Tribute

Sir:

A gulp came into my throat when I read your Feb. 18 article on King George VI. "This simple, decent man." What a tribute. There could be none higher . . .

CHARLES H. IRISH, D.D.S. Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Sir:

. . . Congratulations from the depths of my heart for your soul-stirring eulogy, "The King Is Dead." This masterpiece could profitably be read by every American--man, woman and child . . .

NEWTON L. NICHOLS Captain (ret.), U.S.N. Baltimore, Md.

Gulliver in Washington?

Sir: One of the tragedies of our time is that our President, Harry S. Truman, an essentially honorable and upright man . . . has allowed himself to be so hampered by the machinations of false friends that, like Gulliver, he is rendered helpless by a network thrown about him by "little people," confessed self-seekers and greedy opportunists. Tennyson describes his situation thus: "His honor rooted in dishonor stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." Shakespeare, the master diagnostician of mental and emotional deviations, provides the remedy: ". . . To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man."

If the 1952 election again gives Harry S. Truman the opportunity to lead our nation, will he have the courage to rise and shake himself free from this bondage, and let nothing interfere with what he says is his greatest desire, to help bring peace to the world? If not, then pray God to send us a leader who has the character and the courage to meet the emergency that is upon us.

M. E. SHEER Santa Cruz, Calif.

English Painter

Sir:

. . . I am rent with curiosity to see a small picture by Laurence Stephen Lowry, an artist whom you honor with a one-column write-up in the Feb. 11 issue . . .

(MRS.) LARRAINE BACLAWSKI Hinsdale, Ill.

P: Herewith Laurence Lowry's The Black Tower, Manchester, 1938. The tall, thin, stooped gentleman in the foreground is Artist Lowry.--ED.

The Bishop's Lost See

Sir:

TIME, Feb. 18, mentions the apostolic administrator for the Russian dioceses of Mo-hilev and Minsk, His Excellency Bishop Boleslav Sloskans, as "either dead or in Siberia."

Bishop Sloskans, a Latvian national, is very much alive, though heartbreakingly poor, in Louvain, Belgium ... He has perhaps the unique distinction of being the last known living Latin bishop of a Russian diocese. He survived the brutalities and terrors of more than twelve years in Russian concentration camps. Following the occupation of the Baltic states by the Wehrmacht, Msgr. Sloskans was handed over to the Germans by the Russians in exchange for Russian nationals whom the Germans held prisoner. Like many of his compatriots, Bishop Sloskans fled the Russians as they moved westward in the last years of the war, and eventually wound up in Belgium . . .

Never having been the center of any political upheaval, the incarceration of Bishop Sloskans by the Communists in 1927 went unnoticed by the world press, though duly noted in Vatican publications. Even his release and subsequent life in exile have been cloaked in silence ... But it does remain that he and many of his fellow priests and bishops were forerunners of Stepinac, Mindszenty, Beran, and a whole chain of staunch confessors and martyrs of the faith in our own decade. To my knowledge, Bishop Sloskans is the only survivor of four bishops who were consecrated in 1926 for Russian Sees. Only a Graham Greene or an Eric Ambler could really do justice to the story of that consecration and the detail of the events subsequent to it . . .

BROTHER CHRISTOPHER LYNCH Congregation of Alexian Brothers Signal Mountain, Tenn.

"This Other Eden"

Sir:

Your fine Feb. 11 article on Great Britain and diplomacy could be called the obituary of a once proud and powerful nation under the title, "Blueprint for Disaster." [It] is most timely insofar as it demonstrates the results of that policy based on expediency (adjustment, not solution) and power. May those both in the Kremlin and in Washington who are tempted to play the game consider the results a a la Britain . . .

(REV.) PAUL P. HAGEN Brick Presbyterian Church Perry, N.Y.

Sir:

. . . About Britain being "frankly in the colonial business." It is about time the "saltwater" fallacy was universally exposed, namely that expansion overseas, even peaceful, is immoral, whereas forcibly taking land across your borders from Indians and Mexicans is glorious pioneer expansion! Britain is rectifying her former mistakes--if they were mistakes--by giving wholesale colonial sell-government ... It was F. D. Roosevelt's wariness of "land-grabbing" Britain that played into Stalin's cunning hand at Teheran and Yalta. Anglo-American unity should not be imperiled for the same reason today.

W. STANLEY UTTING Crewe, Cheshire, England

Sir:

. . . The implication of your closing remarks in an otherwise fair article on Anthony Eden seems to be that the day of adjustments in diplomacy is over. May I ask what the other choices are? War? Yes. Eventual collapse of the U.S.S.R. by internal default? Hardly likely . . .

It should be remembered that the balance-of-power principle . . . has not been without success in the past for British interests in particular, and world peace in general. When the scales flew up and kicked the beam, trag'c wars were the result. Mr. Eden was aware of this fact in 1938; this is why he left the cabinet. What are "the facts of international life?" Surely they are that peace is desirable; that adjustments, not wars, are the best methods of serving the interests of most people in the world. Solutions? We of the younger generation are rather wary of solutions: there is nothing in history to show that great wars have ever led to any real ones--and nothing to make us believe that any future wars will.

PETER BUITENHUIS New Haven, Conn.

Kindly Misogynist's Crocs

Sir:

As one who for almost five years was a grateful recipient of Msgr. Ronnie Knox's unremitting kindnesses at Oxford, I am personally grateful for your brilliantly conceived portrait of him in the Feb. 11 issue of TIME. The idea of becoming a Cardinal would, I feel certain, horrify Ronnie. He unsuccessfully resisted being made a Monsignor, and for quite a while after that event, his only recognition of his elevation was to wear a brand new piece of adhesive tape at the top of his cassock in lieu of the customary Roman collar.

Incidentally, Ronnie Knox, during the war, was the victim of one of life's most amusing little ironies. He had always been a kindly misogynist, and was genuinely distressed by the close presence of females. However, the manor house where he had retired to translate the Bible was, as a wartime emergency, inundated with teen-age students from a London convent, and Ronnie was forced to spend most of his war listening to the confessions of hundreds of female adolescents. Being a great and humble priest, he undoubtedly bore this cross eagerly and brilliantly . . .

GERALD CULLINAN Dallas

Ties That Bind

Sir:

In your Feb. 11 account of the "Three Sharpies" who pilfered the apartment of Fashion Designer Mollie Parnis, you state that the young thieves "were ... of the variety who are called 'sharpies' and who wear peg-top pants, sharply pointed shoes, Windsor-knot ties . . ." Hmmm, guess you didn't take a close enough look at the Younger Generation you wrote about a while back, as, if you had, you would have observed that the Windsor knot is very popular among the 18-to-28 age group.

The writer, a conservative 27-year-old chemist, first accepted it upon returning to college from the Army in 1946. The Windsor knot is really a boon to the well-dressed gentleman, as once tied it will not shift its position, and thus retains its neat appearance. Try it . . .

ROBERT M. CHANDLER Wilmington, Del.

P: Readers wishing to master the Windsor knot (see cut, left) can get diagrams from the Men's Tie Foundation, Inc., 180 Madison Avenue, New York City 16.--ED.

The Poughkeepsie Problem

Sir:

. . . Your article on "Doctors' Dilemma" in the Feb. 11 issue introduces again a topic in which I have become very interested. The four physicians who wish to continue as members of a Planned Parenthood League and, at the same time, practice in a Roman Catholic hospital, seem to believe that their attempted dualism is another plank in the new freedom-of-thought platform. It seems to me that it has exactly the opposite effect, for if a man is firmly convinced of something such as planned parenthood, then he is compromising his individual integrity by preferring to be a passive dissenter in a secure job, rather than finding a new position, where he can actively practice what he believes . . .

I suggest that they make up their minds, that they have the courage of their convictions, and that they stop twisting the freedom-of-thought banner . . .

LOUISE DOHERTY Greensburg, Pa.

Sir:

How do critics of Catholic Writer Thomas Sugrue justify the situation existing at St. Francis Hospital, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.?

Is this not a concrete example which justifies or bears out Mr. Sugrue's fears concerning U.S. Catholics in their "tendency toward community separatism and censorship"?

MARGARET M. KILLEN Greenwich, Conn.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.