‘The Irish Tangle for English Readers’ (Macdonald; 10s. 6d.) is a mainly political history of Ireland. The historian, Sir Shane Leslie, sees himself under the sod—‘turf’ would have hotter associations in Ireland—and free to speak his detached mind without fear or favour. One cannot imagine a better place for this feat than a country house on the Ulster border guarded by Yankee sentries; with an occasional coffin of butter, followed by pious mourners, proceeding north, and a few gewgaws from Belfast infiltrating in the other direction. Here the book was conceived. It was finished in a military building in London as ‘impartial reading for Englishmen who are weary of Ireland and the Irish’. It is very good reading for anyone.

The book sets out to tell what Irish and English between them have made of Ireland. It does not saddle the living with the follies, vices and misdemeanours of the dead. Nevertheless, history and the climate have made the country what it is, and neither is particularly helpful. The author insists that Nordic interbreeding has been propitious, and that the climate can always be counted upon to turn immigrants into Irishmen. ‘The only pure blood in Ireland is . . . in the racing-stables.’ There is a climate, too, one notes, of the soul. Cromwell has to expel Spenser’s grandson for becoming a Papist. Nearly all the great Irish leaders have been of mixed stock. The supreme chance for an independent Ireland, without Partition, was lost, the historian insists, with Parnell. Any new opportunity, he says, will be hard and slow to come by; though it is quite possible now that Conservative Ulster may throw in its lot with the farmers of the South, rather than risk entanglement with English Reds.

In European and American publications it is customary to describe the Japanese as a mysterious, impenetrable, deceitful and enigmatical race. To a certain extent, a similar description is made to apply to the Chinese also, with the exception—at least for so long as they still belong to the United Nations—of ‘deceitfulness.’

That East and West are quite different and do not understand one another very well is a generally accepted fact. The Eastern peoples have quite a different spiritual orientation, and for that reason we shall never be able to understand the Japanese and Chinese completely, in the sense of finding an absolutely satisfactory ‘explanation’ of them. Our nervous reactions and sense impressions are quite different from theirs. Our two life-streams—to use that beautiful Oriental metaphor—do not merge. They do not even flow in parallel directions. They have a quite different mental machinery. Our whole brain system, physical energies, reactions to intellectual and sensorial impressions and other unnameable forces of our racial complexion, are different from theirs. The case is not the same with the German or the Frenchman or the member of any other white race. These we can fully understand; we may not agree with them; but their way of doing things and their outlook on life, their objectives are for us reasonable. This is not the case with the Far Easterner. Of course, if we consider the human mind with reference to its essence, we shall find it to be one and the same in all men. Yet this one mind works differently in an Oriental and in an Occidental, so that we are justified in speaking of an Eastern and a Western mind. As an Oriental puts it rather poetically: ‘

All the economic problems of our time are dominated by the debate between property and collectivism. Serious and irrefutable reasons militate in favour of each. Human reason requires the safeguard of personal property: living space for the family, the guarantee of personal freedom, the obligation and sanction of initiative . . . But on the other hand economic reasons involve the introduction of spheres of increasing collectivisation: appearance of process of collective production . . . multiplied returns . . . higher purchase . . . The co-operative solution is the standard one: it has, in fact, been advocated by the Holy Father in his memorable allocution in September, 1944, on the integration of human privileges, of personal or family property and the economic advantages of collectivisation. Hence its future. It is, we think, the most efficacious formula for the adjustment of the tension between capital and labour.

But this tension is not the only one that inflames the great leconomic conflicts of our age. Other tensions have also to be relieved—that between agriculture and industry, between production and distribution—and beyond these properly economic tensions those others between rulers and subjects, between teachers and taught—not to mention those between ideological and spiritual groups . . . All these problems are only distinct on the surface.

The fashionable Beveridge school of full employment economics is open to a good deal of detailed criticism, and Professor Fisher has made a valiant, if not wholly successful attempt to suggest the greater importance of a different approach. In spite of a number of dexterous jabs the Beveridge school still stands, sore but unshaken; in rightly denying that the New Economics are new, Professor Fisher tends to slip too easily into denying that they are frequently good economies. But he has made out his cause on a great many individual points, and provided a valuable corrective to the tendency to over-emphai se monetary solutions.

On the central issue of full employment, the essence of the Beveridge case is that needs must be clothed with purchasing power. If demand shows signs of failing to absorb the whole available output, then tax remissions or subsidies must be used to enable or induce people to buy the goods which they want—or, more commonly, what the current political majority thinks that they ought to want. Professor Fisher prefers to approach the other way round. If goods are unsold, why do producers not make more effort to give consumers what they want? Why not try to promote new enterprise at the “growing points” of the economic system, and to render existing firms more adaptable? There is not much difficulty in showing that along these lines a great deal more could be done than was actually attempted in the thirties; most of all, of course, in Professor Fisher’s own special field of international trade.

The claims of semantics can be illusory, threatening the innocent answer with unsuspected heredities. There is an ever-present gnosticism, heightened nowadays by the methods and vocabulary of psychology, which sees hidden depths of meaning in very ordinary shallows. Yet there can be no denying that discussion too often ends in futility because it has not been preceded by the definition of the terms to be used. This is one of the most frequent sources of disagreement, for instance, in international conferences: “ democracy”, “free elections”, “minorities”—unless there is an honest attempt at determining what the terms mean, subsequent disputes will derive from the varying interpretation, held doubtless in all good faith, of such concepts.

In the theological sphere, careful definition of dogmatic truths is an essential prerequisite of their discussion. That is why so much zealous work for Christian reunion has achieved disappointing results : good will has been substituted for the often unpleasant task of establishing the basis of discussion. The result in the end is bound to be inconclusive, for the evasion of the primary meanings of the truths of faith must affect even the most neutral attempts at co-operation. It is true that united action on a specific moral issue need not demand an identity of belief in the Blessed Trinity among the participants. Yet in the long run, and inevitably, action can claim no autonomy from the demands of belief.

One thing is certain: the total population of the Jewish people has been considerably reduced. For the last twenty years it has been customary to reckon this roughly at sixteen millions, now the two or three millions ruthlessly and wantonly done to death by demoniacs, will have to be subtracted. This ghastly process cannot be regarded as a winnowing; as the avowed intention has not been to eliminate undesirable elements, but to exterminate all who could, in the widest stretch of the term, be designated Jews. Non licet esse vos has been the guiding principle. The arch-fiends who adopted this worse than barbaric policy have not been able to carry out their fell design to the full; but their failure is not due to any lack of malice: they have made a desperate attempt and seem to have been backed by diabolic assistance. The account of a Rabbi-survivor—one of a tiny remnant—rescued from the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, published in The Times, of June 21st, 1945, is a lurid, but exact summary, of the nightmare horrors perpetrated there until the Nazis were forced to relinquish their grip on Bavaria. In this Ghetto, as he styles it—compared with which the worst mediaeval ghetto was an earthly paradise—it was normal that there should be at least a hundred burials, or burnings, a day, most of these the result of what was morally murder. During his three years as an inmate of this inferno, ‘ he estimates that fifty-five thousand perished. Such a violation of the primary instincts of human decency has already suffered a nemesis which, though severe, is mild compared with the crimes that provoked it. But the mills of God have only commenced their work of retribution.

We all know Tommy Atkins. In two wars he has become symbolic of the British soldier. We know what he thinks, how he will react to most events, and his general likes and dislikes. He has been hailed as ‘Britain’s best ambassador’. In foreign countries his demeanour has been one of kindly tolerance, cheerfulness, and some degree of self-effacement. All in all, these things have built themselves into a reasonably understandable character.

What of Ivan Ivanovitch, ‘Tommy Atkins’ of the Red Army? There are three million of his kind in occupied Europe, stretching from the Balkans to the Arctic, and from the Russian frontier to Central Germany. Can we define a general character for Ivan Ivanovitch, whose role is such a significant part of the international play being performed in Europe today?

I have known a hundred Ivans. I have seen him in this aftermath of war. I have seen the results of his handiwork. But my knowledge-is coloured by the difference between the Oriental and the Occidental minds. This barrier is a constant difficulty, necessitating a re-examination of every event. For instance, there was the Red Army soldier who deprived an Austrian of his wireless set, then, as he was leaving, dug his free hand beneath his tunic, brought forth a jade ornament and thrust it at the Austrian, saying: ‘A present for me from Hungary. I give it to you for this present’ (pointing to wireless set). The interest of the situation lies in the word, ‘present’. Was the expression meant humorously, as you and I might have said it? Or did the Red Army soldier interpret finding as keeping? Closer acquaintance with Ivan shows that it is legal for the Red Army soldier to possess what he finds, as long as the article is not required by the State. Hence, there was no humour or veiled sarcasm in the soldier’s remark to the Austrian.

The Parliament of 1560 having effectively destroyed the power of the Auld Kirk in Scotland, ratified and approved Knox’s Confession of Faith as “hailsome and sound doctrine groundit upoune the in-fallibill trewth of Godis word’’.

This decision marked a crisis in Scottish history, but revolutionary though it was it must not be thought that Presbyterianism as it now exists in Scotland, was born, like Athene, fully formed and armed. The infant Reformed Church of Scotland was, in 1560, indeed a babe and it was only in the following two centuries that she took shape and developed the persona she now presents to the world.

So difficult and so complex is the history of Scottish Presbyterianism, reflecting as it does the ebb and flow of logic and passion that make up the Scottish character, that a short account of it can only explain its dominant features by pointing to those elements and problems which have conditioned its growth. It would be quite simple to describe the ecclesiastical system of Calvin or the present organization of Church courts in Scotland, but such a description would not suffice to give any idea of historic Presbyterianism in Scotland.

It is noteworthy that in 1943, when the whole world was embroiled in war, the Holy See issued an Encyclical letter on Biblical studies and the opportune means of promoting them. Much stress is laid on new efforts, certainly, but also on new preoccupations, new investigations, new orientations, in a word, on the changed conditions of Biblical study, ‘for deeper archaeological research has given rise to new questions offering occasion for a closer investigation of the subject’. Indeed, we are urged to pay close attention to archaeological findings; ‘Archaeology’, or its equivalent, is referred or appealed to some six or seven times and unquestionably holds a high place among the many endowments expected of those whose duty it is to make known the Biblical authors’ meanings.

And so a note on some recent Biblical archaeology will not seem out of place.

Writers on Biblical archaeology like to refer to ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ evidence about Biblical narratives; and it is usually said that very few finds bear directly on the Bible, whereas the indirect contribution is very rich. But this division into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ seems fruitless and unessential; rather should we say that any little information, from any source whatever, however tenuous, if it throws light on the sacred text, is to be highly prized, and ‘receives an added and nobler dignity, a consecration as it were, when it is used to shed a brighter light on divine things’. It is true no doubt that we must widen the term ‘Archaeology’ and bring in considerations of topography, history, and in fact anything illustrative; possibly ‘sacred antiquities’ would describe better that ensemble of findings which help us to know the mind of the inspired writer and the way in which he expressed it.

The strategy of a world war has imposed a new ‘grand tour’ upon our generation. Via the African desert, the Appenines, or the beaches of Normandy, we travelled to the Rhine; and then, sweating in crowded transports, bound for India, Burma, Malaya or Japan, we gasped across the Persian Gulf to call, usually, at Ceylon. Here, at the commercial port of Colombo or in the great natural harbour of Trincomalee, the Navy massed its White Ensigns for what proved to be an unnecessary invasion of Malaya; and here in the months that succeeded the atom bomb we waited impatiently to come home.

For Jack ashore, Ceylon offered ebony elephants and sapphire engagement rings; noodles and birds’ nests in a Chinese café; and a ride in a rickshaw, with an almost naked coolie pulling you through the streets, and making you feel, half-guiltily and half-excitedly, like a Roman emperor. But there was little beer and no girls. We were soon bored, and longed for Tyneside, the Gorbals, or the New Cut.

Looking back, one remembers the constant sunshine, the flamboyant trees flowering their vivid petals down the quiet avenues of English bungalows, the blare of oriental music from arrack taverns, and the indescribable stench of the little native streets. And one tries to write down a description of Ceylon that will mean something in England.

When one became expert, one learnt to differentiate between two kinds of natives. There were the Sinhalese, who wear cotton skirts called sarongs, have narrow faces and prominent teeth, and are the original inhabitants of the island. Englishmen tend to complain that they are fundamentally lazy and have no sense of business; they do not share the prestige of martial races like the Sikhs or Gurkhas, and when the Japanese raided Colombo—very lightly by London standards—aimcrat the entire native population fled from the city and wouldn’t come back for a week; this was considered to prove that they had no ‘guts.’

Some fifty years ago at an investigation into Glasgow housing sponsored by a committee of the Church of Scotland, Bruce Glaiser, secretary of the Glasgow branch of the Socialist League, invited to explain why Irish immigrants did not rise so easily as native labourers to be craftsmen, replied: “I do not believe that it is vice that is against the Irishmen, but rather virtue. The improvidence of the Irish springs rather from virtues; while the success of Scotchmen is on account of their canny disposition and desire to make money ... I think that, as a whole, as social beings they are quite equal to the Scotch; I do not think the ambition to take a position side by side with Scotchmen is a very high one.”

Whether the Catholic has revolted instinctively or not against the bleakness of Scottish industrialism in the past century, the fact remains that he has not made his presence effectively felt among the forces that attempt to control and guide it. For this, the circumstances that have conditioned his existence in Scotland are largely responsible.

There are some who see in Catholic participation in the Youth Movement a powerful means for stemming the leakage. They recognise that the Catholic club or youth organisation may well be the bridge between the school and the world. It is obvious, indeed, that there is immense gain to our adolescents when they are nurtured in a Catholic atmosphere by those who are solicitous for their spiritual welfare. It would be difficult to overestimate the good that must come from their taking part in activities directed by helpers whose outlook is necessarily apostolic.

But these good results will only be achieved if our own attitude to the Youth Movement is right. We must not regard it as a kind of rescue work, as if there had already been failure in the cultivation of the tender plant. If it is not yet a proclamation of the glorious fruition of youthful endeavour, it must not at any rate continue the artificial forcing that was begun at school, now in the form of an imposed culture and a suggested enthusiasm for social betterment. Our Youth Movement must be a real one in the sense that it is Youth which is making the movement, and not Youth being moved by its self-appointed guardians.

In short, the Catholic participation in the Movement must not be allowed to involve us in a false philosophy. On the contrary, we have in the Catholic youth organisation an opportunity of combating false ideas on “culture”. We can show that any concentration on collective activities, physical and mental, points not to a material life-goal, but to an eternal one. We must emphasise that we are making no pretence to stay the time which is all too surely and rapidly running its course, but are encouraging our young people to make the best use of the vital period in preparation for this life and the next.

However enthusiastic we may be concerning what is called ‘the back to the land movement,’ it is a fact that most of the attempts made in any organised form, in recent years have ended in failure. However much we may deplore that fact, it still remains a fact, and ‘trying again’ in the same way with the same mistakes, except in regard to some details, is not likely to do more than to convince our unconverted brethren that ‘it can’t be done’. We should surely learn from our past failures some other way of achieving the high task which is literally our only ‘alternative to death’.

The failure of most, if not all, of the well-intentioned ‘movements’ of past years has been due to one or all of three causes : lack of funds, lack of suitable people and lack of education, The last is fundamental and overwhelmingly the real cause of failure. You cannot make a farmer out of a townsman until he becomes, by training and experience, not a townsman settled on the land but a true countryman in every sense of the word. He has to learn more than the technical aspects of his new work. He must before, and above all, begin a new way of living. He must, by patient endeavour and humble obedience, re-orientate his thoughts to a new valuing of almost the whole of his life.

The problem is immense, the suggested solutions innumerable, but we shall not in the future any more than in the past find the true solution without facing the real issue, and the issue is mainly one of education and the re-setting of values. A host of willing helpers, complete with public or secondary school education, may be, and usually are, a great joy to a farmer who has left all things to follow the Divine Wisdom of Nazareth. Their companionship, their conversation, their interests, bring back to him some at least of the good things in the world he has left. But willingness is not effectiveness, nor is the appreciation of the value of work the only requisite for its well-doing. Father McNabb once epitomised life in the words ‘work and the preparation for work.’

Philologists may be interested enough to find out when this word ‘ecology’ became part of the language. Its frequent use in scientific writing today is a portent. The sister-word ‘economy’ has reflected the history of much of our modern thinking about man and mankind in the emphasis laid, not on ‘goods’ themselves as such, but on commerce in and distribution of such goods. Just as, from Devas onwards, there is a growing tendency among economists to consider human, as well as material, factors in the definition of such ideas as prosperity, so a new branch of science has found it increasingly necessary to study in detail what one may call the raw materials of prosperity.

Materially speaking, there are two main aspects of the environment of homo sapiens that repay modern study. One may be summed up under the term exterior influences—climate, housing, clothing, and the like. The others, subject of this short essay, are internal: in a word, man’s diet.

Time was when science seemed to have summed up the whole matter of the human body and how it is nourished, in the three magic words: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. But already the biochemists were beginning to analyse the individual components of each of these, and the necessity for certain minerals—at first the list was limited to iron and calcium—was emphasised, together with observations of their deficiency in the diet of civilised man. A little later, first Lunin and then Hopkins proved that there was a missing factor which the latter called ‘accessory food substances’ and to which Funk gave the name vitamines.

The idea of this article was suggested by an anthropological lecture on two aboriginal peoples of the Pacific.

Two peoples, the Andamanese Islanders and the Tikopia, have lived within boating distance of each other for countless generations. The one is semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing. The other is, or was, agricultural. In the first the communal element in the ownership of property is very marked. In the second the private or personal ownership was far more marked.

From this arises a thought. Is it possible that the question of the balance of individual with communal or social rights in the ownership and use of property is not a matter of industrialism, nor of atheism, but chiefly of mobility or immobility of social occupation?

One can follow the idea in many fields: for instance in the Catholic Middle Ages. As the peoples of Europe began to settle, but were yet uncertain and largely mobile and pastoral, they developed the system called feudalism. Feudalism was a kind of socialism, in the sense that the prince, the owner and the employer all three coincided in the person of the feudal lord. All lands were held in trust from him. He was the government. He was the employer in so far as there was an employer outside the subsistence economy of the people who held tenures on his land.

As the people became more and more settled, agricultural, less and and less mobile, in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, absolute individual tenure of land outside any further responsibility to an overlord became more and more common. The squirearchies appeared, and more and more independent farmers.

Money can only be understood in terms of power. In the hands of the consumer it is power over goods. In the hands of the creative capitalist it is power over the means to produce goods. In the hands of the finance-capitalist, or money-lender, it is not only power over producers and consumers, but power as well over nations and their governments. The technique of money-lending on its simplest level is to make an advance against security, draw interest, and at an agreed date receive back the capital sum—other things being equal, a perfectly honest transaction. If the more ambitious money-lenders kept to this even routine, however, they would be a very long time attaining power. What they desire, therefore, is that the money they lend shall either be repaid to them when its buying power has been greatly enhanced, or that it shall not be repaid at all, thus enabling them to foreclose on their mortgage and become possessed of their victim’s capital assets. These two motifs have long determined the course of economic history, explaining slump and boom, and enabling a small band of international lenders and manipulators to become the virtual masters of the world. The method was explained, with almost incredible candour, in an article which appeared in The U.S.A. Bankers’ Magazine on August 26th, 1934: —

’ Bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When through a process of the law the common people lose their homes they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under the control of leading financiers.

It is still too early to give a complete analysis of the Government’s policy as regards the nationalisation of the banks. Sir Hugh Dalton’s statements were too vague for that, he gave us to understand that all his plans were still in the experimental stage.

Nevertheless, from statements made by different Labour leaders, especially from those of Mr. Bevin, as Minister of Labour of the former Government, we can get quite a clear picture of the philosophy behind their policy, and of this philosophy I shall give a short outline and criticism.

The Labour party is convinced—and rightly so—that our reconstruction problems of today are not so much production as financial problems, that though we may have as many plans for industrial expansion as we like, while this expansion has to be financed according to the old system, in which the power to create and destroy money is left to the banks, our plans will turn out failures.

They fear especially the consequences of deflation. Deflation, the deliberate creation of a shortage of money, causes of necessity a sudden drop of prices, so that producers are forced either to sell below cost price, to destroy their products to keep up their price, or to cease producing at all.

Adjustment to the novel life one is condemned to lead behind barbed wire begins the moment one has been assigned one's quarters. This adjustment is at first purely physical; but long before one has mastered the routine of living in such a place, there are naturally attempts at adjusting oneself to it also mentally. The obvious and most general first adjustment comes by way of resentment, disguised in most cases by a forced jocularity, which tries to laugh off the whole thing. “Are we downhearted?—NO”, used to be the slogan for this sort of attitude during World War 1. In my own case this kind of light-heartedness came naturally as a reaction against the period of uncertainty preceding it: for we had lived for months in a daily atmosphere of anxiety, as to whether our place (an S.V.D. seminary in Manila) would be commandeered by the Japanese army or not, and where we could go in such a case. The wearying part of this had been that one day it seemed quite certain that the Japanese would never take this place, whilst the arrival of another military party of inspections the next day made it certain that they would. When, therefore, on July 8th, 1944, the thunderbolt struck, cancelling our previous release on parole, I for one, felt a great relief that all uncertainty and futile conjectures were over and that now one found onself actually interned, with no more anxieties as to what course to take and what decisions to make. There was nothing now to do, but to wait and “suffer fools gladly”.