THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

VOL. 189. No. 5569

POUNDED IN 1840

PRO ECCLESIA DEI. PRO REGE ET PATRIA

LONDON, FEBRUARY 1st, 1947

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

WORKERS FOR BRITAIN Our Urgent Necessities and the Available Remedy

PEACE WITH ITALY Some Needless Severities. By Barbara Barclay Carter MORE CATHOLIC CHILDREN THAN SCHOOLS How a Quarter o f the Catholic Children are Crowded Out. By Andrew Beck, A.A.

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I, GRAVES

Mgr. Ronald Knox Reviews Mr. Robert Graves’ New Novel

PRIMITIVE NATIONALISM L ORD VANSITTART asked the House o f Lords on Tuesday whether there had ever been heard quite so much as recently about national sovereignty ; and certainly Mr. Attlee’s Government finds itself at every turn faced with crises and difficulties which arise out o f the crude and intransigeant assertion o f nationalism, untempered by any effective sense o f larger obligations. The Palestine Conference is bedevilled by it, for there the British Government is alone in really being prepared to do its part in making a mixed State work. There is nothing to be said for a Partition which will placate neither Jews nor Arabs. I f Palestine has to be a national State resting on any nationalist feeling, it will have to be accepted as an Arab State, like its neighbours. The Jews have made an immense error in trying to force the pace and to translate the Mandate into something it could only ever have become through the slow work o f time.

national, and that the theory th a t whatever political movement can possess itself o f the machinery o f the State has unlimited authority is a doctrine that needs to be superseded by the acceptance everywhere o f a much stricter notion of what Governments may or may not do, and of the boundaries within which they must keep if they are not to degenerate into, and be classified as, lawless tyrannies which are rightly to be opposed. Civil Liberties in the United Nations

The Egyptians are equally in the grip o f the nationalist prepossessions which are making it so difficult for the most conciliatory o f British Governments to work out a new relationship over the Sudan. The Egyptians want to be free o f Britain, but to forbid the Sudan ever to be free of Egypt.

Further East, the Indian Congress Party has carried its resolution for a republic. Meetings are even held in London to celebrate Indian Independence Day, a t which Professor Laski, as ever ready to provide any country with a wrong diagnosis, has told Indians that “ All Indians, irrespective of race and creed, are Indians first and members o f a community second.” The opposite is notoriously the tru th in India, and is likely soon enough to be proved in bloodshed on an immense scale. But it suits the Indian politicians to pretend that they are the leaders of a united nation, because under modern theory their authority then becomes unassailable and absolute, from both outside and inside. Great Britain becomes an external aggressor, and any Indians who refuse obedience become rebels against whom any measures may be taken.

With the Burmese the same pattern is unrolling, where Mr. Attlee and his colleagues find themselves once again the victims o f their own political philosophy. I t is a tragedy that men personally so humane should be led by this inadequate philosophy to think they must hand over power to professional politicians anywhere who claim to be expressing a national will. I f the millions o f people in these countries have their nationalism, they also have their needs and wishes as human beings and private persons, wanting stability and a settled constitutional framework, and not wanting any violent transition or upheaval or collapse. But there is no machinery for putting this kind of popular will on the agenda at conferences, unless the British Government does so by roundly asserting that its primary duty is the essentially practical one o f ensuring continuity and an orderly evolution.

These crude expressions of nationalism emerge in Asia and the Middle East just when in every country in Europe there is a growing realization th a t the main need o f twentiethcentury man is for larger forms o f association than the purely

On Monday the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations met in New York. Mrs. Roosevelt, to whom so many exiles in Europe already owe so much, and whose influence has largely determined the excellently humane orientations o f the new International Refugee Organization, which promises to approach the problem o f the displaced persons in a very different spirit to th a t lately displayed by Unrra, was unanimously elected chairman. The task o f the Commission is to submit proposals, recommendations and reports to the Economic and Social Council with a view to the eventual establishment of an International Bill o f Rights ; proposals which, as Mrs. Roosevelt remarked as the Commission’s work began, may have little prospect of being generally accepted and respected, but which it is none the less valuable to assert and to uphold. The whole field of civil liberties will be covered, and such special matters as international freedom o f information, the protection o f minorities, and so on. The Times on Tuesday carried no report o f the Commission’s meeting, despite the letter in which, two days before, Mr. Philips Price had asked that continental regimes should be judged not exclusively by the tests o f economic justice but also by the regard they show for civil liberties. It was left to the Daily Herald to wri te of the “ vital importance ’ ’ of the Commission:—

“ When we write ‘vital,’ we mean, literally, that what are being discussed are matters o f life or death affecting every citizen o f this country. . . . I t was by violating some o f these principles that the Fascist dictators climbed to p ow e r ; and th a t violation—at first weakly protested against by other Powers—led in the end to war. The Charter of the United Nations foresaw that a code of human rights, accepted by the victor States, was an essential pillar o f the peace. ’’ I t was curious that there should be such little general understanding o f the Communist view o f social democracy that it was worth Mr. Zilliacus’ while to controvert the Attorney-General in The Times. I t was curious that Mr. Philips Price should find his main consolation for the Communist Governments of Eastern Europe in the claim that “ Communism is the very negation of racialism,” when those Governments have shown their only approach to minority problems to be th a t o f mass-expulsion and have proclaimed their racialism in the most unashamed terms at the All-Slav Congress in Belgrade in December. I t may be that in Western Europe Communists are not racialists, but in Eastern Europe they plainly are. That is why there can be no Hungarians in