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.

One of the noteworthy features of our time is the revival of interest in the life and letters of Blessed Thomas More.

These two new Lives of the Beatus are added evidence of this interest, and of its universal character. The one is by a non-Catholic Englishwoman, who is a scholar of the University of Oxford, the other is by a Catholic American, who is a member of the English Faculty at Harvard.

Though there are already (we are told by Miss Routh) twenty-four English Lives of More of different periods, one could not spare either of these new volumes. Of a truth, as Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth is here reported to have said, Sir Thomas More is one of the figures of abiding interest in History.

This multiplication of Lives of Thomas More goes with the reproduction of his English works in the elegant edition that is in course of publication by Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode under the general editorship of W. E. Campbell, with the co-operation of Professor A. W. Read, Professor R. W. Chambers and Mr. W. A. Doyle Davidson: a notable constellation of Catholic and and non-Catholic scholars. The publication in this series of Harpsfield’s Life of Thomas More has given us, from the pen of Professor Chambers, an enduring essay ‘On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School,’ the main thesis of which may be said to be that the English of Alfred survived as a literary language, during the centuries when French and Latin were the official languages of Law and Government, through the religious writings of Englishmen who wrote on mystical subjects for the use of English communities of religious women.

The present year marks two notable anniversaries associated with events which had wide spread importance, though very different results within the area of Law. The one was the publication of the famous Decretals of Gregory IX in 1234, a compilation of ecclesiastical law brought together by a Dominican friar, St. Raymund of Penafort, in the direction of centralization in Church government, which took its rise from the great Hildebrand, steadily but surely moved forward through the reigns of successive popes, and finally almost came to rest with Pope Gregory IX. Then there is that other most tragic event, three hundred years later, in 1534, the passing of the Act of Supremacy, whereby the death blow was struck at Canon Law, as far as England is concerned, and any lively influence that it might still have exerted on our own legal institutions was stifled at its source, though in shadowy forms it lingered on. But in the following year even the study of Canon Law was crushed out, when Cromwell as Henry VIII’s vicegerent visited the Universities and issued injunctions to the effect that lectures on the Decretals and the conferring of degrees in Canon Law should be abolished. The sequel was a notable depression also in the study of civil law in this country.

All but the prejudiced sectarian have come to acknowledge the Papacy as a wonderful piece of machinery and organization, not only within the sphere of religion and political prestige, but as a centre of law and government.

There is a widespread, if inarticulate, misgiving about Catholic Action which needs ventilation and elimination. A particularly vehement layman might express it in some such terms as these :

‘Catholic Action? Ecclesiastical Fascism! A pretext for further encroachment by the clergy on the layman’s business! More clerical domination and interference! More paralysing of lay initiative and endeavour! Apostolate of the Laity! Clerical Gleichschaltung!’

The Englishman, especially, has a horror of being ‘organized.’ And organization, it is universally agreed, is of the very essence of Catholic Action. The adoption and organization of an oeuvre by the Hierarchy is precisely what makes that oeuvre entitled to be called Catholic Action. The local establishment and direction of Catholic Action is committed to the parochial clergy. Must we not then infer that the disgruntled layman is right?

The most effective way to disillusion him would be, perhaps, to take him abroad to countries where Catholic Action is really in action and is already fully organized and vigorous. Failing that, these few considerations may help to shake the prejudices.

All depends on what we mean by ‘organization.’ In the strict sense in which the word is applied to Catholic Action, organization, so far from imposing, excludes uniformity: it fosters rather than hinders individual initiative and enterprise. The point cannot be explained better than in the words of the Holy Father himself.

Organization in general means the unity of many members of which each preserves its own particular nature, functions and life, but which together pursue a common aim and concur in the formation of a single body, itself subordinated to one single vital principle.

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.

Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India? It makes one think of Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of B. D. Basu's Rise and Consolidation of the Christian Power in India, of the Cambridge History of British India, and The Indian Empire. The title is entrancing—and not a little enigmatic: for the authors never tell the reader in so many words what exactly they mean by ‘fulfilment.’ Whatever it be, this History of the British Raj is as lively as the Cambridge tomes are stodgy, and as impartial as Major Basu is partizan: it refutes its own motto—a saying of the Iron Duke—’that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’ Nothing is more needful to-day than that the British mind should thus attend: it will henceforth be able to do so, thanks to Messrs. Thompson and Garratt, without tears, though perhaps not without a good deal of mortification.

‘It is often said,’ observe our authors (p. 273), ‘that Britain acquired her Indian Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness: the epigram has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead.’ True, the Empire began as a mercantile adventure—and ‘of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence’ (p. 5). Yet already in 1618 Sir Thomas Roe said: ‘Assure you, these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’ (p. 17); and by 1641 the East India Company had fortified its factory at Masulipatam.

The essential interest of the ‘Experiment in Biography’ by means of which Mr. A. J. A. Symons tells us’ what his ingenious patience has pieced together about Frederic William Rolfe, the ‘spoilt priest’ who has definitely taken his place in Victorian letters, depends on the fact—presented by Mr. Symons with a mass of accumulated evidence—that he was a congenital Invert. Once this has been realized the course of his wasted life is comprehensible. Without this clue we might well ask ourselves what all the fuss was about.

Born in Victorian London, and received into the Catholic Church at twenty—six years of age, Rolfe presents all the ear—marks of his kind. ‘Bright, attractive, a natural Catholic . . . interested in drawing, music, and the arts, not over given to sport,’ as Mr. Symons says, he might have sublimated his Inversion under the spur and curb of Catholic asceticism to become a useful priest. Yet ‘somehow’ he met ‘squalls’ at Oscott, ‘somehow’ he was expelled from the Scots College, ‘somehow’ he lapsed into vicissitudes at Christchurch and Aberdeen, ‘somehow’ he failed to convince either Franciscans or Jesuits, until ‘somehow’ he became the man of’ many queer friendships ‘who never made a friend, and finished up by purchasing the favours of venal youths in the back alleys of Venice. The ‘somehow’ is not difficult to deduce.

A necessity is defined as something that cannot not be; and in approaching Catholic Action study is a necessity. As a recent writer in Blackfriars expressed it: ‘The first stages of Catholic Action tend more to the study than to the street.’

The question which immediately suggests itself is whether there is adequate provision made for the Catholic layman to encourage and help him to ‘get down to’ this study. It is in the belief that there is not, and that some facilities should be forthcoming, that this scheme is suggested. But first let us be satisfied that not enough is being done. There exist two (National) societies for the purpose of promoting study, namely the Catholic Evidence Guild and the Catholic Social Guild. The avowed object of the former is to train apostolic men and women to expound the truths of the Faith from public platforms. This inevitably restricts their numbers, as but few are fitted for such work. The other society’s aim and object is the study and dissemination of Catholic social principles. In the manner of the Schools we feel that we must add a third—a society, or better (in view of Occam’s razor), some organization subject to the various diocesan Catholic Action Boards, whose object would be to provide classes in the fundamentals of the Catholic religion.

The scheme is best outlined under the divisions of the seven ‘circumstances’ of human action:

He professed his belief in God openly, regarding his religious convictions as a soldier on active service does his uniform, which he wears always and never exchanges for another dress ... In times like these this, so to say, intransigent Christian, can teach us all a lesson.’ In these words an Italian socialist newspaper summed up a student of the University of Turin who died in July, 1925, at the age of twenty-four. The man who made such an impression upon those who did not share his faith was Pier Giorgio Frassati, an engineering student, the son of a former Italian Ambassador in Berlin, an athlete and mountaineer, goodlooking, gay and popular, who, during his short life had made himself so beloved among the poor and among his fellow students that his funeral was something like a pilgrimage.

The life of Frassati is a shining example of that apostolate of the laity which Pius XI calls Catholic Action, and since there is very little literature in English to make clear how Catholic Action works out in practice, those who wish to know more about it cannot do better than read the account of his life, translated from the Italian, which although rather too much abbreviated, gives a vivid picture of a most attractive personality.

Pier Giorgio was essentially of the laity: he had no wish to be a priest or religious. He would have proposed marriage to a girl with whom he was deeply in love, but for the fact that he knew that for some reason she would not be acceptable to his parents, and out of loyalty to them he put the thought aside, at great sacrifice to himself.

Dr Niebuhr has given us a book’ not unlike M. Berdyaev's End of Out Time. Both works lead us to deplore the complacency of Conservatism (as we know it) and the hypocrisy of Mercantile Christianity. Both books drive us to an alternative; with M, Berdiaeff we must choose between the humanistic individualism of the Renascence and Christian individualism, while Dr Niebuhr in impressing upon us the pharisaical injustice of this closing era would induce (it seems) an aggressive and vindictive Christianity.

While M. Berdyaev may be more profound and nearer to Catholic vision, we cannot deny that the author of ‘Reflections on the End of an Era’ is more startling—may even give us more food for thought; and we are provoked to examine for ourselves the antithesis accounting for the attitude indicated in Dr Niebuhr's book—as much as to insist on the only true remedy-a Revolution based on the charity of Christ, Catholicism. The spirit of Conservatism, if we take it to mean the spirit of sheer negative laissez-faire in matters of economic justice, is derived largely from a sense of well-being, a personal satisfaction which we wish to prolong. We prosper: those who are our immediate responsibility prosper: at least we do not want; the business of blind and wholehearted conservatism is the Past; and the Present is no more than its legacy. Our concern for the future is limited to our care for our present ease.