. They have not moved towards each other. Herr Hitler’s answer to M. Daladier, with its protestations of his desire for lasting understanding with France, its references to the formal renunciation of Alsace-Lorraine, could have no effect, because exactly similar things were said to the Czechs, when Austria was taken, and were said over and over again to the Poles, as long as it suited Herr Hitler to observe the Ten-Year Pact. In a brief and unanswerable broadcast, M. Daladier told his countrymen that all they could expect from abandoning the Poles would be that next March or September would come the German demands on France. We can see only too well the appearance in the German Press, gaining volume and crescendo, little by little, of the stories of the illtreatment of Germans in Alsace and the high moral duty laid on the Reich to rescue those tortured people.

But the main activity has been between London and Berlin. It has been a good thing that there has been a pause which has left a margin of hope. If the Germans had difficulty in understanding why we will not agree to divide the world into spheres of influence, the answer is the German record over Czecho-Slovakia. We make our stand while there is still some independence left, running from Poland to Turkey, in Eastern Europe. Peace Efforts

The Italian Press is now appealing to the Poles not on the lower ground of how much they will suffer and lose, but on the loftier ground that their sacrifices for a settlement can save the rest of mankind. No one is working harder than the Duce or has, indeed, more reason so to work. He can have no illusions about Italy’s position, whatever the outcome. The German attempts to buy Turkish neutrality, the coldness, increasingly marked now in the Spanish Press, between General Franco and Berlin, make Italy’s Mediterranean policy one of extreme difficulty. Both sides of the Suez Canal are controlled against Italy.

These Italian appeals to the Poles must be largely designed for the Italian public. The Poles, all through the past weeks, have withstood a barrage of deliberately created incidents, the burnings of German property by the Agents Provacateurs of the Gestapo, on the famous model of the Reichstag fire. The Poles have maintained their protests, but they have also accepted the offers of disinterested mediation, on the simple condition that they negotiate on an equal footing, and that they are not expected to present themselves at Berlin.

The latest and the noblest of these offers comes from the Queen of Holland and the King of the Belgians, who are running obvious risks for the common good. Both countries have been driven to an increasing fear of Germany, and their mediation, if its results were not wholly pleasing in Berlin, would give a handle for use against them. They have been accepted by the Poles and civilly thanked by the Germans, but all the signs point, at the moment of writing on Thursday afternoon, to violent German action in the near future. After that action in the east, the Duce, with German approval, may propose negotiations to arrest a world war which will have begun in name rather than in fact. But this is a timetable not acceptable to Poland’s friends. The Poles will resist, and will expect immediate action in the West. Trotsky Against Stalin

The Russian, General Krivitsky, was not the only writer this Spring to disclose the intrigues for an understanding between Berlin and Moscow against