Morality is not immediately concerned with what happens but with what people do. The characteristic moral judgment is not ‘It would be better to have this happen than that’ but ‘It would be good to do this, better to do this other, and definitely bad to do that’.

It is important to restate this platitude because nearly all muddle in questions of morality comes from forgetting it. Take for example, the business of the population explosion and contraceptives: you can have an interesting discussion about whether the world would be a better place with a large population or a small one, whether a large population means too many mouths to feed or more hands to work, and so on. Such a discussion can be very interesting but is attended by a curious difficulty—apart from dogma and prejudice it is exceedingly difficult to rest the discussion on any firm basis at all. You get difficult exchanges like ‘If you do such and such, the human race will not survive’. ‘Why should the human race survive?’ ‘Well I just want it to’. Mr Evelyn Waugh’s famous and characteristic remark that he saw no objection to the destruction of the human race, especially if, as seems likely, it should happen accidentally, was taken as some kind of joke. But it is perfectly serious. Mr Evelyn Waugh sees no objection, if you are surprised it is up to you to think of an objection. One of the most interesting things about a discussion of this kind is that it brings you up against these curious puzzles.

Three times in the last seventy years, a major encyclical has been devoted primarily to economic and social questions. Each has made its contribution to the social doctrine of the Church, setting forth the moral principles which should govern economic and social relationships, drawing attention to the chief social evils of the day, and suggesting the general lines of reform. The latest of these encyclicals, Mater et Magistra, makes important contributions to the social teaching of the Church in four areas. First, there is a clear and authoritative re-statement of the principle of subsidiary function at a time when the provision of social services has been and is being greatly extended in many countries, and when the proper role of the state in this field is a subject of considerable controversy. Secondly, in its discussion of wages, profits and the status of the worker, the new encyclical clarifies the Church’s teaching, and also shows that despite the reforms that have already come about, in some measure in response to the earlier encyclicals, much still remains to be done. Thirdly, it calls attention to the depressed state of agriculture relatively to industry, and sees in this an evil to be remedied. Finally, far greater attention is paid in this latest encyclical to international economic questions than in Rerum Novarum or even Quadragesimo Anno.

One Catholic M.P. appears to have found in the new encyclical support for the Welfare State as it exists in Britain to-day, whilst a correspondent writing to one of the Catholic papers has suggested that countries wishing to put the social encyclicals into practice would do well to copy our National Health Service.

‘Every creative writer worth our consideration.......is a victim: a man given over to an obsession’, wrote Graham Greene in an essay on Walter de la Mare. Critics have not been slow in applying this statement to Mr Greene himself. He has been considered almost exclusively in terms of a few recurring obsessions: the vision of evil; the concept, borrowed from Peguy, of the sinner at the heart of Christianity; the theme of pursuit, and so on.

This critical approach has contributed much that is valuable to the study of his work. Unfortunately it has, by obscuring its variousness, inadvertently supplied ammunition to those critics who like to dismiss him as a mere manipulator of rigid and repetitive formulae. We can, for instance label both The Confidential Agent and The Power and The Glory as ‘Pursuit’ novels. But this does not take us very far. Apart from the fact that The Confidential Agent is an ‘Entertainment’, and The Power and The Glory a ‘Novel,’ the two books are of course entirely different. To determine the identity of each we must probe deeper than the obsessive symbol of pursuit, to the obsessive word. The key-word in The Confidential Agent is ‘trust’, presented mainly in its negative aspect as ‘mistrust’ or ‘distrust’. These three words occur at least sixteen times in The Confidential Agent. The irony of its title is therefore clear: the hero is a confidential agent who has confidence in nobody, and in whom nobody has confidence.