Immediate action. The state of affairs twenty years hence is difficult to conjecture. Those who foresee the break-up of Industrialism are preparing quite logically to go back to the land. Under the circumstances it is beside the point to criticise the smallness of their beginnings or to ask how townsmen can possibly be turned into successful farmers. But a general crash is far from being the only possibility. The centre of gravity is shifting from the congested industrial town, but whether it will move into the country or stop in the outer suburb is another matter. After all, there are various schemes which claim to be able to save our present system of production, although they would completely overhaul the financial system. For this reason, Mr. Foster’s suggestion in the present number of Blackfriars for Catholic housing associations deserves the most serious consideration.

An economic staff. The Army has specialist officers whose function is to adjust fighting power to the economic situation. The Church, too, has its specialists; but, very naturally, they are mostly concerned with principles and diagnosis of conditions. There is room for a more immediate and utilitarian effort. Local government affects our lives more than Parliament does, and although priests are often closely in touch with local developments, there seems to be a place for a council which would inform and advise diocesan authorities on such things as future town planning, the movement of industry, the possibility of a Catholic housing scheme at some strategic point. This is work for laymen, a form of Catholic action which did things, instead of debating social theory. For the times are too urgent to wait for many theoretical conclusions; the centre of Catholic life is a church, and what is a church unless the Catholics are grouped around it?

Catholic Action is in fashion at last. For many years a small band of writers and lecturers have been urging their fellow-Catholics to get ready to take their places in the world-movements all around and to help in all spheres of life: political, social and economic, as well as religious. Furthermore, their emphasis has been that Catholics should take part in these activities not just as individual human beings, but specifically as Catholics, with the force and prestige of the Faith behind their endeavours. Many years have elapsed since this suggestion was first put forward by the Holy Father, but it is only of recent times that much attention has been paid to it by the Catholic community in general. Indeed, it has taken several years of hard times to demonstrate to Catholics at large that there is a specifically Catholic attitude to social ills and remedies for them which the Church alone possesses.

Yet this is almost as far as things have gone. There is much talk about Catholic Action—and there, far too often, the matter ends. When pressed for some practical confimation of our brave speaking, we can only point to one movement—the Catholic Land Associations—and even this is in its infancy. Already, indeed, we have done far too much pointing in this direction. One swallow does not make a summer, and while the Catholic land movement is a welcome development (welcome even if we disagree with it, because it is something practical at last) it can only be regarded as the beginning of Catholic social action. Far more is needed before the Catholic solution to our social problem is appreciated as it deserves by the nation as a whole.

The philosophers of the eighteenth century created a study of the social order in its economic aspect. The fruit of their researches was developed in the nineteenth century under the name of Political Economy, which was included among the sciences. Precisely to what extent, if any, there is an ‘economic science’ is a topic worthy of examination; and by the publication of M. Vialatoux’s Philosophic Economique many suggestive lines of thought are presented.

The mental background of the founders of economics— Stewart, Petty, Locke, Adam Smith in England, and the Physiocrats in France—was the work principally of Bacon and Descartes. The former asserted the value of inductive logic in the formation of sciences, thereby following Aristotle (whose work it was his ambition to consummate); he formulated a new abstraction of the sciences, based on the method of knowing, not on the object known (thereby deserting Aristotle and founding the peculiar heresy of English philosophy).

In 1552 the Council of Trent, in affirming the previous decisions of Popes and Councils, declared that the Sacrament of Penance consists of three essential and indispensable elements; viz., contrition, confession and satisfaction; that these are of divine institution; that every penitent must confess his grievous sins at least once a year, and that no minister who is not in priest’s orders has the power of absolution. The wilful omission of any material circumstance vitiates the whole confession and renders it null and void. It is, therefore, clear that the Catholic cannot evade the obligation of confession without grave injury to conscience. The priest, on the other hand, cannot deny his duty of hearing confession to any who seeks it, though he may refuse to give absolution afterwards. The Church goes further and binds him to an inviolable secrecy as to what is told him in the privacy of the confessional. He is bound, under the most solemn obligation, never under any circumstances or whatever demand be made upon him, to reveal any sin which a penitent has confessed for the purpose of sacramental absolution. The priest, by his very act of administering the Sacrament, binds himself to a secrecy, a secrecy which he cannot violate without mortal sin, and the forfeiture of all that is most valuable in life. ‘The Seal, as it is called, is of divine right most strictly binding the priest, in every case, even where the welfare of the State is at stake, and even after the death of the penitent, to reveal nothing that he has heard in confession, so that the Sacrament be not rendered intolerable and hateful to the people,’ And we know from the high standard of the priesthood that no priest would so violate his religion and his honour as to be guilty of such a crime for all that the world could offer. The priest remains under this obligation even when in doubt as to having heard the matter in question in the confessional.

It may be truly said that many years before Dr. Johnson’s death, he had obtained the universal respect of his fellow-countrymen. And this esteem continued for at least a generation after he had passed away, for had not the genius of his great biographer ‘Johnsonized the land’? However, later on there came a time, and one that lasted long, when his fame suffered an eclipse, and that almost total. Romanticism and a new Liberalism were now sovereign; Byron and Scott, Wordsworth and Shelley, these were men’s gods; there was no place for the sturdy common-sense of Johnson. But to-day this movement has more or less run its course, and by an inevitable reaction Dr. Johnson has come into his own again. There is a general revival of interest in him, his circle, and his period, and that not only in England, but very markedly in America also. Societies are founded to study his works and his opinions. New editions of Johnson and Boswell, with careful and meticulous commentaries and annotations, issue from the press. Every detail is scanned, every morsel of interest is brought to light. Collections of letters and sayings are published. Essays are written, meetings are held, speeches are delivered, literary repositories are ransacked, manuscripts are unearthed and collated, and transatlantic millionaires bear down upon our auction-rooms and at incredible cost secure rich Johnsonian prizes.

The second part of this brief exposition of the language question in Malta opens with the grant of self-government to the Maltese Islands in 1921. The Charter then granted by His Majesty’s Government practically incorporated the actual use of the languages. It was not what the National Assembly had asked for, but it gave in this matter full justice to the historical traditions of the Island. His Majesty’s Government’s declaration on the subject proceeded on the assurance that the settlement arrived at had been inspired by a wish to avoid further struggles on that question. Indeed, in paragraph 7 of Mr. Amery’s despatch of April 9th, 1921, it is stated that

‘in endeavouring to arrive at a final settlement of the language question, the only object kept in view was to avoid future discussion and controversy by a solution which should take equally into account the historic and cultural traditions of the Island, its position as a member of the British Commonwealth and the every day needs of its people. There was certainly no intention of displacing or restricting the use of the Italian language.’

Further, Lord Milner in his despatch of May 28th, 1920, paragraph 13, wrote that:

‘Those (religion and language) are matters which it is obviously desirable to keep outside the field of party strife, and which should not be liable to alteration at the discretion of a purely temporary majority'.’

This attitude shows that His Majesty’s Government intended to give a final solution to the problem in the sense that any departure from the state of things sanctioned by the Constitution on this question should be made only if and when public opinion had definitely expressed itself in a stronger sense than a temporary parliamentary majority could provide.

The word is dead, but the thing is alive and growing. According to an American observer, Technocracy has made an impression; it went straight down through the layers of society to the very bottom. It may be dead at the top, but at the bottom it will live on. The organisation named Technocracy has been discredited, almost entirely on a question of personalities and and errors in incidental statistics. The popular press has turned to other stunts. Nevertheless there is a growing tendency among intelligent people to enquire if the consequence of plenty is really starvation, to what extent the present ‘economic crisis’ is natural and how much of it arises from stupidity. As the rising tide of bankruptcies reaches the professional classes, so an increased interest in economics is aroused in a section of society which has long been remarkable in England for ‘this gift of moving in a region other than that of logic.’ The broadcast emotion of a Prime Minister specially elected to put things right, is ceasing to reassure or even to interest a nation, which for a year and a half was instructed to save what it had not got and is now being urged to spend the proceeds of this thrift. In sheer desperation the nation is beginning to think for perhaps the first time since the Reform Bill.

On March and Francesco Luigi Ferrari, editor of the international review, Res Publica, official leader of the Popular Party abroad and its representative at all the international gatherings of Christian Democratic parties, died in exile in Paris at the age of 4a. He had been badly gassed in the war; in 1920 he had received internal injuries from a Communist attack—remote causes, as far as it appears, of the abscess on the lungs that, an aftermath of neglected influenza, ended a life of useful achievement and still greater promise. Eighteen months earlier he had followed the funeral of Giuseppe Donati, his friend and colleague, the brilliant ex-editor of the militant Popolo of Rome, and who died of consumption accelerated by the privations of exile.

The deaths of both, in Catholic serenity and exaltation, were in harmony with their lives. They had spent themselves in the Catholic Social cause, in defence of the principles of Rerum Novarum in the political and economic field, and therefore it is well that they should be remembered.