Standards of Persecution
SuL—The final paragraph of Miss Macaulay's review of John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan seems to suggest that your reviewer does not know of the persecution of the Catholic Church that is going on today in Eastern Europe and China.
It is indeed mentioned but seldom in the secular Press. But if Miss Macaulay had time to look through- the Tablet or one of the other Catholic papers for the last few years—Or even,the last few months—: she would find plenty of indications that: both the brutality of Elizabethan times and the heroism of the English martyrs 'have their counterpart in 'our own day.
It would be unprofitable to discuss the relative merits of the older and newer methods of torture and extermination ; but I should hesitate to assume that a technique which reduces human beings to something like automata, apparently incapable of speaking - except as they are ordered to speak, was more humane than the rack ; and perhaps some of the people in forced labour camps, especially those working under- - ground, would prefer the crude but quicker death of their forerunners.—
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