Campaigning for Realities
344 THE COMMONWEAL August 7, I9z9 rope" leads one to recognize the circumstance that the work of Versailles is, in several important respects, vastly out of date. It has, for instance,...
...Since that time a silence, vast and profound as a divorce between worlds of the spirit, has brooded under the bells of the enormous basilicama silence which blended indignation and regret, penitence and longing...
...The French Premier, conscious always of the economic and political importance of the Americas in any picture of the modern world, has adroitly accompanied his homilies to the continent with invitations to the new world...
...In other words: economics has forced itself upon the political consciousness, and much of the machinery is antiquated...
...The hundreds of thousands who knelt for benediction, who enjoyed the regal splendor of the ceremony, and who acclaimed the man in whom the destinies of Christendom are for the moment centered, could not well avoid feeling that a new vitality had entered the conduct of the Church...
...It might gradually curb its Nordic and Latin manias...
...One may also point to the circumstance that, as Briand has put it, the new concept of unification does not emphasize any kind of antipathy to the United States...
...THOUGH his opportunity comes through the regrettable illness of M. Poincar~, the times are now appropriate for the return of Aristide Briand Briand to leadership in France, just as three years ago circumstances were ripe Returns for his exit...
...But it can shape common policies and common hopes without giving them, once and for all, the rigid formulization required for the League covenant...
...Not a single one of the important post-war financial problems has been referred to it for settlement...
...and that the sequence of Golgotha upon Palm Sunday has been, and will inevitably be, the rhythm of Catholic history upon earth...
...Now Russia is bound more closely to Germany than perhaps ever before...
...In the meantime there have been few moments when this remarkable man could have shown to his best advantage at the head of the government...
...Whether that influence is welded into political unity or not, the fact remains that Vienna is rapidly becoming a centre of German Danubic control...
...In short, it might prevent not the collapse of Europe (of this there is little danger) but the continued anaemia of Europe...
...Rome, which naturallyCivitatem possesses a better memory for such things, thinks of the event in terms of comparison with the final sad public appearance of Pio Nono...
...WEEK BY WEEK T O THE world at large the triumphal procession which ushered Pope Pius XI from the Vatican to Saint Peter's was a sign that the Church has definitively accepted the Lateran treaties Exeunt in and ended the official seclusion of fiftynine years...
...It can recognize the fact that its enterprise hums round the half-dozen important capitals in its area, and that adroit political decisions may control economic valves...
...344 THE COMMONWEAL August 7, I9z9 rope" leads one to recognize the circumstance that the work of Versailles is, in several important respects, vastly out of date...
...Europe will, therefore, refuse to sacrifice it unless ~ome wave of folly gets the better of wits...
...that easy adjustments frequently imply spiritual failure...
...It has, for instance, visualized a Russian republic allied with the victorious powers and receiving tribute from Germany...
...One need hardly be told that Europe can never achieve what we here understand by the term "united states...
...Meanwhile the famous "ring of states," once drawn like a cordon to the south of the defeated Teutons, has become a dangerous battleground for French and Italian rivalry...
...He may be mistaken, but he has risked a genuine effort to be wise...
...and though one may regret that the way was barred for so long, it was doubtless imperative that the conflict between faith and arrogant nationalism should end itself through the catastrophe of a world's war...
...one remembers the semi-panic which ensued when it became apparent that Briand was to fail, and the dizzy plunges of the franc while control of the government wavered between him and Herriot...
...Now the throng has witnessed an emergence which summons to mind again the entry of Christ Himself into Jerusalem amid the plaudits of the crowd...
...Poincar~, called at the eleventh hour, managed to form a Cabinet of union, and was almost immediately a steadying influence...
...Germanic influence in what used to be the Hapsburg empire is limited to one republic which, however, possesses the most important distributing centre in the whole of southeastern Europe...
...We need to bear in mind always that one part of the Christian mission is necessarily expressed in conflict...
...But its prosperity will mean security for American investments, and this is all which may reasonably be expected...
...But M. Briand is proposing a necessary supplement--an agreement to achieve unity on the basis of actual facts...
...The fluctuations of the franc were the French government's most serious problem, and his successive administrations had been powerless to stabilize it...
...Under his management the country has gradually regained prosperity, while M. Briand, free to...
...As such the League of Nations never has had and never will have economic effectiveness...
...All roads through the world are open to the Sovereign Pontiff, as they were to Peter the Fisherman...
...Inevitably, of course, Europe will struggle for a more favorable credit balance than it can now point toward...
...In I926, lines of difference between him and the forces led by M. Herriot were so bitterly drawn that he was out of the picture...
...Every...
...Really an anti-war conference body, its significance lies mostly in the political effectiveness of the public opinion it can muster...
...and Poland, once conceived of as a kind of wall which would both hinder the Reich's eastward progress and permit Franco-British egress, is, potentially at least, in the position of a nut caught between the jaws of a cracker...
...Or go around to the other side...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 14
