Some day no doubt an attempt will be made to probe the roots of the colour bar in the psychology of certain European nations. The colour bar did not originate in South Africa. It came with Dutch and British colonists. But it found a vigorous stimulant to its growth in the formidable challenge of that very thing, the black skin, in the dread of which it consists. It has been suggested that the list of capital sins needs amplification, for it contains no reference to one of humanity’s worst failings, the tendency to restrict the scope of the connatural love of the species to a particular community constituted by language, lineage, race, religion, politics, economic interest or colour. In our days, colour is one of the most fiercely sundering of these restrictive elements.

Colour dominates the South African social scene. It would be a mistake, however, to simplify the picture and put all the blame for the country’s ills on White oppressors. There can be no denying their guilt, but we need not add to it by making them responsible for all the tensions that have resulted from the meeting of Western sophistication and African backwardness. White colonizers have probably made all the mistakes in the book; but even without colonial conquest there would have been conflict a-plenty arising from the impact of Western dynamism on the social stagnation of Africa.

The history of the ecclesiastical breach between East and West, and of the attempt to heal it, is very long and obscure. There was the Photian schism of the middle of the ninth century, but that was over within a few years. Two centuries later the Patriarch Cerularius was excommunicated by an over-zealous papal legate and retaliated in kind; but that quarrel was not final. The Fourth Crusade captured Christian Constantinople and never went any further, but set up a Latin kingdom there which lasted less than sixty years and did as much to antagonize the Greeks as anything else. Yet, a little more than ten years after he regained his throne, the restored Greek Emperor—but not the Greek Church—had accepted the Latin faith and union in the Second Council of Lyons (1274). His purpose, however, was political, to win the Pope’s help to prevent any attempt to re-establish the Latin kingdom of Constantinople.

From then on over the next century, whenever Constantinople was more in danger than usual by reason of the rapid advance of the Turks, the Byzantine emperors approached the pope of the time, as head of western Christendom. They asked for military aid, and they offered the possibility of union of the Churches through the medium of a general council. The offer was, of course, a sort of bribe, but not entirely so. Both East and West sincerely deplored the schism that divided them and would have wholeheartedly welcomed a genuine union.

There is generally understood to be some special link between morals and the career of the politician. Every professional man, the business executive, the professor, the actor, the doctor and the barrister (to confine ourselves to laymen) encounters plenty of moral problems in the course of his career and in the case of the last two categories—lawyers and doctors—a number of well-known issues are recognized under the headings of forensic and medical ethics. But there is generally thought to be more to it than this in the case of politicians. They not only encounter personal problems in politics, but they assume a duty, consciously or unconsciously, of applying political principles which are often presented as an extension of the principles of ethics.

The three distinguished men whose lives are wholly or partly portrayed in three recent books were outstanding national figures in the 1930’s and it is tempting to compare them in their respective attitudes to the tremendous challenges of that period. There is bound to be something artificial in doing so, for whereas the first volume of Mr Bevin’s Life and the full life of Lord Lothian come to an end in 1940, Full Circle is the second volume of Sir Anthony Eden’s Memoirs (published first) and covers only the period from 1951 to 1957. And yet it is perhaps possible to abstract from all else, including Mr Bevin’s truly heroic creation of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, and study one question only which faced Lord Lothian in the thirties, Mr Bevin, in fact, in the thirties and forties, and Sir Anthony Eden in the thirties, forties and fifties. It is a question which faces us still—the question of the moral reply in terms of political action to what one judges to be organized evil.