WHEN the courts of South Africa tried Michael Scott for breaking the laws that now rigidly segregate Europeans and non-Europeans, he was asked how he could decently mix with such people. He answered with a quotation:

"There cannot be 'Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman and freeman, but Christ is all in all.' "

The corridors of the United Nations--whether in New York or Paris--have grown used to an untidy priest. He is tall and strikingly handsome. He has that reserved, proconsular look, the bony nose, the clear eyes, the careless hair that the British prefer for their archetype rather than the beery John Bull. His speech is slow and unemotional. He is never without a briefcase that bulges, like a refugee's pack, with badly duplicated memoranda and official reports. He is the Rev. Michael Scott; he has no official position, not even a parish. He can point to few positive achievements. Some of his friends claim that he has worsened situations he came to change. Yet he has won himself a rare position in the Western world.

In 1949 he spoke before the Trusteeship Committee of the United Nations in New York on behalf of three obscure African tribes. They were peoples of no strategic importance; they had been under the protection of the League of Nations, and were protesting against their arbitrary incorporation into the Union of South Africa. The great powers were sympathetic but embarrassed. He went again in 1950, and an old intestinal disease made him lobby from his bed. He spoke again in 1951 and 1952 in Paris. The committee invited representatives of the three tribes, but the government of South Africa refused to let them go. Scott spoke merely as the only white man the bewildered tribesmen trusted.

He is no Savonarola, fanatic and intolerant. Like most honest men, he is torn with doubts. Only too easily he can see his opponents' point of view. He is a man moved by compassion, who desires only justice and love. It sounds inadequate. In politics he is often oversimple and makes honest politicians impatient. Yet, somehow representing the Christian and liberal tradition of the West, quite untainted by the new philosophical short cuts that lead over the edge, he has made himself a quiet power wherever men consider the rights of underprivileged peoples.

MICHAEL SCOTT is a clergyman of the Church of England. He is a man who has tried to "be absolutely logical about being a Christian, and to carry the logic into public life and politics. He has tried to practice such uncomfortable texts as "Thou shalt love thy neighbor." In doing so he has found himself in a position where many sincere men regard him as a mischievous crank, a self-advertising fanatic and an easy tool for Communists. Many other men regard him as their only effective friend in politics, as a man who intends to do good as well as be good. With David Livingstone and Albert Schweitzer, he is one of the few who have penetrated the barrier of suspicion that exists between the races in Africa, and found friendship and absolute confidence on the other side. (Tribesmen call him the "Hearer," the one who listens and gathers evidence on their behalf.)

He is the son of an English parson and received a conventional English middle-class education. At the age of 19 he fell ill, and doctors suggested the clear warmth of South Africa. He took a job there, working among people afflicted with leprosy. He went home in 1930 and a little later was ordained an Anglican priest. He worked in a country parish, in a quietly rich London church and among the rough poor of London. He went to India to work quietly in Calcutta and Bombay as an obedient priest. War came, and he joined the R.A.F., not as a chaplain but as an aircraftman, since he believed that he could not, as a priest, exhort others to fight. But many operations had left him weak. He fell sick again and went back to South Africa.

In the last few years the Negro peoples of Africa have been emerging from a state of mind that has changed little since the start of history. All Africa, south of the Sahara, is still governed by white men. Liberia is the diminutive exception. Some of these governments--those that have offered their Africans education--are now faced with the same racial grief, the same unselective resentment which has led before to the rude rejection of all the gentle things for which the West stands. In the face of this mounting opposition, some of the permanent white populations have reacted strongly. They have, in effect, set a ne plus ultra to the march of their black peoples. They have tried to preserve their status in a sort of old imperial aspic. Their fears are human and easily understood; they have resulted in laws and arrangements that seem unjust to strangers.

THE South Africa te which Scott returned is the most important and most troubled of these mixed societies. The government of the late Field Marshal Smuts passed a bill that segregated the Indian minority in Durban. Scott found that young Indian men & women were going each evening to camp or stand on a piece of ground that was now reserved for Europeans. He put on his cassock and joined them. Pleasant-looking young white men in athletic clothes gathered with pretty girls under the trees opposite. They attacked the Indians, making hunting cries. They did not touch Scott. They merely said, "If you stand for God, I'm against Him." They knocked down the men and called the girls "curry guts." An Indian girl turned to Scott: "It's not their fault; they don't know what they're doing." She was a Moslem and had not read the story of the Crucifixion.

For his share in this affair Scott was sent to prison for three months. The attackers were not arrested. His bishop, torn between embarrassment and admiration, released him from his slum parish in Johannesburg, but left him license to preach.

African ex-servicemen, desperate for somewhere to live, had set up a great semi-permanent camp on the veld close to the city. Pathetically they called it Tobruk, after the place that had seen a great Allied defeat and victory. Scott joined them. But Scott found that life is not a simple fight of good against evil, white against black. The encampment of underprivileged families was run by vicious criminals of their own race. When he tried to hinder them, they burned down the chapel made of sacking that he served. When their leaders left with the communal funds, he paid outstanding wages from his savings. The South African government gave him a suspended sentence for living in an area scheduled for non-Europeans.

IT is not perhaps much of a story. He went to South West Africa, where the three tribes existed, and left it to state their case before the United Nations. He is not a famous man, yet almost any government minister in Britain will receive him, and the State Department has listened to his pleas. He has learned to avoid the company of Communists.

This private man without an organization represents the spirit that the West cannot afford quite to lose. The people he speaks for are without arms or resources, and can play no part in the power line-up of the world. Yet, in ignoring them, the West does injury to itself and to its moral case. His aims for them are moderate; he is passionately sure that they suffer monstrous injustice; he is using whatever means are open to a Christian to help them. It seems certain that he will be defeated in the end and pass, among politicians, for a failure. But it is likely that he will be remembered by millions of voteless Africans as one Christian who cared enough to do something.

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