THE TABLET A W E E K L Y NEW SPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 169 No. 5050 LONDON FEBRUARY 20th, 1937

SIXPENCE

PRINCIPAL CONTENTS

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK . . . . 253 THE ARAGON FRONT ; PRESSURE ON PORTUGAL ; WEAPONS AND WISDOM ; RESPONSIBILITIES FOR PEACE ; UNTOTALITARIAN BRITAIN ; “ THOU ART NOT CESAR’S FRIEND" ; WIDENING THE L.C.C. ELEC­ TION ISSUES ; THE PRESIDENT AS A DISTRIBUTIST ; MR. LEWIS’ PARTIAL VICTORY ; THE CLAIM OF INDUSTRIAL UNIONISM ; THEOCRACY IN JAPANESE POLITICS ; LOUD LEGISLATORS IN JAPAN ; THE STARS LOOK UP SIX CHURCHMEN IN SPAIN . . . . 255 IDEOLOGICAL FRONTS .......................... 257 By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS THE ROOTS OF MODERN SPAIN (I) . 260 By MARIA F. DE LAGUNA

ROME LETTER

SOME FRENCH CATHOLIC POETS . . 264 THE CHURCH ABROAD 265 LETTERS TO THE ED IT O R ...............................267 BOOKS OF THE WEEK ............................... 270 THE DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES ; DICTATORS ; I WAS A SOVIET WORKER ; CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY

Fiction Chronicle

. . . . 274

By GRAHAM GREENE German Books . . . . . . . . . . 276 TOWN, COUNTRY AND ABROAD . 278 LENTEN PASTORALS ...............................279

263 CHESS AND CROSSWORD . .

282

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Aragon Front

The Barcelona Correspondent of the Belgian paper La Metropole, who has earned a remarkable name for himself for his accurate forecastings, now expects to see great Nationalist activity on the Aragon front. Very little has been heard of Saragossa since the Autumn. It used to be announced that a great army from Catalonia was marching against it, but nothing came of that, and perhaps nothing throws a clearer light on the weakness and confusion of Red Spain than the failure of the Catalans to conduct an effective offensive, it is believed that the new strategy of the Nationalists will be a slow parallel extension north and south, leaving Madrid the one centre of lively and effective military effort by the other side, so that even should Madrid resist for much longer yet, it will become increasingly a remote outpost of opposition. As the war draws near to the eastern coast, the dissensions between Valencia and Catalonia play a more important part. Pressure on Portugal

This week there comes into force the agreed ban on foreign volunteers in Spain. The supervision presents difficulties, particularly in the case of Portugal. What France has been to Red Spain, the main highway of supplies, Portugal has been to the Nationalists. The French say that if they are now willing to see their frontier sealed and watched, the lesser dignity of Portugal must not jib at naval supervision of Lisbon and Oporto. But the Portuguese do jib, because from the first the struggle has been to them far more momentous than to anyone else outside Spain itself. The issue for or against violent revolution in Portugal is being decided now in Spain, and the enemies of revolution can hardly be expected to be enthusiastic about neutrality and non-intervention, and the other arrangements for minimising friction between the great powers who are so far removed from Portugal’s isolation. It has been interesting to watch the immediate reactions of people in England who a short while ago were talking a great deal about the equal rights of the smallest and of the greatest Powers, and about the beauty of the League system in which Panama has as much voice as China. These same people are now explaining that if Portugal is recalcitrant it ought to be perfectly easy to bully her into acquiescence, particularly by threatening to give her colonies to Germany. Weapons and Wisdom

The large scale of British rearmament will have, we trust, a sobering effect upon public opinion. For one thing it is always sobering to pay money, and while borrowing of a kind which will last beyond the effective lifetimes of most of the weapons so obtained, is to be the chief method of financing rearmament, yet there will have to be a considerable addition to the annual revenue, and some form of increased taxation. There is a general recognition in the foreign Press that Great Britain is not only within her rights, but that the stability of Europe will be helped v/hen British power is proportionate to British responsibilities. The disquieting thing is that this new might is coming into the hands of people who have only been saved in the last two years from some very foolish adventures because they lacked the immediate equipment. There is no way of ensuring a proportionate increased sense of responsibility and knowledge of Europe, and the armaments which are being ordered today may rest at the disposal of harebrained individuals prepared to plunge the world into war in the hope of salvaging a whole imaginary system of collective security. It is an abiding weakness of the Labour movement that its steadiest heads come into national politics from the industrial side without the opportunity or the incentive to know much about the world and international relations. It is the intellectuals, who find themselves disqualified by accidents of birth from industrial leadership, who make world affairs their special study, and who are the exponents of forciblefeeble paper schemes in which their vanity very soon becomes fatally entangled. Responsibilities for Peace

Most people, including most statesmen, very much want to maintain peace, but our institutions are more and more being moulded in the tradition that the public man, the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary of the day, is only there to carry out the popular will. The war of 1914-18 might well have been closed to the general advantage in 1916 if it had been a war between autocrats