There are plenty of reformers and prophets for England’s material needs. The Beveridge Report is only one of several hundreds of printed works showing what the men of this country lack and how their needs are to be filled. We are shown the wretched lives of those to whom our system has been harsh : the uncertainty of employment, the great number living below subsistence level, the hovels in which many workers live, the long hours and the slender leisure; these things can be painted in vivid colours and provide the mainstay for the enthusiasts for the plans and reports.

There are few who recognise that those material needs are of secondary importance compared with the spiritual ones, and that the needs of Englishmen will never be met so long as we confine our efforts to relieving their physical wants. Pius XII, in his impressive Christmas allocution, has pointed out that the troubles from which we suffer cannot be cured if we leave out religion. This truth is set aside by the majority of social thinkers and planners, and they scoff at the Pope as reactionary and out of touch with reality. But in this country the need is greater than elsewhere.

The Beveridge Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services is in its way a portent in English politics.

Though it is in form a report made by Sir William Beveridge to the Minister of Reconstruction, Sir William Jowitt, K.C., M.P., who held the rank and office of Paymaster General (and is now Minister without Portfolio), and though the Report admittedly raises matters of policy which are ‘so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole,’ the issue of the Report was heralded by a regular campaign of advance publicity and propaganda which appeared to be designed and calculated to impose the document on Parliament and the people; and its actual publication was accompanied by such a fanfare of trumpets, in the Press and on the Radio, as made one to understand, almost for the first time, the technique and power of publicity in the hands of a totalitarian régime and its habit of treating Parliament no longer as a deliberative assembly, but rather as a body accustomed obediently to register the decisions of the Party, or the Fuhrer. Thus, within twenty-four hours of its publication, summaries of the Report (as yet unconsidered by the Government or by Parliament) were broadcast in twenty-two languages as a forecast of the line of social legislation to be followed by Great Britain in the post-war reconstruction.

It is now some time since Mr. Massingham began to educate and delight us with his studies of the English rural tradition, but the present book may be considered his most mature achievement. In it he takes the types which he regards as most representative of the English countryman and examines in turn the origins, status, character and history of each. The history indeed is of rather a melancholy kind, since in each case rise and development is followed by a decline and fall, the fortunes of the countryside being bound up with those of England and its culture at large, and the movement towards modern times being a retreat rather than an advance. The replacement of sacred by secular, of spiritual by material, of the functional and the reasonable by the functionless and irrational, of many-sided wisdom by the smartness of business men and the research of undisciplined scientists—these are the characteristic note's of modernity, and it is natural that they should appear with particular vividness in the history of so central and primary a thing as agriculture. Nevertheless, the diagnosis is not a hopeless one, and its partial acceptance now, with the chance of wider acceptance soon, offers some possibility of a return to the norm we have forsaken.

Of these nine essays, two are now seen for the first time, and one, the longest, is new to the present writer. Secular and Sacred in Modern Industry takes up the last twenty pages. Two full-size reproductions and three or four ‘colophons’ from his hand make the little volume more intimate and precious to his old friends and the war-economy standard of production seems to enhance rather than impair the attractiveness. The little volume contains a lot of close reasoning, many aphorisms of price, and much true intense loyalty to the Papal Encyclicals on Labour and Social Reform. We speak feelingly;, having had to defend the faith of Eric Gill against those who never retain a single word of those earth-shaking documents even if they ever heeded one. On p. 13, 1. 7, occurs a sentence with one that too many.

Who wants an antidote to the Daily Bane and other touting boobytraps for Democracy and the Proletarianisation (his word) of all things? Who wants to hear that ‘the labourer’s point of view is necessarily radically different from any other’? Who swallows all the second-hand sops of Midas without any rumination? Who but everyone who does not read Eric Gill.

On the whole the English type of spirituality shows greater consideration for the human needs of the individual than that of, say, Italy or Spain; it has a gentler and more tolerant character. The northern climate preaches moderation in penances and asks for attention to human frailty and feelings. The phlegmatic Englishman is seldom demonstrative in external religion, for he is unwilling to reveal his emotions, though they be intense. The warm blood of the South appears to him to indulge in excess in all things, excess in sanctity as in sinning. We may find a gentle human element in the mystics of fourteenth-century England; but it goes further back than that. St. Aelred of Rievaulx shows it in his life and writings in the twelfth century; he is in fact one of the only spiritual writers who has dealt with human friendships to justify them as part of the spiritual life. ‘I began to wonder whether Scripture had any blessing to give to friendship, or was it only a thing that paganism had praised. However, I had found that the letters of the saints were full of references to friendship.’ And so he sets out in pursuit of a human love within the embrace of the divine. ‘Particular friendships’ have often been condemned; yet there is something of the same sympathy as St. Aelred’s in the writing of Richard Rolle, while the author of the Ancren Riwle (c. 1200) takes it for granted that the recluses for whom he writes will have special friends.

During four generations Poland has been specially dear to the hearts of English Catholics. One reason assuredly for this attachment arises from the strong Irish element in our make up, with its memory of suppression of the faith and violent persecution. Yet the native Catholics too share an affinity with the Polish people that is strong and peculiarly English. The English have always shown a keen sense of injustice. The enemies of our race would say it was a sense only outraged by injustice of a continental brand. It is, however, a commonplace that England has afforded an exile’s home for every kind of Ishmael : The Seers of the Enlightenment followed by Bourbons and Eugenie: Dom Manoel and Don Sturzo; Garibaldi and the French émigré clergy, whose names are honoured in the history of many London parishes; Marx and Chateaubriand; Einstein and Chopin. But more than this, for English Catholics Poland typifies splendidly the spirit of resurgent Catholicism. The English remnant can take heart from the example of Poland.

The first lesson I ever learned in the study of the European scene was that there were two bastions in Europe, Ireland and Poland; both were rooted in tradition, both were vital in a dying world, because established on the four-square gospel of a sane social creed : a Faith, the land, family and patriotism—i.e. the love of the hearth I was taught later in the insularity of English University life with its fear of metaphysics and again in the cosmopolitan fever of the Sorbonne that Poland and Ireland were despicable blockhouses of superstition and reaction. It was taken for granted that Weygand had saved Warsaw : so miraculous in achievement was that strategy that it seemed incredible otherwise.