lt is a great joy to be able to give some account, in the friendly columns of Blackfriars of La Vie Intellectuelle, the Dominican review which started to appear again last February after four-and- a-half years of silence. That joy is all the greater, because during the occupation we always envisaged our work after the war as united to that of Catholics throughout the world, but especially to that of our English brethren, linked to us as they are by the closest of ties. It was indeed because I had tried to get into touch with them, despite the German occupation, in order to prepare for this work for the Church, that I, with one of my brethren, Pète Dubarle, was arrested on the Swiss frontier in March, 1944. Only a few days after my liberation I was able to meet in France some of my friends from across the Channel, and now, less than a year later, on a visit to England, I can write, in an English review, something of what has happened and of our hopes for the future.

To begin with, let me recall what La Vie Intellectuelle stood for before the war. Begun in 1929, under the editorship of Père Bernadot, that indefatigable creator of reviews, who started La Vie Spirituelle, as well as many other publications, La Vie Intellectuelle was animated by a small group of Dominicans, with the active collaboration of many secular priests and lay people. Its aim was to contribute in France to that intellectual effort required in order to make the influence of the Church felt in the world. We know with what interest Pius XI, and after him, Pius XII, always encouraged such efforts.

In January Russia is decked out like a bride, snow covering the merciless scars of war, and glistening in the reflection of the sun . . . For the countryside is as beautiful as ever, untouched by politics and strife ... It is easy to wander back with the mind's eye and see the Russia of Tolstoy, the land so noted for its generosity in the sight of God, that it was called “Holy Russia”.

Let us recall that Russia, so as to get a clearer picture of the Russia of today.

It was an Agricultural land, where most of the education still clung to the religious houses, and the rest of the countryside were simple, trusting folk, who loved to see foreigners because they were different and therefore interesting. They were exceedingly hospitable, as all people are in lands where the climate is rigorous: if you do not put up the stranger for the night, and the next village is many a verst away, then he could easily perish, if not from the cold, then from the wolves on the way, which have aiways been numerous in Russia. As children we used to wonder whv our Lady did not come to a Russian Bethlehem, for there was always room for everybody, she would not have been homeless.

The fashionable Beveridge school of full employment economics is open to a good deal of detailed criticism, and Professor Fisher has made a valiant, if not wholly successful attempt to suggest the greater importance of a different approach. In spite of a number of dexterous jabs the Beveridge school still stands, sore but unshaken; in rightly denying that the New Economics are new, Professor Fisher tends to slip too easily into denying that they are frequently good economies. But he has made out his cause on a great many individual points, and provided a valuable corrective to the tendency to over-emphai se monetary solutions.

On the central issue of full employment, the essence of the Beveridge case is that needs must be clothed with purchasing power. If demand shows signs of failing to absorb the whole available output, then tax remissions or subsidies must be used to enable or induce people to buy the goods which they want—or, more commonly, what the current political majority thinks that they ought to want. Professor Fisher prefers to approach the other way round. If goods are unsold, why do producers not make more effort to give consumers what they want? Why not try to promote new enterprise at the “growing points” of the economic system, and to render existing firms more adaptable? There is not much difficulty in showing that along these lines a great deal more could be done than was actually attempted in the thirties; most of all, of course, in Professor Fisher’s own special field of international trade.

It is still too early to give a complete analysis of the Government’s policy as regards the nationalisation of the banks. Sir Hugh Dalton’s statements were too vague for that, he gave us to understand that all his plans were still in the experimental stage.

Nevertheless, from statements made by different Labour leaders, especially from those of Mr. Bevin, as Minister of Labour of the former Government, we can get quite a clear picture of the philosophy behind their policy, and of this philosophy I shall give a short outline and criticism.

The Labour party is convinced—and rightly so—that our reconstruction problems of today are not so much production as financial problems, that though we may have as many plans for industrial expansion as we like, while this expansion has to be financed according to the old system, in which the power to create and destroy money is left to the banks, our plans will turn out failures.

They fear especially the consequences of deflation. Deflation, the deliberate creation of a shortage of money, causes of necessity a sudden drop of prices, so that producers are forced either to sell below cost price, to destroy their products to keep up their price, or to cease producing at all.

It is dangerous to disagree with so learned a man as Dr. Chaytor, but I cannot pretend that his recent interesting and scholarly work on medieval literature does not put one in a quarrelsome mood. A number of the views contained in it are highly disputable, and I feel that much of the rest of it is misleading, even if it cannot be definitely contradicted. The issues it raises, however, are tricky and delicate; nor are Dr. Chaytor’s own positions always perfectly clear. Still, there is so much in his book that seems quite definitely misleading that a reviewer can hardly avoid hostilities, even while he acknowledges that. Dr. Chaytor’s learning has once again made English students of- the Middle Ages his debtors.

Dr. Chaytor’s purpose is to examine and characterise medieval literature from the point of view, in particular, of the way in which it reached its public; and it reached it either orally or through script, but not through print. It is in this sense that he speaks of the “importance of the difference between the literary and critical methods of the early middle ages and those of modern times”, between the age of script and the age of print. We are to be shown how to understand medieval writings in the light of the fact that they were not printed.