Though many may disagree profoundly with the conclusions reached in The Coming Struggle for Power, by John Strachey, nevertheless they will admit that they are grateful for its publication. It requires such a book, which challenges all the ideals upon which this and previous generations have been brought up, to rouse people from taking things for granted and to make them ask themselves such questions as ‘whither is our civilization leading us?’

Mr. Strachey has no doubts but that communism is the goal to be aimed at, and that it is also the goal towards which we are being irresistibly drawn. It would be unprofitable to examine in detail the multiplicity of arguments which he has advanced in support of his general thesis, but the general trend of the argument in the book needs careful attention—Mr. Strachey first points to all the evils which at present exist in the world; wars, famine, and poverty on the one side, over-production and accumulation of vast fortunes on the other; periodical crises, booms and slumps; tendencies towards monopolies and nationalism. All these, he says, are the obvious results of capitalism, and it is impossible for capitalism to provide a cure for these evils. This, in brief, is the first stage in his argument, and I think it is worth our while to consider it at some length.

In a long narrow gallery of Versailles seldom opened to the public hangs a picture by Nocret of Louise Duchesse de la Vallière in court dress of the late seventeenth century. There is something strangely haunting about the beautiful aristocratic face with its great sad eyes ringed by dark circles. For all her fine parure she has the air of one whose nights are spent in weeping. And now her life has been written by one who seems to have crept into her very heart and learnt its whispered secret; a work so different from the usual ones on Louis XIV’s mistresses, and justly crowned by the Académie Française.

Here is the story. In 1661, the sixteen-year-old Madame Henriette d’Angleterre married Louis XIV’s brother. Among her ladies-in-waiting was Mlle. Louise de la Baume le Blanc, of Blois, aged seventeen. She had fair hair and innocent almond-shaped blue eyes, ‘ses yeux longs,’ and though she limped slightly, she was very exquisite. Madame herself said she was ‘douce, précieuse, admirable’ . . . ‘dans ses beaux yeux une douce langueur.’ As a little girl in Tours and at Blois, she had been greatly neglected by her mother and allowed to run wild. She had seen the King for the first time on his way to marry the Spanish Infanta. It was strange that on the high chimney of her chateau was the device: Ad principem ut ad ignes amor indissolubilis which by a strained translation is interpreted as foretelling her love for Louis and then its sacrifice to the fires of a greater love.

On March and Francesco Luigi Ferrari, editor of the international review, Res Publica, official leader of the Popular Party abroad and its representative at all the international gatherings of Christian Democratic parties, died in exile in Paris at the age of 4a. He had been badly gassed in the war; in 1920 he had received internal injuries from a Communist attack—remote causes, as far as it appears, of the abscess on the lungs that, an aftermath of neglected influenza, ended a life of useful achievement and still greater promise. Eighteen months earlier he had followed the funeral of Giuseppe Donati, his friend and colleague, the brilliant ex-editor of the militant Popolo of Rome, and who died of consumption accelerated by the privations of exile.

The deaths of both, in Catholic serenity and exaltation, were in harmony with their lives. They had spent themselves in the Catholic Social cause, in defence of the principles of Rerum Novarum in the political and economic field, and therefore it is well that they should be remembered.

The Ordo Vagorum was already cutting its teeth when Gerdibert was born. But the infant was precocious and caught up with the vagabonds in the second lap; by his majority he was well apace with them. Not officially one of their number, their spirit was his, their doctrine his creed. He was not one of them because circumstances against which his character—more ready to smile winsomely on adversity than to attack it—could not compete, thrust him early into a very different environment. Thanks to the pious impatience of a romantic and rather erratic mother he was clapped into a cloister, sicut denarium furatum in bursam as he said, and hidden with a like despatch from the curious gaze of the world. Gerdibert was certainly in those early years too soft and submitting to be entirely lovable. Yet lovable he was even then, with his mane of fair hair that was always unruly, his brilliant eyes, his chiselled nose, his full yet delicate lips which tempted many a maid and matron, his ready amenity. Perhaps at first he found the cloistral solitude soothing, for it freed him from the matrons with marriageable daughters, a pest by no means confined to our later ages, who pursued him, as he said, sicut leonissae quaerentes quern devorent. His friend Philibert had capped the quotation: ‘quibus resiste fortis in coelibatu,’ adding the Tu autern Domine miserere mihi, for he himself was wed some fourteen years and had spent thirteen and three-quarters regretting it.

The difficulty of dealing adequately with French painting as a whole is that the very use of the term ‘French painting’ implies a continuity, a unifying tradition, which among French painters is entirely absent. Appreciation of tradition alone suffices to explain why Sasseta was Sasseta or Greco Greco, but it is vain to ask Fragonard why Daumier was Daumier or to look in Watteau for the germ of Delacroix. In each separate case to find the original influence we have to go outside France, with Wat teau and Delacroix to Rubens, with Fragonard and Daumier to the atelier of Rembrandt. Though certain French painters group themselves together, Ingres and David and Prud’hon or Monet and Sisley and Berthe Morisot, we can look for a very long time without discovering a common denominator between any two such groups. There are French painters; there is no French painting. In French art more than in the art of any other country we are dealing with the individual as a single entity and not as part of a progressive chain and we therefore find ourselves, more frequently than elsewhere, coming up again and again against the personal, unheralded assertion of individuality that we call genius. Study of these inconsequent phenomena can necessarily only take the form of interpretative biography and not of the mere objective history certain writers have attempted to make of it.

The notion of a development of Christianity is found in Tertullian and in Vincent of Lérins; indeed it is an immediate conclusion from the words of Our Lord, ‘I am not come to destroy but to fulfil.’ Yet no one gave the subject especial attention before Newman. The historical spirit is not rarely alien to the mind of the theologian, and theology has been received with little sympathy since the rise of modern historical science in the eighteenth century.

Newman, widely read in the Fathers, but saturated in the spirit of the Oxford of his day, approached the question by attempting to explain away a suspicion that the Roman Catholic Church of 1845 was the same body as the Primitive Church of historical research. Startling divergence seemed to reveal, as well as to conceal, an ultimate identity. His reconciliation of this seeming contradiction was the conclusion, but not the purpose, of his writing the essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The historical, theological, philosophical and psychological vistas which the book opens up are manifold: we can here concern ourselves only with its analysis of the subject itself.

If (hypothesized Aristotle) if but the tool could do its own work, even as the automatons of Daedalus and the walking tripods of Hephaestus, then there would be no need of slaves and ‘prentices. And if (thought Antiparos of the water mill) we go on inventing things like this we shall certainly liberate our poor slaving women and return to the Golden Age. And Marx (who mistook the plutarchy born of the Reformation for Christianity) caustically observed that the ingenious Antiparos knew no political economy; and Aristotle not being a Christian could not conceive the intricacies of value-breeding process and other mysteries of industrial capitalism. Actually, the work of the machine, which according to Proudhon should be a protest of the ‘genius of industry against humiliating and murderous toil,’ is better described by the words which Ure applies to a modern factory, ‘A vast automaton composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.’ Ure’s ‘benignant power of steam’ (quoted sardonically by Kautsky) does not extend its benign influence beyond its true lord and master, the capitalist (whose beaming benevolence pervades the whole working world).