Influence of Climate on Pulmonary Consumption. By C.T. Williams, M.D.

(Smith and Elder.) Dr Williams has no interest in one of the sanitaria over another. It is his business, as a London physician, to send his patients to the most likely spot for recovery. Dr Williams is strongly of opinion that some places are much to be preferred to others. Of the better known health-resorts in England, he puts Hastings, with St Leonard's, first, Bournemouth second, and Torquay last. Of the foreign places Pau seems without doubt to be the worst, excepting, perhaps, Madeira, which is now, indeed, generally abandoned by the profession. The climate of the Riviera is much more favourable. Men who groan over the mistral will be consoled to hear that, in Dr Williams's opinion, it is 'as necessary to the maintenance of the appetite, as the warm air is beneficial to the cough and other local symptoms.' Malaga, as far as can be judged from a small number of patients, is very salutary. Egypt stands at the head of all. 'Of twenty patients who passed in Egypt twenty-six winters, sixty-five per cent improved, twenty-five per cent remained stationary, and ten per cent became worse. This is by far the finest land result that we have to offer.' But the 'sea results' are better than the land results; 89 per cent of the patients improved, five-and-a-half per cent remained stationary, and five-and-a-half per cent became worse. The best seavoyage is to Australia and New Zealand.

exile, Solzhenitsyn has had an opportunity to take a much more penetrating look at the West. And, as became clear from his widely unreported speech at Harvard last month, his world-view has consequently completed a most important transmutation. In the first two-thirds of the speech, which I described last week, he set down the chief aspects of contemporary life in the West which had most surprised and shocked him: the

'decline in civil courage'; the extent to which our empty materialism seemed to leave people looking perpetually strained and unhappy; the constant emphasis in our social relationships on 'rights' rather than 'obligations'; the superficiality and conformism of the omnipresent media. All this had led him to a sense that the West is suffering from a profound spiritual sickness much deeper than he had ever guessed from the other side of the great gulf which divides mankind; he had even been forced to recognise that, in certain fundamental respects, the hell of living under sixty years of Socialism had produced in the East E much greater spiritual strength and resilience among ordinary people than is readily evident anywhere in the West (as the bearing of Shcharansky and Ginsburg in recent days, he would no doubt suggest, well illustrates).

In the last third of his speech, Solzhenitsyn seeks to inquire how it is that, after centuries of its apparently triumphant march as the spearhead of man's progress, our Western civilisation should have been reduced to this appalling state of spiritual debilitation. He sees us as a weak man who wants to cling onto his easy life and to hide from reality, desperately hoping that somehow the status quo will be preserved — as year by year, one 'faraway little nation' after another (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopa) continues to slip into the totalitarian darkness, and the shadow of Soviet power lengthens ever longer over the future of mankind. He sees us even pathetically hoping that somehow China, a worse totalitarian power than the Soviet Union, will prove to be an ally in preserving our fragile freedom and our material comforts. Again and again the force of his argument is strikingly reminiscent of those words of Yeats which, with only a shift in tense, could still become the epitaph for our twentieth-century civilisation: 'things fell apart, the centre could not hold, the best lacked all conviction, while the worst were full of passionate intensity'.

In short,. Solzhenitsyn sees approaching for mankind a moment of crisis, a watershed, more important than any since

the end of the Middle Ages and the dawn °f the Renaissance. No longer is it just a matter of blithely hoping, as did he and hls friends thirty years ago during the darkest night of Stalinism, that somehow the superior moral values of the West wont° one day prevail, and tpt the Communist system would become gentler, more liberal and more humane. The day when any of us could indulge in such foolish hopes is long since past. We must now take a much deeper, more honest and more painful look at the whole tendency of the West's development over the past five hundred years. 'The West kept advancing socially in accordance with its proclaimed intentions, with the help of brilliant technological Pr°F ress. And all of a sudden it found itself la this present state of weakness. This means that the mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in the Past centuries'. The point Solzhenitsyn is making here is not a wholly unfamiliar one. He addressesf himself to that 'prevailing Western view ° 'the world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its political exPression from the period of the Enlightenment [which] became the basis for government and social science, and could be defined as rationalistic humanism, or humanistic ant' onomy'. He is certainly not saying that the Renaissance was anything other than 'historically inevitable.'

In the Middle Ages, man's

spiritual nature was exalted above his physical needs; and sooner or later what Heraclitus, described asenantiodromia, the tendency ot all things in human nature to 'run about' into their opposites, was bound to take place. But Solzhenitsyn then asks us to consider the consequences of that fundamental shift in man's view of himself which took place after the Renaissance, a view which has so come to dominate the thinking of our civilisation that most people are scarcelY aware that there is any alternative —nanielY the view of man as a creature whose chief and overriding purpose is to create a Materially comfortable life for himself on the largest possible scale. And here, more forcefully than ever before, Solzhenitsyn expresses a conviction which has clearly been growing in him in recent years — which is that, seen in such a light, the apparently glaring differences between the two ideological poles which now divide the earth shrink into insignificance. Both the Eastern and Westeideologies are fundamentally materialis; and humanist in their view of man. For a long time, our Christian heritage, with 'great reserves of mercy and sacrifice , appeared to give a spiritual underpinning t,i° r the whole forward thrust of Western civil: isation. But increasingly those resource' have been exhausted, to the point where we are being forced finally face to face with the fact that the real driving force behind both the Socialism of the East and the `despiritualised humanism' of the west is nothing more noble than the desire to live as

long as possible in the greatest degree of material comfort.

Now, about this process, two very important facts may be observed. The first, Solzhenitsyn argues, is that built into this 'current of materialism', there will always be a fundamental drive to the Left. The 'logic of materialist development' dictates that the Left will always end up being 'stronger, more attractive and victorious, because it is more consistent. Humanism without its Christian heritage cannot resist such competition. We watch this process in the past centuries, and especially in the past decades, as on a world scale the situation has become increasingly dramatic. Liberalism was inevitably displaced by radicalism, radicalism had to surrender to socialism, and socialism could never resist communism'.

Certainly if we survey the political history of this country over the past hundred years, it cannot be denied that the 'leftward drift' has invariably made the running in our own political development — since the heyday of Gladstonian Liberalism, the onward march of state control, bureaucracy, welfarism, social engineering ('egalitarianism') has been pretty well unchecked; and despite such occasional illusory flurries of 'reaction', such as the de-nationalisation of steel, or Mrs Thatcher's present attempts to provide Conservatism with 'a new philosophy', the underlying process is still continuing at remarkable speed. It now seems quite extraordinary to contemplate that in 1959, less than twenty years ago, influential members of the Labour Party were contemplating the abandonment of nationalisation as something `no longer relevant'. In those days most people in Britain still looked on America as the most likely model for our future social development; whereas, a year or two ago, when I was watching a Robert Kee TV film about life in East Germany, showing a society with full employment, no inflation, no taxes and cheap subsidised housing for all, I could not help reflecting that the picture Kee presented would probably now strike most people in this country as rather enviable.

The same general pattern (again with comparatively trivial exceptions such as Greece after the war, or more recently Chile and Portugal) is observable all over the world. The overriding political tendency of mankind in the twentieth century has been to move to the totalitarian left, with the proportion of the earth's nations living under such regimes rising at an ever increasing speed. The chief odium of our century has been reserved for those governments which, in attempting to stand out against the tide, have seemed to lurch to the opposite extreme of the political spectrum — above all, of course, Hitler's Germany, but also South Africa, the juntas of South America, and America's intervention in Vietnam. Indeed the most dramatic development of all in the past twenty years has been perhaps the extent to which the United States itself, the chief flagship of 'democracy' which twenty years ago seemed to be the undisputed `super-power' of the world, both in terms of its military might and its material achievements, now seems to have faltered and fallen away to the point where it now seems only to be prim us inter pares among that small group of Western nations who are all, in different ways and to differing degrees, going through the same prolonged crisis of internal confidence.

Are we then to assume that somehow it is built in to the whole underlying tendency of our late, post-Renaissance, materialist civilisation that sooner or later the superior confidence and single-mindedness of the totalitarian left will conquer everywhere; that all attempts to stem the tide will look as petulant, absurd and short-lived as America's adventure in Indochina, or Ian Smith's stand against black nationalism; and that ultimately the whole globe will languish under the same totalitarian night as do Russia, China and some thirty or forty other countries today?

I do not think that Solzhenitsyn himself has really thought through this question in his own mind — any more than he has really faced up to the curious difficulty which the West appears to have in attempting effectively and with conviction to stand up for its own values (he is far too blithe, for instance, in. his insistence that America should have

• taken a much 'tougher' line in Vietnam. What does he really mean —that they should have dropped the H-bomb on Hanoi?). He appears to think that some great final confrontation between the two schizophrenically-split halves of mankind may come about; but again he seems to have convinced himself that such a war need not be nuclear (although he is prepared to

consider the possibility that, if the United States were foolish enough to enlist the hell) of China against the Soviet Union, the Chinese would then turn round with their newly-acquired American weapons and 'America itself would fall prey to a genocide similar to the one perpetrated on Cambodia in our own days'). Where Solzhenitsyn is on much stronger ground, because it is based on his own pt.9. found experience and observation, is emphasising that ultimately the whole humanist, materialist view of man's existence and purpose on earth simply does not work. It may seem to 'work' politically, in that sixty years later the oldest-established left-wing totalitarian regime in the world is not only still in existence but stronger than ever. But even the Communist world itself is far from being a monolith, and is riven bY every kind of nationalistic discord (Russia v China, China v Vietnam, Vietnam v Call" bodia) which could sooner or later break out into wars just as terrible and destructive as any between East and West. ' Much more important is the fact that the materialist view of man does not work sinr ply because it is based on a total misreading of the fundamental nature of man and his relations with the universe. lithe Soviet experiment has demonstrated one more clearly than anything else it is that, you subject men to the very extremes 0' material and spiritual deprivation, if Y1/11 force lies into their ears and surround thetn from birth to death with nothing but the materialist, humanist view of man in its most grandiloquent and exalted form, Y911 will find that in the end many of them Ws" cover an entirely new spiritual centre t° their existence within themselves, because It is imprinted within us to an extent that is beyond the power of any earthly force to eradicate.

Perhaps mankind as a whole will have endure prolonged and terrible suffering or the kind which so far in our century only the Russian people themselves have had t° undergo, in peace and war. One thing that is certain is that our materialist, technologically-based post-Renaissance civilisation can only be ultimately seen as very short-lived phase in the history (31' mankind, whether it is destroyed violentlY and quickly by war, or slowly by the exhaus: tion of natural resources, or a degree 01 both. That is why Solzhenitsyn can end his Harvard speech on a note of such unshalcable confidence in saying: 'If the world has not come to its end, it has approached

c

major turn in history, equal in importane to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, a new level of life whet: e our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more iMP01tantly, our spiritual being will not be train" pled on as in the Modern Era. This aseea; sion will be similar to climbing onto the n° anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward'.