Compromise by Force
Prince Myshkin, the hero of Dostoyevsky's novel, The Idiot, was seized by an alarming presentiment that at the party he was about to attend he would knock over a valuable china vase which stood on a pedestal in the ball-room. He therefore stationed himself as far away from the vase as possible ; but, as the evening wore on, he inexorably moved nearer and nearer to it, until with a final wild gesticulation he knocked it over and smashed it to smithereens. The course of Belgian politics in the past four or five years has been distressingly like the course of Prince Myshkin across the ball-room, It was universally admitted that the problem of the King's re- instatement, if mishandled, was a potential source of civil war. With considerable delay and great care the problem was then handled in such a way that tension steadily mounted until, last week-end, the first shots in civil strife were fired. The ultimate catastrophe, which all parties except the Communists have struggled against, was only avoided by the last-minute capitulation of the King, but the manner in which this capitulation was brought about will create as much as it dissipates. Two or three months ago the compromise solution which has now been adopted, whereby the Crown passes to Prince Baudouin, might have been accepted with good grace by King Leopold and all the three main parties. But today it appears as a compromise based on force, not on reason, and it is doubtful what validity the King's abdication will, in these circumstances, have in the eyes of his more devoted supporters, particularly in view of the fact that the abdication itself involves the setting-up of a debate- able constitutional precedent. The serious and durable scars which the whole incident will leave in Belgium's public life are discussed by a correspondent on another page of this issue. Some of these scars, which are in fact old wounds of separatism and isolationism reopened, are of great concern to this country and all those nations which have to do with planning the defence of Western Europe.
