In a previous article, I pointed out that Frederic Ozanam, the great and saintly founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, had in the course of his lectures on Commercial Law at the University of Lyons in 1839 outlined a remarkable system of Christian social reforms. He had denounced the exploitation of the working classes, which he described as slavery, he called for a just wage, profit-sharing and even pensions—over fifty years before Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum. And Ozanam was not the only French Catholic to be moved by the spectacle of working-class misery which grew in intensity with the development of the Industrial Revolution. Conservatives like Villeneuve-Bargemont and Charles de Coux had denounced the evil effects of industrialism, and Royahsts claimed that the plight of the workers was due to the Revolution which had made their exploitation possible by destroying the Guilds of the ancien regime. Other Catholics were influenced by the doctrines of the early Socialist thinkers, such as Saint-Simon and Fourrier. The most notable of these were the group of working men who, under the leadership of Buchez, founded a paper called l’Atelier, some of the pages of which make stimulating and startling reading even today. The vigorous and progressive spirit of this elite of French Catholic social thinkers is best rendered by the Abbe (afterwards Mgr) Maret, the friend and collaborator of Ozanam and Lacordaire, who (before Marx and Proudhon had given to the word ‘socialism’ its materialistic and atheistic connotation) wrote: ‘It is no use refuting the pseudo-socialists, let us become socialists ourselves’.

It is laid down in Section 4(i) of the Education Act 1944 that ‘there shall be two Central Advisory Councils for Education, one for England and the other for Wales and Monmouthshire, and it shall be the duty of those Councils to advise the Minister upon such matters connected with educational theory and practice as they think fit and upon any questions referred to them by him’.

The Central Advisory Council for Wales has already published three substantial reports: they deal with the future of secondary education in Wales, with county colleges and with The place of Welsh and English in the schools of Wales.This last report, which is the result of two years of hard work, is an impressive volume and its contents merit an extended notice. By nature of its terms of reference, which include ‘the problem of bilingualism in Wales generally’, it is a document of the greatest importance not only for those who are bound to be concerned with education in Wales but also for all who feel any concern for the future of the Welsh nation.

The historical setting of the problem is presented in the first two sections of the Report. The first gives a comprehensive and valuable account of the place of Welsh and English in the schools between 1650 and 1925: the former date marks the foundation of nearly sixty free schools in Wales under the ‘Act for the Better Propagation of the Gospel’, and the latter was the year which saw the appointment of the Departmental Committee whose inspiring but as yet, after a quarter of a century, not fully implemented report on Welsh in Education and Life was published in 1927.

Scholarship and reflection go together all too seldom. Two new books about the Middle Ages combine them in a quite exceptional way. It is no accident, but a sad commentary on present historical teaching, that one book was written by a professor in retirement, the other by a college tutor in a period of enforced rest. Both convey the rare and delightful impression of learning recollected in tranquillity. One remembers that the great Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, wrote his Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe far away from his books and his students in a German prison camp in the First World War.

The Thirteenth Century (1216-1307) by Sir Maurice Powicke falls into two parts; the change in method and treatment is easily discernible. The first part covering the reign of Henry III draws on the author’s earlier book, Henry III and the Lord Edward, published in 1947. This large-scale work in two volumes summarized the findings of recent studies including the author’s minute researches into the reign of Henry III. Here he condenses it into a crisp and exciting narrative. A few details are new, since the first book provoked discussion, and some fresh studies have appeared. But the main difference is that judgments stand out more sharply and the characters have clearer outlines. If Henry remains very much the same, a naive, changeable, but ‘fundamentally decent’ person, his great friend and antagonist, Simon de Montfort, has become more sympathetic and intelligible. The incalculable trouble-maker, while still ambitious and erratic, now stands in closer relations with the knights and freeholders of the shires who supported his cause through their mistrust of royal promises.

Those who consider theology worth talking about, form perhaps a very small minority in the country; but at least, apart from Marxists, or humanists at our older Universities, very few of them would still maintain that it has finally been disposed of by science. Against the background threat of total destruction, modem efforts are preferably directed to integrating what has been inherited; so it is the relation rather than the conflict of science and religion which now provides the usual theme in public lectures on those subjects. Two recent publications may exemplify this contrast of styles between old and new.

There is little to show that the greater part of Professor Price’s Eddington memorial lecture was not written thirty or more years ago. Its argument begins with the claim that ‘the materialistic conception of human personality ... is accepted nowadays, almost as a matter of course, by the majority of Western educated people’. Though there is a disagreement as to the exact form materiahsm takes (Epiphenomenalism, Behaviourism, Marxism are suggested ways), it is at least certain, according to science, that ‘mental processes are inseparable from bodily ones’. Since theism, our natural knowledge of God exclusive of particular revelation (though Professor Price’s scope is wider, the essential point lies here), depends on some direct awareness of him, unmediated by the senses, it is thoroughly discredited in a scientific age. But a ray of hope shone through the general gloom on the day ‘when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a brilliant group of Cambridge men’.