Whittaker Chambers

by REBECCA WEST

1

IT is worth while taking some trouble to recognize the historical significance of the part played by Whittaker Chambers in the Hiss trial before reading Witness. For his own interpretation of it is often mistaken, owing to the defects of his qualities, and the explosive impact of the Hiss case on the spectators has given an illusory impression of uniqueness. But it could hardly have had such power to distress us had it been an isolated event. It was the most recent manifestation of a recurrent threat to society, which recurs because it is the work of mischievous human tendencies which appear to be ineradicable. It was yet another dervish trial.

There could be nothing more inappropriate to a court of law than the presence of a mob of dancing dervishes. But in they rush, and the examination of witnesses can hardly be carried on because of the commotion caused by the invaders, twirling and turning all over the courtroom, and the lawyers’ speeches are not to be heard because of their holy bowlings. Finally they take over the control of the proceedings. All attempts at deciding the accused person’s guilt according to the facts of the case and the principles of law are abandoned. Whether his life is preserved or forfeited depends on which party line triumphs in the tumult. More and more people join the dervishes in their spinning and their screaming, and by the time they have frothed at the mouth and fallen to the ground the courtroom is wrecked. It may well happen that at the end of one of these dervish trials the whole of civilization will he wrecked.

These deplorable events occur only when there is a certain conjunction of circumstances. First of all, there must be a series of events which arouse the suspicion that a crime has been committed, and at the same time are so tangled that it is hard to verify or disprove that suspicion. The alleged crime must be of a certain magnitude and offensiveness, and it must be committed in a community split across by tin ideological division. The people who in the first instance allege that the crime took place, and those who deny it, must be facing each other across that gulf. What happens after that, as Whittaker Chambers shows, depends on the character of the protagonists and the power of the community to resist moral infection.

Victorian England showed us artless but ominous specimens of the process. In the seventies Arthur Orton came from Australia and claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, who had disappeared twelve years before. During the long series of legal actions which followed, the urban industrialist population campaigned for the claimant, for the reason that the position of the landowners as the governing class seemed to them so arbitrary that they could easily imagine a great family suiting its own convenience by fraudulently disowning an eccentric head. In the eighties the politician Sir Charles Dilke was cited as corespondent by a fellow member of Parliament whose young wife had confessed to committing adultery with him throughout her married life. The confession was comically incredible, but nevertheless was believed, because at that time it was a reasonable supposition that no woman would tell such a story unless it were true, as she would be condemning herself to complete social death. But since Sir Charles was a republican and a champion of labor unions, breakers of political prejudice washed over the case and drowned the man who might have been the greatest statesman of his time.

During the nineties the dervish trial which was to surpass all others in frenzy took place in France. Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of espionage in the interests of Germany, and his guilt was asserted and denied by opponents more rancorous than those who had wrangled over Arthur Orton and Sir Charles Dilke, because the ideological issues involved were far graver. By this time the; English urban populations which had supported the Tichborne claimant had seen their industrial masters wrest a share in political power from the old landowning classes, and were themselves preparing to demand a further partition for their own benefit. Of Dilke’s two causes, republicanism was dead and labor unionism was on the way to triumph. But Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards faced each other across an ideological gulf which still yawns deep and wide.

On one side, there was anti-Semitism, which is treason against the very constitution of man. In refusing to judge Jewish individuals according to their merits, and in condemning the whole race, it rejects t he empirical basis on which art and science are founded. It refuses to allow the exquisite machinery of our nerves to perform their miraculous task of collecting information about what is not ourselves. Against the anti-Semites were ranged the men who would not betray their humanity.

That was the disposition of the contending forces when the trial began. But the dervishes yelled and gyrated, and all was confusion. An abscess of hatred burst on the brain of France. Anti-Semitism was met by anti-Catholicism not less gross, and the whole French Army was condemned because certain French officers had been liars and forgers. Sane people ran about screaming insane propositions. It was even argued seriously that to protect the honor of the French Army it was necessary to pretend that the officers who had lied and forged had not done so, and that Dreyfus, who had committed no act of espionage, had done so, thus leaving the liars and forgers inside the Army and kicking the innocent man out.

There was rioting in French streets and rioting in the French mind. Most serious consequence of all was the common conviction that justice had not been done. Dreyfus was never acquitted by due process of any court of law. He was pardoned by the President of the French Republic in 1900 and six years later was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, which was thereby acting illegally, for it had power to order a retrial, which if refrained from doing because of the inflamed state of public opinion, but had no power to acquit the prisoner. So this result was unsatisfactory to Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards alike, with a deep dissatisfaction. For Western man now needs the assurance that he lives under just laws justly administered, as much as he needs food and drink and shelter. This appetite has been slowly bred in our kind by Judaism and the Roman Empire, the Christian Church and secular culture, and it has now the force of an instinct.

As the Dreyfus case came to an end in France there began in Germany the case of Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg. There the accuser was a Jew, the journalist Maximilian Harden, and he acted as the agent of German liberalism in bringing charges of homosexuality against a Prussian Junker who was an intimate friend of the Kaiser and a supporter of his absolutist tendencies. Here again the matter was not settled by due process of a court of law. The prosecution of Prince Philipp was abandoned and a wave of cynical distrust passed over Germany, affecting even the conservative element, which shifted its allegiance to the General Staff of the German Army, since it had always been hostile to Prince Philipp. Thus the First World War was brought a stage nearer.

When it had come and gone, France had to be rebuilt by men and women who had been children during the Dreyfus case, and had grown up in an atmosphere which made them feel distrust of their own community. That distrust has kept them in a state of political chaos ever since, and led to the fall of France in 1940. The .Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards had said many things against each other which were far too brilliant to be forgotten; and at the back of the public mind was a hoarding scrawled with phrases which together composed an indictment against the whole of France, and a sensitive people depressed itself perpetually with self-satire. The Germans are not such lords of language as the French, and the scandal of Prince Philipp left few memorable passages of wit or rhetoric to haunt posterity; and the very existence of the Weimar Republic demonstrated that the struggle between the Hohenzollerns and liberalism had been settled. One might have thought that nobody remembered the trial. But as soon as the Nazis came to power their actions showed that somebody had remembered it and was going to develop the dervish trial deliberately as a political weapon.

The Nazis burned down the Reichstag, which was in any case offensive to them as a symbol of representative government. They charged some innocent men with the crime, and did not trouble to make a watertight case against them. That way they could not lose. Their tougher supporters would affect to believe the accused guilty. Their simpler supporters would really believe it. Their simpler opponents would be induced by the trial to believe that Hitler had really been telling the truth when he claimed that there were dangerous revolutionaries about and that he alone could rout them. As for their shrewder opponents, they would see that the accused were innocent, and they would know what to think when van der Lubbe was hanged. They would realize that this government of professional revolutionaries which had seized power against the will of the people meant to use the courts not for the purpose of dispensing justice but for keeping ils power. The man would be superhuman who did not move more cautiously after he had learned that piece of news.

The Reichslag trial was a novelty. All other dervish trials had started spontaneously, but this was artificially engendered as a means of making the population abandon resistance to an antidemocratic government. It worked so well that Stalin took it as a model for the purges by which he rooted out all actual and potential opposition, in preparation for the time when he would pursue an unpopular policy of amity with Hitler. This seemed the last metamorphosis of the dervish trial possible in our time, until the Hiss case revealed itself in all its monstrous fantasy.

This was something new and complicated. For it began spontaneously in one country and then was artificially developed on the same site but according to the desires of another country. Even to those of us who were old-fashioned enough to reserve judgment on Hiss and Chambers until the courts had brought in their verdict, it was apparent that the case was being exploited for the benefit of the Soviet Union and to the detriment of the United States. By the side of the many upright men and women who sincerely believed in the innocence of Alger Hiss and said so for the highest motives, there was ranged another army uninterested in any sort of innocence. Whether Hiss was guilty or not, an extremely able general was fighting a campaign on the terrain of this case, with a double purpose. First, the public was to be persuaded that it was an inherently absurd notion that anybody could be a Soviet spy, that there was a Communist underground, that Soviet Russia had a secret service, that a person reporting a case of Soviet espionage was thereby proving himself a lunatic or an impostor. Second, there was to be created in the United States precisely the same distrust of the law, the conlempt for national institutions, the sense of pervading insecurity, which the Dreyfus case created in France. The dervishes who took over this trial howled and gyrated with the precision of Rocket tes; but the amateurs who joined them frothed at the mouth in the old way. It is doubtful whether it can yet be estimated how much damage has been done to the courtroom.

2

IT IS strange how often Witness makes the Hiss case recede into the background and draws the attention to more important matters: to Grandfather Chambers, for example.

That old sinner was a brilliant newspaperman, a blusterer and a drunkard. He used to take his little grandsons on a tour of the Long Island saloons, in every one of them swilling grandly, as if he were the imperial hog from which the imperial hogshead took its name, weaving and careening on his way home so that the boys had to help him across the road and onto the trolley. But no harm came to the children from these gross outings, no scar was left even on their exceptionally sensitive minds, for he had charity. A stream of warm and unqualified love flowed from him to them, and nothing he could do could harm them. This was not fair. His blustering was not merely violence, it was cruelty. It had withered up his wife and his son, the children’s father. But towards the children he fell authentic love, and in his relationship with them he enjoyed the authentic immunity from sin of the saints.

He is only one of the people who were alive when Whittaker Chambers was a child, and now are dead, and are now raised by him from their graves, to walk through his book, in their living flesh, but stamped now with their immortal meaning. This is perhaps the greatest of all the surprises disclosed by the Hiss case: that Whittaker Chambers should be capable of writing an autobiography so just and so massive in its resuscitation of the past that it often recalls the name of the master of all autobiographers, Aksakov. The value of the book does not depend simply on its painfully exceptional material, nor on the sincerity of the author. Whittaker Chambers writes as writers by vocation try to write, and he makes the further discoveries about reality, pushing another half-inch below the surface, which writers hope to make when they write.

He records his unique experience in ils uniqueness, without recourse to used and general phrases. His prose rises again to the task of describing the intricate and ambitious misery of the home where he was brought up. It was the scene of a succession of inverted miracles: the empty cup was always filled by an unseen hand with a poisonous draught. The Chamberses were one of those middle-class families which drift into isolation as if they were criminals, though they have nothing so potentially profitable as a crime to their name, and who, since they are isolated, depress themselves still further by believing their fate to be unique. They had so little command over their surroundings that they were scarcely able to live in a house. The plumbing, the unpainted walls, the leaking roof, the dangling shutters, seemed to be given life by their owners’ incompetence, and perpetually threatened to get. the better of them. The situation was made worse, not better, when Chambers’s spirited but plaintive mother determined to make counterattacks on the hostile masonry and sanitation, and indulged in constructional flights of fancy which Chambers describes in passages suggesting visual forms as acutely illustrative of distress as Piranesi’s Carceri.

Many of us who, like Chambers, endured rough weather in our childhood can match the instances he gives of adults who found themselves undeterred by any scruple from taunting a child with the poverty of its parents; and we have learned how unwelcome such reminiscences are, and how likely to be greeted with impatienl suggestions that they are exaggerated or are the figments of self-pity, lint Chambers makes his point, and goes further in offending against the contemporary convention that, though all generations are made of the same stuff, the most recent generation is always in the right in its relations to the preceding one. He states candidly that his parents failed their children again and again, but he admits that they too had been failed by their parents. The mainspring of his father’s nature had been broken by his father’s bullying; and his mother had been left with a broken wing and an excessive disposition to soaring flight by the feckless romantics who had brought her into the world. Moreover, he and his brother had failed their parents. He confesses that they held it against their tormented mother that, because their father would not fulfill the duties of a father, “she was trying to be both father and mother.” And by an anecdote concerning the cutting down of a clematis, which is both beautiful and horrible, he proves that his father was a starved man whose need should have pricked his family into finding some way of feeding him.

The double character of that anecdote reveals where Chambers’s resistance to fashion leads him. He admits the hideousness of life, writing of the madness of his grandmother and the despair and suicide of his brother as the calamities that they were. “I used to wish that the house would burn down with all its horrors.” But he also admits the beauty of life. That means that he can write tragedy. For he can give an account of a man who is visited by misfortune and include in it the reason why he felt, his misfortunes to be a breach of a firm promise made him by the universe. The particular manifestation of beauty which he took as a promise emerges during the book as a finely drawn character: as, indeed, the third protagonist in the Hiss case. It is a character which has appeared in other books, most notably, perhaps, in Huckleberry Finn. It is the American countryside.

The forty-year-old cherry trees on the Merrick Road, the aseptic while village houses, the black pyramidal old cypresses standing alone, the green columnar young eypresses growing in groves, the streams slipping over sandy bottoms through the birch and swamp-maple woods, the special stream where all the robins bathed at dawn, the other special stream where the cardinal flower could be found, the fleets of clouds riding over the Long Island salt marshes, the silent invasion of the tides through the cattails, the surf pounding on the beaches — the boy saw in that landscape a fertile tranquillity that accused the profitless convulsions of his home life and consoled him for them. We see through his eyes the miraculous quality of the American landscape which touches and astounds all European visitors. The opaque hills and plains give the same sense of purity as the transparent waters of a spring. Henry James, returning after many years of expatriation, recognized this appearance and attributed it to the lack of the stains left by that soiled fabric, history. The land has still that innocent look, save where it is actually covered by buildings. Some corrupting process, at work in all the older continents, seems here to have been suspended.

To Whittaker Chambers the American couulreside was not merely earth that had a look of purity. It was a person that made claims that offered help. When he and Alger Hiss visited the derelict farmhouse in Maryland, the two men were not alone. For as the features of a face, as the limbs of a body, were the wisteria that smothered the porch and pushed through the shingles of the roof, the two cedars tall beside the barn, the apple and sour cherry trees in the orchard, the wind that blew along the valley through the unscythed grass. Later when Chambers was about to leave the Party and break with Hiss, he went back to see that farm. The neighborhood retained him. He now owns and works a large and productive farm in those parts, and his account of the sacrifices that he and his family have made to acquire that farm, and the joy they find in working it, reveals that he belongs to a certain well-recognized order of man. He believes that nature is an aspect of God, and that to grow crops and tend herds is a means of establishing communication wilh God. He believes that he communicates with God and that God communicates with him. He is, in fact, a Christian mystic of the pantheist school, a spiritual descendant of Eckhart and Boehme and Angel us Silesius.

It is one of the great jokes of history that the dragnet of a Washington committee should have fetched up this man of all men to take part in a dervish trial. For the Moslem dervish is a priest, and so too is the Western dervish of the sort that promotes trials. He is a priest who desires to preserve some institution: to guard the integrity of parliamentary government by extending its basis or restricting it; to retain the monarchy or convert the constitution into a republic; lo save the honor of the Army or of the Freemasons; to maintain the unbreached power of Nazi or Bolshevik totalitarianism; to rout all who cast aspersions on the American administrative class; to rout all who impede the operations of the Communist Party. But a mystic distrusts all institutions. No matter whether they are religious or secular, he fears lest the thickness of their walls shall prevent man from hearing when God speaks to him. For that reason he is apt to fall out with the defenders of the most respectable institutions; so he is bound to feel an exalted repugnance when he sees dervishes at work on a trial openly profaning the truth and casting away the divine gift of reason in order to serve institutional interests. He can make no compromise when he is involved in such a trial. He cannot even make the necessary adjustments. He goes forward on the path dictated by his private revelation, no matter what road the inst it at ionalists engaged in the trial may be following. The resultant collision is bound to he on a sidereal scale, drawing sparks bright as cornets.

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Witness demonstrates the strength of the mystic and his use to society. Though he may be discomposed by the howling and gyrating of the dervishes, he leans on his understanding with God. But the book also demonstrates the weakness of the mystic, and explains why the Church has always feared negative dissenters, who fall away from lack of faith, far less than the positive dissenters, who question authority because full ness of faith persuades them that they receive direct instruction from God.

To reach the state of intense perception which makes a mystic, a man must be unselfish but egotistical. He must be supremely interested in finding out the truth concerning the universe, and not at all interested in securing his own well-being in it. But he must cultivate inattention to what others tell him and concentrate on his own experience. This gives his relationships a peculiar character. It is as if he were a telephone subscriber on terms which enabled him to make outgoing calls but prevented him from receiving incoming calls, Whittaker Chambers obviously feels deep love for his wife and his mother. His pantheist turn of mind makes us see them in terms of the countryside: his wife a sheltering hillside which keeps the wind off the pastures, his mother a winding valley where running water and wild woods make one picturesque surprise after another. But few could read of these women without wanting to hurry to them with hot milk and aspirins. Obviously, he has given them great happiness, but they must be very, very tired. There was at work in him something at once less and greater than human nature when he prepared an ingeniously didactic suicide, as morally unassailable as a suicide may be, and yet forgot the burden he would thereby have laid on his family.

Again, he expresses gratitude to the men who stood by him during his ordeal, the newspapermen and the lawyers and the politicians and the friends. But he also describes how he pursued a tortuous policy in his testimony, disclosing this piece of evidence and withholding that, with the intention of keeping true the moral balance of his relationship with Hiss. He felt under an obligation to supply the authorities with information which would enable them to convince a court of law that Hiss had been a Communist, but he also felt under an obligation to shield Hiss from suffering, as far as was possible, so he supplied the authorities with just the amount of information which he thought would be sufficient to convince a court of law, reserving the rest and parting with it only gradually as it became evident that his calculalions had been faulty, He obviously has no sense of guilt regarding the unnecessary trouble to which he put his supporters by leaving holes in his case, to say nothing of the jeopardy in which he placed the anti-Communist cause, and the encouragement he gave his non-Communist opponents to believe that he was a liar.

There is also support in Witness for a still more serious charge against the mystic: that because of his visions he speaks with authority, and that those who listen to him may be misled when he deals with subjects other than those on which he has received divine instruction. Whittaker Chambers compels our respect by his account of his experiences, many of which have been determined by his membership in the Communist Parly. It is therefore natural that we should listen to him when he analyzes Communism. But a large part of his analysis is demonstrably untrue and, indeed, dangerous in its implications.

When he appeared before the grand jury, one of the jurors asked him what it meant to be a Communist, and he told three anecdotes to illustrate typical Communist behavior. He described how Djerjinsky, when he was a young man in a Tsarist prison in Warsaw, insisted on being given the task of cleaning the latrines, holding that it was the duty of the most developed member of any community to take upon himself the lowliest tasks. He described how Eugene Leviné, the leader of the unsuccessful Bolshevik uprising of 1919, was told by the court-martial which tried him that he was under sentence of death, and answered, “We Communists art always under sentence of death.” And he described how Sazonov, a prisoner in a Siberian camp, protested against the Hogging of his fellow prisoners bv drenching himself with kerosene and setting himself on fire and running about till he was burned to death. These men illustrate the view which Whittaker Chambers si ill takes ol the Communist Party: that it is a self-sacrificing and courageous body of idealists who fail only because they hold a materialist philosophy and thus reject God and separate man from Him.

Not one of these anecdotes has the slightest relevance to the realities of Communism. As for Djerjinsky, the act of cleaning latrines cannot be held up as an exceptional example ol self-sacrifice, for, as members of the armed forces are well aware, there are millions of latrines in the world and nearly all of them get cleaned by someone. But in any case the anecdote overlooks a cardinal point in Communist policy, for Communists are strictly forbidden to do anything to alleviate the material conditions of any person, no matter how unfortunate, except when they can therein gain credit, for the Party and attract recruits. In all other circumstances their duty is to prevent the improvement of material conditions, so that the proletariat will grow in discontent and be more susceptible to revolutionary propaganda.

As for Levine, when he said, “We Communists are always under sentence of death,” he uttered words which are inapplicable to the Communist Party in any part of the globe, and ludicrously inapplicable to Communist Parties in the Englishspeaking world, unless reference be made to the very real danger that comrades run of being killed by other comrades. If the Rosen bergs go to the electric chair they will be the first Communists in the English-speaking world to suffer the death penalty. Very few Communists have been sent to jail on either side of the Atlantic, except for short sentences. But the victims of Communism number millions, and there are vast areas of the world where the majority of the population can say, “We anti-Communists are always under sentence of death.”

As for Sazonov, this is a horrible story, but a very silly one. Even those who in their childhood knew and revered Russian revolutionaries must think it a silly story. It is frivolous in its disregard of the strength of evil. Supposing that a prisoner in a modern totalitarian camp decided to protest against the maltreatment of his fellow prisoners by setting himself on fire, it is probable that the officers of the camp, blunted by contemplation of countless hordes of the starving and suffering, would feel nothing but impatience.

Chambers’s generalizations about Communism are not less odd than these particular instances. He asserts that “the widespread notion that men become Communists for material gain” is unfounded, and points to Fuchs as an example of a man to whom the Communist Party could not possibly offer anything that could balance the demands it might make upon him. Many refugees exemplify the working of the Welfare Slate within a state which the Communist Party organizes in every country for the benefit of its members. When Hitler came to power the machinery for bringing bis victims out of Germany very soon fell under Communist control, and it was arranged that as far as possible Communist Germans should be brought to safety while Liberals and Social Democrats and Catholics were left to be destroyed by the Nazis. Stories of such removals are tediously familiar in Europe, where the Communists enjoy an immense advantage for the very reason that, both in the countries they have seized and in the countries they have infiltrated, they offer ambitious men and women bribes, in the form of employment and special privileges and accelerated promotion, which no democratic party could or should offer to its members.

But Chambers not only guarantees that the Communists are not moved by material considerations: he makes on their behalf a staggering claim to priority as idealists, “Communists,” he asserts, “are that part of mankind which has recovered its power to live or die—to bear witness — for its faith.” Now, the Communist Party certainly uses a little idealistic propaganda for recruiting purposes, a few soft words about poverty and peace. But there is nothing inherently idealistic in Rolxhevik Communism, which came into being as a hard-boiled atlempt to fill the power vacuum slowly but surely created by the industrial revolution, for the benefit of a middle-class group which saw that their class was in danger of losing its privileges. They proposed to sign a contract with the proletariat, guaranteeing it the monopoly of economic profit in exchange for a monopoly of political power. At the time the idealistic Socialist movements of all Europe opposed the program tooth and nail just because they foresaw that it might inspire a course of action quite incompatible with idealism; and we Europeans of today feel that we have received sufficient proof that they were right. The British people showed themselves willing to live or die for their faith under the blitz and during the early summer of 1940, when German invasion seemed inevitable. But our Communists were not with us. The Stalin-Hitler Pact still held, and so they were busily working on the side of the Germans and doing what they could to sabotage our defenses; and many of them were visibly relieved to think that if the Germans came they could claim to be their friends. In Berlin, too, a population has been bright with defiance: defiance of a Communist blockade.

Why does Chambers pay these undeserved tributes to a faith he regards as evil? The answer lies in his account of the crucial point in his conversion to that faith. He became, as he puts it, an “irreconcilable” Communist as he stood beside the snow-covered grave of his brother at midnight on New Year’s Eve, while the sirens wailed and the fire bells rang, and the crowds in the roadhouses sang and shouted, and a bottle t hrown from an automobile crashed on the graveyard wall. He then took a vow to purge the world of the baseness which he conceived to have killed his brother. The purity of Party discipline seemed to him a solvent which would wash away the filth which had choked the boy; and dedication to the single purpose of Communism promised relief from the perils that came of living with no purpose at all. It is to be noted that the three anecdotes he related to the grand jury show men practicing a forgetfulness of self and indifference to pain which is not characteristic of Communist behavior but is part of the technique recommended by all the classic religions to those who wish to develop their consciousness of God.

That moment by the graveside is sacred to Whittaker Chambers because it was the point of departure for a journey which he has found satisfying; and therefore it has never occurred to him that the argument which he was then conducting with himself at that moment was based on false premises. We see why the institution has so often throughout history cried out, in accusation against the mystic: “This man is telling the truth concerning eternity, but he is in error concerning time, and it is in time that we have to do our present duty.” There is much in this complaint. But the mystic has often been able to answer: “Because I have sought the trulh in eternity I alone have had the strength to tell the trulh in time.”

4

THE dispute between the institution and the mysl ic will goon until the end of the world. But wo have one institution which tries to step out of its category and aims at arbitrating in all disputes bet ween opposed individuals and groups: the law. It would be interesting to learn how far the tumult of the Hiss case was due to the lack of laws which might prevent the conversion of normal trials into dervish trials, and how far to the failure to apply such of these laws as exist. Obviously it was unjust to both Hiss and Chambers that the case should have been tried in the press and on the radio and on the platform long before it came into court. This would have been impossible in Britain, because of our strict laws regarding contempt of court which forbid any comment on a case before it is tried and while it is being tried. All responsible British journalists are united in approving these laws. They protect us from advertently or inadvertently prejudicing the course of justice and from being charged with corruption; and their usefulness to the community was proved recently when they prevented the conversion of a trial under the Official Secrets Act into a dervish trial. There is abundant evidence that a number of people were anxious to whitewash a Communist by pretending that he was an independent scientist who wished to hand over information to Soviet Russia because of his admiration for its feats in the war and because he believed that scientific knowledge should be the property of all peoples. Had those people been able to conduct their campaign before the trial, they might have been able to persuade the public that a verdict of guilty must be unjust; but though they have pul forward their inaccurate version since the trial, it has been difficult for them to make much headway, since the fads had already been established in court by the prosecution and accepted by the defense.

Mr. Chambers has perhaps the most slender sense of legality that a highly intelligent man could possess. He seems hardly aware of the need to respect the attempts made by the community to reconcile 1 he conflicting rights of its members. He seems, for one thing, to have a blind eye for the idea of contract. This can be seen, oddly enough, in his allusions to his religious affiliations. He says explicitly more than once that he does not accept the Quaker doctrine of nonresistance, yet he is an adherent of the Society of Friends because it is a center of mysticism.

This has its bearing on what is perhaps the strangest incident m the Hiss case: Whittaker Chambers’s perjury before the grand jury. Its amazing qualitx does not warrant the fantastic use of it made by Hiss’s supporters, who can hardly be candid when they suggest that Hiss should be considered innocent because the chief witness against him staled on oath that he was innocent and then admitted that he was not telling the truth. But it is truly amazing that a man should consent to play a part in the investigation of Hiss’s conduct by the law, and then, in order to fulfill what he conceived to he his moral duty towards Hiss, should disregard the understanding on which every trial is founded: that witnesses regard the oath they lake as binding. This is an act which is explicable only by reference to the egotism of the mystic. In the light of that clue it is quite comprehensible. Without that clue, it is troubling and enigmatic, Perhaps the best way of understanding Whittaker Chambers would be to turn back to the records of the Dreyfus case, and try to imagine what it would have been like had the witness who exposed the Army conspiracy been not the straightforward soldier, Colonel Picquart, but Charles Péguy, the Christian poet and philosopher who was Dreyfus’s greatest literary defender, and whose relationship with the Roman Catholic Church showed the same inconsistency as Whittaker Chambers’s relationship to the Society of Friends, The spectators would often have been greatly perplexed.