THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 189. No. 5588

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, JUNE 28th, 1947

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

•THE PARIS CONFERENCE High Possibilities and Small Hopes

THE RUSSIANS IN AUSTRIA THE FUTURE OF ULSTER

From Our Correspondent

By Christopher Hollis, M.P.

CATHOLIC POLAND TODAY Cardinal Griffin’s Account of his Recent Tour

“ WHY BLIND OUR EY E S ? ” T HE Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary made very similar speeches last weekend, Mr. Attlee to the people who can today affect the destinies and policies of this country as directly as any capitalists have ever done—that is, to the National Union o f Mineworkers, whose secretary is Mr. A rthur Horner—and Mr. Bevin in replying to the debate on European affairs in the House o f Commons. Mr. Bevin referred, and not for the first time, to the direct relation to foreign policy which the coal shortage has ; and it is the overriding factor in the whole economic prospect a t home. This year Britain, which could pursue a strong policy abroad when it was the greatest coal-exporting Power in the world, is actually importing coal from the United States, a t a cost o f £8 a ton. Output fell again last week, and, with half the year gone, less than half the target-production for the year has been mined in this country. That target is an absolute minimum, without which, as Mr. Shinwell told the same audience to which Mr. Attlee spoke, a more serious breakdown than last F ebruary’s will be difficult to avoid and the country's industrial system will stand in the gravest peril. The five-day week has failed to produce the results that the Socialists confidently expected, just as the nationalization o f the mines has failed to spur the miners to greater effort with the knowledge that they are adding to nobody's private wealth except their own.

Hammersmith (Mr. D. N. Pritt), with his great legal ability, conjure up such a case as he did today ? He knows better. He really knows better. . . . 1 must confess that in this debate today there has been one slightly disappointing feature. I have been a little disturbed to find a certain readiness to defend political persecution. This defence o f political persecution comes strangely to my ears, because, after all, the party 1 represent a t this Box today emerged from days o f political oppression and persecution.” The Government is, indeed, hardly less concerned about the penetration of the ranks of its own party, and o f the trade union movement, than about events on the continent o f Europe.

Mr. Bevin also said, in a notable passage :—

‘ ‘If there is to be a conflict o f ideologies, I shall regret it, but i f it is forced upon us we must face it. . . . I do not believe that the Western world in the long run will be the sufferers if it is fought. I have seen and have studied so many efforts o f dictators to suppress liberty in the world, and, in the end, it is always the dictators who fall. 1 am quite certain that, if there is a desire to interfere with free expression and all the other indefinable things that go to make up the soul o f man, that desire will fail again.” President and Congress

But the main burden o f Mr. Attlee's speech was not in the peroration in which he urged the miners to work harder. It was in the earlier passages in which, like Mr. Bevin in the House o f Commons, he spoke plain words about what he called the denial o f human rights and the travesty of democratic government in the countries o f Eastern Europe. He did so in order to lead up to a passage about the members o f the Labour Party who are unmoved by those betrayals, and even endorse them. Both Mr. Attlee and Mr. Bevin spoke o f the history and traditions o f the Labour movement in this country, and expressed astonishment that there should be men in it today to defend what is being done in Eastern Europe in a precisely opposite tradition. “ la m concerned, ’’ said Mr. Attlee,

‘ ‘th a t there should be people in this country, and people who profess to be Socialists, who appear to condone things that are done by Governments that call themselves Left, when they would protest vigorously if precisely the same things were done by Governments o f the Right. I t is o f vital importance to the health o f the Socialist movement that it should uphold absolute moral values.” And Mr. Bevin, giving praise to several speeches in the debate, notably one by Mr. Evans, the Labour Member for Wednesbury, which had been particularly candid about the nature o f the Soviet Government, spoke o f his concern that other Labour members should have been anxious to defend what has lately happened in Hungary :—

‘ ‘We have lived through all this sort o f thing— Poland, Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria. Why blind our eyes to it? Why should we blind our eyes to it when we will not stand for it in the local Labour Party 1... . Why should the hon. and learned member Tor North

Towards the end o f his speech Mr. Bevin turned to Greece. ‘ ‘I f only the tip were given” in the high councils o f international Communism, ‘‘Greece could settle down and Carry out her own political settlement without interference.” ‘ ‘With a lift o f the finger the civil war would stop tom orrow .” But the finger is not lifted, and it is too easy to assess the prospects o f the Conference now meeting in Paris without even remembering the portentous fact that there is war in Greece at all. It is too easy to say that the Greek Government is exaggerating the trouble because it is anxious to secure as muefi from the United States as it can. It is too easy to contrast the cautious phrases o f Mr. Marshall's Harvard speech with the blunt language of the original enunciation o f the Truman Doctrine, and to say how encouraging it is that the Americans have become more reasonable ; to believe that the words with which Mr. Truman asked for the credits for Greece and Turkey were chosen to impress a Republican Congress with an exaggerated fear o f Communism, and that the Administration takes a more balanced view. The Times was telling the Americans on Tuesday that if anything is to come of the Paris Conference they must ‘ ‘accept Communism as a current feature o f life in a number o f European countries.” The truth is that in proportion as that particular feature o f life persists the visions o f a united continent now being so freely seen will be mirages and no more.

Two major collisions within a week between the Executive and the Legislature of the United States, over the Tax Remission Bill and the Hartley-Taft Labour Bill, have given an exaggerated impression of the danger to the new bi-partisan principle in foreign affairs which has its foremost spokesman in Senator Vandenberg. President T rum an’s duel with