THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND R E V IE W

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 169 No. 5052

LONDON MARCH 6th, 1937

SIXPENCE

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK

PRINCIPAL CONTENTS

. 325

FOREIGN M IS S IO N S AND SOCIAL

DIVIDED CHURCHMEN : M. BLUM AND M. FLANDIN ; THE GERMANS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA ; REPERCUSSIONS OF REARMAMENT ; DOMESTIC SERVITUDE IN BRITISH TERRITORY ; SERVITUDE versus WAGES: THE DILEMMA OF CONGRESS : AN UNFULFILLED PROMISE ; IS THERE MORE JUVENILE DELINQUENCY? MR. LEWIS’ STRATEGICAL VICTORY ; A BOOK BY GIL ROBLES; THE FIRST HUNDRED THOUSAND; END OF THE INVASION SCARE THE MORAL OF LONDON 328 THE CELIBACY OF THE CLERGY 328 PROTESTANTISM IN GERMANY . 329

By WALDEMAR GURIAN A LETTER FROM S P A I N .............................. 330

ACTION ......................................................331 FRENCH BROADCASTING ELECTIONS 333 ROME LETTER 334 THE CHURCH ABROAD .............................. 336 LECTURE ON POLAND .............................. 338

By J . B. MORTON BOOKS OF THE WEEK .............................. 340

THE WYNNE DIARIES; METROPOLITAN MAN; A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LIFE ; ENGLISH CAVALCADE ; HALF A MILLION TRAMPS ; THE ROMAN PRIMACY ; THE CULT OF OUR LADY ; THE CRISIS OF CHRISTIAN RATIONALISM ; THE CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE LETTERS TO THE EDITOR . 347

THE W O R L D W EEK B Y W EEK Divided Churchmen

We are glad to print in our correspondence columns a letter from one of the Anglican clergymen who have recently visited Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid, particularly for its testimony that there were no charges of evil living against the Spanish clergy, because Mr. Usher’s testimony, like the articles which the Dean of Chichester is writing in the Guardian, is a timely corrective to the almost hysterical anti-Catholicism to which the organizer of their party, Mr. Henry Brinton, is giving expression. Mr. Brinton is writing, quoting a prominent Spanish Catholic, that the priests are blamed not for believing in Christ, but for not imitating Him, and so on. According to Mr. Brinton, if priests have been massacred, it was their provocative behaviour which brought their fate upon them. Of the Church in Spain he writes, in the pages of the New Statesman: “ What has such an institution to do with Jesus of Nazareth, the friend of the oppressed, the Prince of Peace ? We are too apt to forget that it was the organized Church, two thousand years ago, which crucified the founder of Christianity.” We think the other members of this party would be well advised publicly to disavow Mr. Brinton and his utterances, as that the Nationalist uprising constitutes “ a new crucifixion of Christ.” We were glad to see a letter in The Times from the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, making it quite plain that he was not approached or consulted about the visit, and saying, as history will unhappily make plainer and plainer, that the report of these clergymen is “ wholly inadequate as an account of ’alleged atrocities’ against the Church in Spain.” The Bishop bears witness to the progressive deterioration of the organs of Government over the last four years in Spain. M. Blum and M. Flandin

Although M. Blum has weathered his last storm in the French Chamber, the attack, headed by M. Flandin, was not really answered. M. Blum finds his strength in the general recognition that a dissolution of the Popular Front might unchain a succession of growing evils. M. Blum maintains himself because a sufficient number of people who are not enthusiastic about his Government are afraid that its disappearance would be followed by the failure of anyone else to form a Government at all. M. Blum himself, when he headed a much smaller Socialist group, owed his strength to his detachment and his refusal to merge his party in coalition. If his Government is brought down, his much larger Socialist Party o f today is not at all likely to be willing to work with a more moderate Radical administration, and it is difficult, at the moment, to see how any politician of the Centre or Centre Left could command a majority if both the Communists and the Socialists went into opposition. M. Blum remains charged with his responsibility in face of growing financial difficulties. He has to maintain a semblance of social reform in a country where the upward trend of prices is rendering nugatory the concessions about wages made last June. Government officials in particular, who are a far more numerous and important class in France than in England, judge Governments more by the purchasing power of money than by anything else. What is particularly alarming for the French Government is the quickened tendency of private Frenchmen to try and put some of their savings into foreign currencies. The Germans in Czechoslovakia

The leader of the German Czechs, Herr Henlein, has been setting out the policy of his party, and what the Germans in Czechoslovakia consider owing to them by the Czechs. He said that his party are going to press the President, Dr. Benesh, to hold a general election in order to test public feeling on the German demand for a measure of home rule for the German Czechs. He complained that while Bolshevik literature is allowed to circulate freely in Czechoslovakia, German literature and newspapers are prohibited. Czechoslovakia was a synthetic creation of the Versailles Treaty, an arrangement which secured independence for the Czechs, who had long been a minority in Austria at the expense of other minorities who had to be grouped with them in order to produce a country with the minimum resources in territory and population. Its responsible statesmen, President Masaryk and Dr. Benesh, in particular, have acted with a full realization of the difficult composition of their country, which stood to gain more than any other by the growth in Europe of a collective system guaranteeing the Treaty frontiers. The resurgence of Germany has created a threat, and