THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 174 No. 5199

LONDON, DECEMBER 30th, 1939____________________SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE

EUROPEAN UNITY AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

IE. EUROPEAN UNITY AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER

By Christopher Dawson

HUNGARY BETWEEN TWO FIRES

By Our Central European Correspondent

JEAN RACINE An Essay for his Tercentenary, by Martin Turnell THE POPE’S CHRISTMAS EVE ALLOCUTION

The Holy Father’s Tests for an International Order

Full List o f Contents on page 740. ____________________

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Finns Stand Fast

The successful Finnish resistance has now lasted for a month, and it was the month of worst danger. From now on the arctic weather will be increasingly useful to the defence, and in the intervening weeks there has been time for the admiring world to take stock of the necessities of the Finns, and to come to their help. M. Daladier spoke more openly than any British Minister has done about the help which is going from the Allies. In France today there are no hesitations or reluctant glances backward along the Moscow road, and the national unity of France could not be damaged by the most open declarations of help for Finland. The same process is rapidly taking place in England, but it is much better to let it happen as the events and the speeches of Stalin and Molotov make it every day more impossible for anybody to defend them. The messages exchanged on Stalin's sixtieth birthday were better propaganda than anything the long avowed enemies of the Soviet could have devised. Hitler hails Stalin in a message which closed with the words : “ The Soviet Union, our friend, and if the true test of friendship is, as Aristotle and Cicero have expounded, a willingness to make sacrifices for the advantage of a friend, Nazi Germany can point by the real strength and effectiveness of the Soviet. For the resistance of the Finns, while it has its comfort obviously for the Germans, as well as for all other peoples living near Russia, also detracts from any attempt to represent the Soviet Union as a friend worth making, though all the rest of the world had to be estranged. The Importance of Helping Finland

General Duval writes excellently in Le Journal :— “ Let us not regard the defence of Finland simply as the magnificent example of a people who wish to live as free men or perish. It is that ; but it is also, in the strategical development of the war, a struggle for possession of one of the key positions of Europe. If we wish to understand it, let us study, not a detailed map of the Scandinavian Peninsula, but a map of the whole of Europe and the North Atlantic. Possibly because they have for more than a century lived apart from conflicts in Europe, we are not accustomed to attach sufficient importance to the position of Sweden and Norway as Maritime Powers. But it must be asked whether any possibility of blockade against Germany would remain if she dominated the Scandinavian Peninsula and Iceland.

to no mean gifts which have been laid, for an altogether inadequate price, before the clay feet of the master of the Kremlin. There has been laid before him, by unwise men from the west, all Germany’s moral and material position in the Baltic, the traditional protectorate over the Baltic States adjoining East Prussia, and the important good will of the Scandinavian countries who all rightly feel themselves to have been betrayed and sold. The German position in Central and South-Eastern Europe is equally compromised, and the largest single factor in the changed relations of the partners in the Rome-Berlin Axis is their strikingly different attitudes towards the aggression of Russian Communism. These are gifts indeed, and all that Hitler can indicate to satisfy bewildered and sceptical Germans as compensating advantages is the absence, up to the present, of Soviet hostility towards Germany, and its avowed expression towards Germany’s enemies.

The value of this is obviously to be measured entirely

“ Many invasions of our Continent have found their starting-place in Scandinavia. The occupation of Finland by the U.S.S.R. would, by itself, be no more than an odious crime. But if it was followed by a combined action by Russia and Germany against Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and if after this had been effected the Germans made their entry into Holland, it is difficult to see how Great Britain could continue to command the North Sea and the North Atlantic. ...” The Too Wide World

The Holy Father, in his Christmas Eve speech, referred to the League, saying : “ In creating or reconstituting international institutions which have lofty missions, but at the same time missions full of difficulties and grave responsibilities, the experience of the past should be kept in mind. Ineffectiveness and faults in practice, in which any similar institution has suffered, should be taken into consideration, so