THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 180 No. 5347

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

LONDON, OCTOBER 31st, 1942

SIXPENCE

IN RESTRAINT OF POLITICS The only way of Safeguarding Private Liberty

THE ESSENTIAL CONDITIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL ORDER

The “ Osservatore Romano” on the Rights of Minorities. By Andrew Beck, A.A. THE EARLY CHURCH A PRAYER A Review of Lebreton. By Ronald Knox A Translation from Pushkin. By Maurice Baring

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK The Attack in Africa

A b itter battle rages in North Africa. Since General Montgomery, commanding the Eighth Army, has himself connected the present offensive with General Sm u ts ' references to the general transition from the defensive to the offensive o f the whole war effort o f the United Nations, it is worth recalling some o f the public utterances made by General Smuts between his meeting with Mr. Churchill in Cairo in August and his arrival in this country. On two occasions in particular he made speeches which, in view o f later events, have more significance than may have been realized a t the time. A t P retoria on August 23rd, he said th a t he was convinced th a t all the lost ground in N o r th Africa could be recovered, and added, “ North Africa, in addition to being made in to an impregnable position, should be made a base from which the great offensives o f next year would start, and which might well carry us to v ic to ry ." A fortnight later, on September 8th, again a t Pretoria, he endorsed this view : “ The most vital theatre o f this war is the Mediterranean base,” he said, “ and we cannot win the war w ithout clearing th a t base.” Whether o r no t it be the case, the enemy certainly appears to believe th a t his speech o f August 23rd was an accurate forecast o f the Allied plan, and th a t the operations now in progress are intended as a prelim inary to an attack from Africa next year, “ which may well carry us to v ic to ry .” This week, as General Montgomery pu t it, “ a start has been made on what General Smuts has called ‘the offensive’ ” ; we have entered, according to M ario Appelius a t Rome, “ a particularly dram atic stage o f the conflict,” in which Italy, as he said, “ must expect an Anglo-American a ttack launched with the maximum effort. ’ ’

to sta rt the new calendar and a new system o f reckoning the years in com petition with the calendar o f the Christian era. Twice in the course o f one long life-time the Romans have seen their E te rnal City made in to the capital o f a regime which arrived proclaim ing itself to be the incarnation o f new and eternal political tru th s . They have n o t accepted these claims, but they have experienced many avoidable miseries through being subordinated to all-embracing politics.

The Fascist regime has been marked by immense activity in all directions, and it would be unfair to view the whole record simply in the light o f the disastrous erro r o f the German alliance. The responsibility for the disastrous failure to save Austrian independence is no t exclusively Mussolini’s. But the present occasion, not a moment for a full balance sheet, is an appropriate moment to draw from the past th e great moral which should guide us in the future.

There are still Englishmen living who can remember 1860, and the enthusiasm with which Englishmen viewed and furthered the cause o f a united Italy, and the invention o f an Italian nationality to replace and unite the older local loyalties o f Venetians and Genoese and Florentines, Romans and Neopolitans. The common view o f nineteenth century Englishmen was th a t it was a prom o tion for the Rome o f the Popes to become the capital o f a sovereign modern state ; yet there were no peoples in Europe who exemplify the rapidity o f transition under modern political theories. The phrase “ sacro egoismo, ” vigorously exemplified in the Fascist period, dates from the liberal state ; as, indeed, do the main features o f the foreign and colonial policy upon which united Italy embarked as soon as its internal unity had been secured.

The twentieth anniversary o f the Fascist regime in Italy has fallen a t w hat seems to be the climax, for the Italians, o f the most unnecessary and unpopular war in to which the Duce plunged them in June, 1940. The air raids on the great industrial centres o f northern Italy, made from Britain with almost complete immunity, are greeted with an indignation on the p a r t o f the Italian Government, which forgets in what exultant tones the Duce sent Italian aeroplanes to take part, ineffectively enough as it proved, in bombing London two years ago. The new attem p ts now to incite hatred o f Britain will have little effect, and, on our side, England has fought no o th e r war in her history with so little passion o r feeling as th is which the Italian s have forced on us.

The city o f G enoa has always been a centre o f resistance to Mussolini, with all a great p o r t ’s dislike o f a policy o f selfsufficiency, and a surviving trad itio n as a commercial Republic. Before the war, Genoa was the city in which the most extensive precautions had to be taken before the Duce could visit it. Milan, on the other hand, is the first home o f Italian Fascism. A Gloomy Celebration

Against the oldest o f European backgrounds, in the presence o f the 261st successor o f St. Peter, it should look a small circum stance to the I talians th a t the same political regime has lasted for twenty years. Rome was never the place in which

The questions which flared up in the 1930’s went back to the last century, and whatever form o f government comes in the future, the Italian people will have special Central European interests, the age-old jealousy o f German pressure and predominance, and a desire to play a part, n o t less than the Spaniards and French, in the great continent to the south o f the Mediterranean. Any future government o f united Italy will find itself inheriting pursuing conceptions which have been common to Ita lian politicians both before and after 1922. But the whole story o f Italy, first united and then using the new strength o f unity for policies o f expansion, as it has taken place before our eyes, is a palimpsest, written over a much older writing ; and the Italian peninsula is as good an example as any part o f Europe o f the way civilization is n o t exhausted by, and is often badly served by, the political approach. Our forefathers need n o t be reproached for not having understood th a t their enthusiasm fo r strong secular governments in sovereign States was an enthusiasm for a principle full o f la ten t dangers which have since emerged. But we should approach the future differently.

The twentieth anniversary is being kept with a spate o f new social legislation. When Mussolini has gone, much o f this legislation will remain. There is now announced a twenty-five