In the Preamble to the Covenant of the League of Nations it is stated that the League is brought into existence ‘to promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security.’ The first article of the Covenant which is concerned with policy (Art. 8) deals with the reduction of armaments. The League Secretariat accepts disarmament as the touchstone of the work of organizing peace. Peace is the end and the extent to which the nations of the world approach that end is to be judged by the extent to which they approach disarmament.

Just as peace is the end of the League, so is the demand for peace its foundation. But, founded also on the Treaties of Peace, it is, like them, grounded in war, partaking of the conditions of war, its ambitions, its hatreds and fears. It has then to obey two masters who do not always agree. Itself a result of the last war, it is called upon to prevent the next.

The position is further complicated by the fact that the demand for peace is itself largely a result of the War. Nothing so widespread and at the same time so deep has been known before as a force in international affairs. Though there was a demand for peace, nothing comparable existed before 1914. In England at least it did not exist until the Somme brought disillusionment, a disillusionment made more bitter by Paschendaele, March, 1918, and the submarine campaign. Born, too, of war, the demand for peace is based rather upon disgust and horror for the one than upon love for the other.

Poetic Experience surely provides what Mr. Herbert Read was looking for. And in a more conclusive and final way than the hints and suggestions he found in the works of M. Bergson. The sub-title is An Introduction to Thomist Aesthetic. The claim is amply justified in the argument by its close and constant use of the principles of St. Thomas.

The scope of the book is wide. It deals with poetic experience in general, and seeks to chart its position in the Thomist system. This it does by insisting on a particular aspect and a special relation of familiar Thomist principles. Atmosphere is given by the appearance of such names as Billuart, Cajetan and Durandus, until one is almost led to expect some familiar quotation from Zigliara.

We have become so accustomed, at least in English works on aesthetics, to arguments in a strange and unintelligible idiom. Unrecognizable principles and intangible conclusions are all too familiar. Since Mr. Clive Bell wrote Art a sort of superficial idiom has been established. Prospectuses issued by educational authorities now speak in terms of ‘significant form.’ But there is no generally accepted meaning of these terms. The importance and the great value of this book lies in the fact that its conclusions are related to familiar landmarks. They cannot be dismissed as ‘somewhere in Ruritania.’

In brief, the argument is this. Knowledge in its perfection is union with a concrete thing. In its normal life the reason only partially achieves this end.

During their forty years’ exile in the desert the Israelites were supported by the expectation of the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey. The same promise has often been made in our own day to the pale-faced city clerk and all city dwellers in their desert of papers and figures. A factory-ridden people is encouraged to return to the land, for it is said to be the only life fit for man. They are in bondage; they need the freedom of the soil, out in the spacious fields. The children of the Father of heaven are free; so, we are told, are the children of mother earth—in fact, we are almost led to imagine the two sets of offspring to be identical. Satan invented the machine to lash mankind in bondage. God means his sons to be free, following the furrow of the plough.

Freedom is not, however, the only advantage attributed to this form of life, for to freedom they add all the joys of living. The delight of hard muscular toil will be followed by relaxation in a comfortable chair before a glowing hearth with one’s children gathering round quiet and content. Is not Nature the kindest of mothers, and is there anything to compare for sheer delight with daily toil in the brown earth among the gentle beasts placed at man’s service? These are the fruits taken by the spies from the promised land.

This pleasant picture, however, remains little more than an imaginative one, having little resemblance to reality. It might even be a snare for the young romantic who does not care much for rational explanations.

It is not merely because these words are penned in an hotel under the shadow of the Cathedral of Ghent that I remark upon certain associations between Belgium and Wales, certain important lessons that Wales might learn from Belgium. Recent literary researches have revealed the debt of Welsh poets of the fourteenth century to the Flemish town poetry of that period. In our own day some Belgian social works have attracted attention in Wales. Belgium like Wales is a small country, much industrialized, and Belgium has also a bi-lingual problem which it has settled or is settling in a manner that Wales would do well to study. In fact, Belgium is one of the small countries of Latin Europe from which Wales might learn some important lessons.

But more than this; Belgium is one of the most devoutly Catholic countries in Europe and in the world. Now let us suppose that my fellow-Catholics in South Wales, who are mostly, one may presume, of Irish origin and very many of whose parents came there from Ireland during the industrial expansion of the nineteenth century, had emigrated not to South Wales, but to Belgium, what would have been their history? We may assume with some confidence that they would to-day be Flemish-speaking citizens of Belgium, would have adopted Belgium as their own country, and would be enriching its civic as well as its religious life; would have become one with its people. But in Wales it has been otherwise.

Let us be clear. The vehemence of Conservative reaction to-day is evoked not by this particular -ism or that; nor has it anything to do with objective examination of the remedial theories proposed. Its critical faculties are limited strictly to the apprehension of a radical programme only in so far as it is sufficiently practical, or not, to be feared.

Capitalism reacts, then, to nothing more specific than effective Revolutionary impulse evoked by the exploitation of the masses. And to the effectiveness or probable effectiveness of the impulse, the vigour of Conservative reaction is strictly relative. For the powers of this world deal not in absolute value but effect. Let us suffer no illusion. We do not doubt that were Catholics sufficiently keen and sincere, sufficiently devoted to the leadership of the Pope to be feared in the world politic, the Social encyclicals of Pius XI would be in no time apprehended as heralding a revolution so complete (because so absolute and profoundly moral) that it would in effect surpass the wildest dreams of an oppressed proletariat (and the most fearful nightmares of the pocket-conscious). Once again, as before when it suited the mood and the expedients of the time, the Pope would be dubbed Anti-Christ. The World is ever wont to perceive heresy in its opponents.

We have spoken of dissent among the Elect. Of the alacrity with which the Bien-pensant perceive a heresy. By a diabolical ill-chance—and something more than chance—revolution in nine cases out of ten allies itself to a heresy. But it is our present business to urge that that heresy is not necessarily identifiable with the revolutionary impulse itself.

It is well that he died when he did: it were too painful to picture him still living in these days of betrayal of the victory for which he gave his life so joyously. He deserved to die in battle for France and Christendom, for his death was thus of a piece with his life. As he died, so had he lived—in action; fighting, as he expresses it, on the frontiers of every province of human activity.

During life, the instrument of his action had been the pen. Yet, in a sense, he was a writer only accidentally. Essentially, he was the citizen, and later the patriot and the Christian, who recognizes a duty and claims the right to influence his contemporaries. The authority he wielded was moral rather than intellectual, less doctrinal than educational: heart predominates over head, but since it was a good heart, which had been set true from the beginning, it was able to pilot him, gropingly but safely, through those early years of his public life when his range of action was foreshortened by an overclouding of his intellectual horizon. The return from agnosticism to the Faith, and from utopian socialism to France and Christendom, is scarcely perceptible in his writings: at least, in the earlier Péguy, the later is always clearly discernible. His ‘conversion’ was rather a rediscovery of the supernatural, conditioned perhaps by the realization that true love of neighbour exists, and is possible, only as a function of love of God.

Gentile attributes to post-Renaissance literary heresy the familiar form of Manicheanism. Body and soul, the Catholic believes, are married indivorcibly in this life: the historical Manichee emphasizes the soul and neglects the reality of the body. Historically the Manichees regarded marriage as sinful, with the consequence that many came to inflict on themselves sterilization, for that was their doctrine in effect. The outcome was soulfulness and Grundyism, which have permeated life and literature ever since. If Gentile errs in applying the emphasis on soul, it is because he neglects the counter-emphasis on the body. The revolt against post-Reformation Puritanism implicit in D. H. Lawrence is a natural though blind realization of the unreality of the spiritual superman exploited in romantic art. It is to a negative religiosity that Lawrence is merciless in his exposure of Miriam who was always begging things to love her. His own romanticist exploitation of sex is mere primitivism, but the Manichean attitude is evident in the fatalistic way logic is dissociated from the world of fact as when the Manichees ignored marriage in spite of its necessity for human preservation. It is useful, therefore, to take the fundamental Manichean spirit as centred obliviously on either body or soul alone, for either way corrupts human integrity and disturbs the unity where body dovetails with soul.

The soul-emphasis in literature is reflected in modem aestheticism. This is partly due to the critical tendency which refines every line of the poem and partly to the abuse of art as religion.

Mr. Harold Nicholson has completed his great trilogy, thus concluding his survey of the diplomatic history of Great Britain from approximately the end of ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the death of Lord Curzon. And there has happened to Mr. Nicholson what has happened to other historians; in compiling an account he has unpremeditatedly formulated an indictment. He has focussed his lens delicately upon the clear-cut and aristocratic figure of Diplomacy, but the developed plate has revealed in the background and in the very act of sabotage the hulking and murderous figure of Democracy.

There are many counts upon which to praise Mr. Nicholson. He is an admirer of the modern and obscure method of prose writing, but his own style is limpid and traditional. The Supreme Council overworked him at Paris in 1919 because of his ability in drafting, and we reap the benefit of that ability in his concise précis of situations, protocols, treaties, crises and historic passages, précis which are clear, logical and full, and easier to read than many novels. Most of his historic estimates are not assailable. His narrative of Conferences and correspondences is broken by some of the most brilliant pen-sketches of places and personalities that our generation has produced—the meeting of Edward VII and the Czar at Reval, for instance, the Allied Mission to Bela Kun in 1919, Lord Curzon at Lausanne (a portrait which should be supplemented by his sketch of Arketall in Some People). His epithets and phrases enclose large and precise ideas, his knowledge of Europe and its working make the reading of his volumes almost an education in affairs.

The present organization of English society is based on the assumption that families include only two or three children apiece. The details of life fit into a consistent scheme which is compatible with the small family, and with no other.

The scheme quite clearly and obviously does not permit of a large family, save as a very exceptional thing. A family of several young children is rarely met with to-day, particularly in the wide-spread middle-classes, and in those classes a natural family of 8, 10 or 12 children is extremely rare. For the large family is compelled to ostracise itself, and to live so differently from persons of its own social status as to excite their curiosity.

It also excites their pity, contempt or reprobation. To bring a number of children into the world is regarded as foolish, improvident, unkind and unjust. It is retrograde, out of harmony with modern progress, a failure to benefit from scientific knowledge, an intensification of the troubles of an already over-populated world, and an act of cruelty to parents and children alike. That is the common verdict, not only of the worldly man and woman, but also of the majority of the most upright, generous, kind-hearted and religious of our neighbours.