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THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA VOL. 189. No. 5572 FOUNDED IN 1840 LONDON, MARCH 8th, 1947 SIXPENCE PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER INDIAN TRAGEDY The Lords’ Debate, and the Neglect o f the Native States GERMANY TODAY AND TOMORROW A Visit on the Eve o f the Moscow Conference. By Major Guy Lloyd, D .S .O ., M .P . HOW ITALIANS TOOK THE PEACE TREATY From our Rome Correspondent RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE Cardinal van Roey’s Lenten Pastoral Letter This ruling is something of a shock to the politicians and their departmental advisers, who have now got into the habit o f taking judicial powers and creating their own tribunals, primarily as a way o f shutting the public off from access to the ordinary courts. The English tradition of a right of appeal is too strong for it just to be abolished, but if it can be made an appeal to the Ministry and kept inside the Ministry, or to a tribunal picked by the Minister, appearances can be preserved. The Case of the Periodical Press “ ‘FASTER, FASTER,’ SAID THE RED QUEEN” T HERE are many features about our present predicaments which are not easily, remediable ; but there is one which can and should be remedied a t once. The Government, piling Bill on Bill with artificial urgency, must change the temper of their minds, and show more understanding for the genius o f our constitutional democracy. At present, whatever lip-service they pay, their own first thoughts only too often disclose a quite different mentality, by which their only duty is to hurry on to the Statute Book, with or without discussion, every proposal that was printed in their election literature. They have experienced a set-back in their attempt to curtail any at all adequate parliamentary discussion o f a succession o f highly important Bills. They do not like it when Conservative members point out that the House of Commons, for all its venerable past, could easily be transformed by those methods into a sort of perfunctoiy consultative body or Nazi Reichstag ; a body which is allowed a certain limited power o f discussing some o f the details of Government measures, but where the main function o f an obedient and carefully selected majority is just to acclaim, quite uncritically, what the Government chooses to do. The slowness of our procedure is not an irrelevant anachronism, and it was surprising to find so moderate and respected a Minister as Mr. Chuter Ede using the dangerous argument that it is. When he suggests that it is the sticklers for forms who are the enemies o f real democracy, he is going dangerously far on the road where there are so many warning examples to deter us. I t then becomes logical to eliminate Parliament altogether, to consult the people, and, when a majority—perhaps, as now, a bare majority—has been obtained, to proceed to carry out the whole programme. It is doubtful how far our legal tradition will survive if this philosophy spreads, because that, too, can be called an inheritance of obstacles and the rule o f the dead, and governments are perpetually tempted to appoint judges who will act as servants o f the executive, even if they do not use the open language o f M. Krylenko, Commissar for Justice in the Soviet Union until his turn came for liquidation, who summed up the new conception by saying:— “ Every judge must keep himself well-informed on questions of State policy, and remember that his judicial decisions in particular cases are intended to promote the prevailing policy o f the ruling class, and nothing else.” I t is still, happily, a far cry from that conception to the rulings given by Mr. Justice Henn-Collins in favour of the Stevenage petitioners against Mr. Lewis Silkin. The English judge ruled that it is not enough for a Minister to take from the House o f Commons powers creating him the judge on all sorts o f questions affecting the use o f his own powers, unless he accepts the responsibilities o f a judge, which means th a t he accepts the idea that when a question goes into a judicial setting the large and abiding considerations of natural justice come into active operation, so that a Minister might have to decide against himself and his department. The abrupt, and short-lived, ban on periodicals reflected the same habitual and almost unconscious indifference. No one seriously suggests for a moment that the Government were thinking o f trying to stifle criticism, but it is hardly less disquieting that they so instinctively thought o f the printing and dissemination of opinion as no more than one part of industry, and an inessential part at that. They were not sure ju st what powers they had, but they were reasonably confident that while no Minister, and least o f all the Minister o f Fuel and Power, had any direct or statutory authority to close down any portion of the Press, yet somewhere among the vast accumulation o f powers taken in the war and not relinquished, or taken since, they would find one which covered them ; as, indeed, they did find it, in Defence Order No. 55, which is so sweepingly phrased that it authorizes the Government to prohibit the use o f any particular material in any particular industry. But the actual procedure adopted, prompter and less regular, was greatly facilitated by the existence o f a trade association to which rather more than half the periodicals affected belong, and in which in general up to now they have had great confidence. Like the Roman tyrant who wished the people had only one head, so that he could cut it off a t one blow, the Government were very alive to the advantages o f only having to deal with one body ; the least defensible part o f the procedure, the declaration that there was a prohibition o f all alternative methods o f production, even where papers had no competitors to feel aggrieved— The Isis, a t Oxford, was a capital example—was something that could not have happened if the Government had had to approach all the publications individually, or to address them in general, and had not been able to claim an agreement with a representative body. The country has been rightly perturbed at the ease with which so big a departure from established ideas in a very important field was carried through. But it is also true that as soon as the position was realised there was a strong reaction against it, taking many forms. The solidarity of the Press was affirmed by the dailies, themselves reduced to wartime size, giving their space very generously to their less fortunate contemporaries. The Tablet records its gratitude to the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Graphic, and the Standard of Dublin. Only the pages o f Hansard give the picture of how insist­

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THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 189. No. 5572

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MARCH 8th, 1947

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

INDIAN TRAGEDY The Lords’ Debate, and the Neglect o f the Native States

GERMANY TODAY AND TOMORROW

A Visit on the Eve o f the Moscow Conference. By Major Guy Lloyd, D .S .O ., M .P .

HOW ITALIANS TOOK THE PEACE TREATY

From our Rome Correspondent

RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION IN EASTERN EUROPE

Cardinal van Roey’s Lenten Pastoral Letter

This ruling is something of a shock to the politicians and their departmental advisers, who have now got into the habit o f taking judicial powers and creating their own tribunals, primarily as a way o f shutting the public off from access to the ordinary courts. The English tradition of a right of appeal is too strong for it just to be abolished, but if it can be made an appeal to the Ministry and kept inside the Ministry, or to a tribunal picked by the Minister, appearances can be preserved. The Case of the Periodical Press

“ ‘FASTER, FASTER,’ SAID THE RED QUEEN” T HERE are many features about our present predicaments which are not easily, remediable ; but there is one which can and should be remedied a t once. The Government, piling Bill on Bill with artificial urgency, must change the temper of their minds, and show more understanding for the genius o f our constitutional democracy. At present, whatever lip-service they pay, their own first thoughts only too often disclose a quite different mentality, by which their only duty is to hurry on to the Statute Book, with or without discussion, every proposal that was printed in their election literature. They have experienced a set-back in their attempt to curtail any at all adequate parliamentary discussion o f a succession o f highly important Bills. They do not like it when Conservative members point out that the House of Commons, for all its venerable past, could easily be transformed by those methods into a sort of perfunctoiy consultative body or Nazi Reichstag ; a body which is allowed a certain limited power o f discussing some o f the details of Government measures, but where the main function o f an obedient and carefully selected majority is just to acclaim, quite uncritically, what the Government chooses to do.

The slowness of our procedure is not an irrelevant anachronism, and it was surprising to find so moderate and respected a Minister as Mr. Chuter Ede using the dangerous argument that it is. When he suggests that it is the sticklers for forms who are the enemies o f real democracy, he is going dangerously far on the road where there are so many warning examples to deter us. I t then becomes logical to eliminate Parliament altogether, to consult the people, and, when a majority—perhaps, as now, a bare majority—has been obtained, to proceed to carry out the whole programme.

It is doubtful how far our legal tradition will survive if this philosophy spreads, because that, too, can be called an inheritance of obstacles and the rule o f the dead, and governments are perpetually tempted to appoint judges who will act as servants o f the executive, even if they do not use the open language o f M. Krylenko, Commissar for Justice in the Soviet Union until his turn came for liquidation, who summed up the new conception by saying:—

“ Every judge must keep himself well-informed on questions of State policy, and remember that his judicial decisions in particular cases are intended to promote the prevailing policy o f the ruling class, and nothing else.” I t is still, happily, a far cry from that conception to the rulings given by Mr. Justice Henn-Collins in favour of the Stevenage petitioners against Mr. Lewis Silkin. The English judge ruled that it is not enough for a Minister to take from the House o f Commons powers creating him the judge on all sorts o f questions affecting the use o f his own powers, unless he accepts the responsibilities o f a judge, which means th a t he accepts the idea that when a question goes into a judicial setting the large and abiding considerations of natural justice come into active operation, so that a Minister might have to decide against himself and his department.

The abrupt, and short-lived, ban on periodicals reflected the same habitual and almost unconscious indifference. No one seriously suggests for a moment that the Government were thinking o f trying to stifle criticism, but it is hardly less disquieting that they so instinctively thought o f the printing and dissemination of opinion as no more than one part of industry, and an inessential part at that. They were not sure ju st what powers they had, but they were reasonably confident that while no Minister, and least o f all the Minister o f Fuel and Power, had any direct or statutory authority to close down any portion of the Press, yet somewhere among the vast accumulation o f powers taken in the war and not relinquished, or taken since, they would find one which covered them ; as, indeed, they did find it, in Defence Order No. 55, which is so sweepingly phrased that it authorizes the Government to prohibit the use o f any particular material in any particular industry.

But the actual procedure adopted, prompter and less regular, was greatly facilitated by the existence o f a trade association to which rather more than half the periodicals affected belong, and in which in general up to now they have had great confidence. Like the Roman tyrant who wished the people had only one head, so that he could cut it off a t one blow, the Government were very alive to the advantages o f only having to deal with one body ; the least defensible part o f the procedure, the declaration that there was a prohibition o f all alternative methods o f production, even where papers had no competitors to feel aggrieved— The Isis, a t Oxford, was a capital example—was something that could not have happened if the Government had had to approach all the publications individually, or to address them in general, and had not been able to claim an agreement with a representative body.

The country has been rightly perturbed at the ease with which so big a departure from established ideas in a very important field was carried through. But it is also true that as soon as the position was realised there was a strong reaction against it, taking many forms. The solidarity of the Press was affirmed by the dailies, themselves reduced to wartime size, giving their space very generously to their less fortunate contemporaries. The Tablet records its gratitude to the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Graphic, and the Standard of Dublin.

Only the pages o f Hansard give the picture of how insist­

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