AUTOBIOGRAPHY of G. K. CHESTERTON begins this week.

THE TABLET

A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 168 No. 5026

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

LONDON SEPTEMBER 5th, 1936

SIXPENCE

PRINCIPAL CONTENTS

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK . . .293

FRENCH ATTITUDE TO SPA IN ; WHAT HAPPENED TO REPUBLICAN SPAIN ; THE GERMAN BISHOPS ; TITULESCO THE PRETENCE OF DEMOCRACY IN

S P A IN ............................................................... 296 THE SUBORDINATION OF ECONOMICS 297 DEPUTY INTO CANNIBAL.............................297 VOLTAIRE AS HISTORIAN.............................298

By ALFRED NOYES RELIGION IN THE AGE OF

REVOLUTION, I I ........................................ 301 By CHRISTOPHER DAWSON

THE STATISTICAL KNOWLEDGE OF

GOD—A POEM ........................................ 303 ROME LETTER ........................................ 303 THE GERMAN BISHOPS’ PASTORAL . . 305 AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY ............................. 309

By G. K. CHESTERTON BOOKS OF THE WEEK ............................. 314

THE GIFFORD LECTURES ; THE NEW FREEDOM AND THE NEW DEAL CHESS AND CROSSWORD.............................319 THE CALENDAR ........................................ 324

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Charges of French Intervention

The very important agreement between the Powers not to help either side in Spain is taking a long time to come into effect. The grievances are held by the sympathisers with both combatants. Labour deputations go repeatedly to the Foreign Office to seek assurances which they can pass on to their more extreme members. The Left Wing view in England is that Portugal, Germany and Italy are all helping the. antiGovernment forces. So much publicity is being given to these charges that it is important to state that the French are equally suspected of helping the Spanish Government. General Mola has now formulated his charge. The original Italian hesitations about the agreement were based on the expectation that the French Government intended to wink at a good deal of what would be done by French Labour organizations. There was a busy traffic across the eastern boundary and between Marseilles and Barcelona in the early weeks of the struggle. The charges are now more explicit; it is alleged with much circumstantial detail (in La Petite Gironde, for example) that M. Montaigne, Leon Blum’s private secretary, lately had an interview a t Behobie with the representative of the Government commander of Irun. This meeting was followed by the supply of munitions and machine-guns, and on the nights of the 25th and 26th, anti-aircraft guns and French ’75’s went through Hendaye to Irun in charge of a French Reserve Captain, Jaques Menachim, with a technical assistant. The stubborn resistance of Irun, a place little adapted to withstand prolonged attack, undoubtedly suggests that its proximity to the French border has proved a great source of supply. It is not a matter for great surprise or indignation that this should be so. What is surprising is that the very people in .England who were loudest in their conviction earlier this year that French politicians were cheating over Sanctions, were pretending one thing to Britain and acting quite differently to Italy, should now profess to have no sort of misgiving about the complete reliability of French official assurances. The Italians have been less simple and more wary. It should be a simple matter, when the agreement is ratified, to arrange for observers on both the French and Portuguese frontiers. To check the despatch of arms by sea is a much more difficult matter, and to prevent the delivery of airplanes the most difficult of all. Meanwhile, we welcome the Government’s prohibition of British subjects volunteering for the Spanish war. The French have most reason to fear a large-scale volunteer movement which will bring back into the already sufficiently sharp antagonisms of French politics, an element which will have been blooded in the ferocious class warfare in Spain. Spain under the Government

For it has by now become obvious that in many of the cities where what is euphemistically termed “ the Government” is in control, small committees drawn from the societies and associations of Anarchists even more than of Communists conduct reigns of terror. They use the weapons which the Government gave them, to shoot anybody against whom they have a grudge; they kidnap, court-martial and shoot individuals as being potentially or actually enemies of the workers without any pretence of military necessity. The nightly shootings in Madrid are simply revenge, often highly personal, and bloodthirstiness. If Madrid falls, it will not fall the sooner if these sort of executions cease, and the Government deserves the credit of at any rate making gestures towards controlling the savages who now infest the streets of the capital. It wants them either to give up their arms or to fight with them on the north or south fronts outside the capital.