I wonder that the Editor of Blackfriars is not afraid that the formidable figure of St Thomas will appear to disturb his slumbers with reproof, for he set great store by accurate definition and precision of language. What accuracy or precision is there in the March editorial when the Editor writes: ‘French Catholics crossing the Channel are amazed to find that while the numerical majority of Catholics vote Labour and consider themselves as leaning towards the Left, the Catholic voice in journalism, etc., is almost without exception “true blue” Conservative, and, therefore still wholly immersed in the politics of a past age’. Really? ‘Wholly-immersed in the politics of a past age.’ While he was writing that, I and my colleagues were preoccupied with that most immediate contemporary question, whether and how Europe can be saved, and restored, were writing about the Brussels Conference and the Atlantic Pact.

We might even claim to have shown a little prescience. In domestic politics, which were presumably more in your mind, so far from being immersed in the past, we are preoccupied with the future, with the later developments implicit in the present changes. Whether people agree with us or not, they must admit that we are preoccupied with the future, with the direction social change is taking and the direction we hold it should take. It would be a more substantial criticism to say that we are too far ahead for the public to follow us, that we have got up very early and we have gone out before the milkman, not that we have stayed out too late and come home with the milk.

Bertrand Russell stated the fundamental problem of polities succinctly and in practical form at the beginning of his Reith Lectures with the question: ‘How can we combine that degree of individual initiative which is necessary for progress with the degree of social cohesion that is necessary for survival?’ It may be that the distinction that he makes is too clear cut and that there are circumstances where individual initiative is not anarchic or where the particular form of social cohesion imposed carries in itself the seeds of nihilism. Nonetheless, one cannot but agree with Russell when he suggests that the three primary aims of government are security, justice and conservation.

A far too simpliste approach to world polities, of which Russell himself is to some degree guilty, would equate the system in which individual initiative predominates with ‘the American way of life', and the system where social cohesion is created and maintained by unparalleled means of force with the U.S.S.B., and indeed with most of the satellite countries of Eastern Europe. The latter system, almost ex hypothesi, is stable with the monolithic rigidity of fanatical adherence to a doctrine, a messianic doctrine, that must be made to work out in practice. On the other hand, the American system is constantly undergoing changes which bring it nearer to being a balance between the two extremes. (It must not be thought that I am concerned to defend the American way of life—I would merely point out that it is constantly undergoing modifications, and cannot be reckoned static as is the doctrinaire Stalinist position.)

Since wartime days South Africa has been faced, both at home and abroad, with a rising tide of feeling and opinion which demands a solution to its problems of population groups, European, African, Cape Coloured and Indian, on lines in accordance with justice and Christianity. It is no longer possible to look upon the Non-White peoples as perpetually or indefinitely condemned to be servants and labourers; and such views, common in the press ten years ago, are now rarely seen. All parties realise that only a policy that gives full justice and opportunity will have any hope of success. Hence the rival policies, which formerly tended to don the appearances of Liberal and Repressionist, now meet on grounds of fairness and practicability. Each claims to be the only policy which combines justice to all groups with practical feasibility; while all, in greater or lesser degree, claim to represent Christian principles.

Leaving aside, therefore, political policies of parties, which aim largely at political or commercial ends and which do not face the problem squarely, it will be useful to make a short survey of the theoretical policies at present being advocated in the Union. They may be classed as four in number: Apartheid or Separation, Parallelism, Trusteeship, and Assimilation.