This appears an unambiguous title; we talk frequently, both about ‘prevention’ and ‘family breakdown’. Yet if we reflect on each of these terms there are good reasons for doubt and uncertainty. Does the death of a father constitute the breakdown (or break-up?) of a family? Has a family in which the eldest child is unloved by mother and overprotected by father broken down? Or a family from which the mother is away in mental hospital, possibly for a short time? In brief do we use the term to refer to the lack of the physical wholeness of a family or to a failure in one of the essential functions of the family? If we refer to both these features at the same time it is likely that the term is being stretched beyond its usefulness.

If we turn to the other term in the title, prevention, the lack of clarity is much more in evidence. The idea of prevention has a long history as far as public provision for social welfare is concerned. It is possible to observe at least three stages in the development of this idea. Firstly, it was considered that people should be prevented from recourse to dependence on such social provision as existed by the availability early in life of certain guiding influences. Thus, education was seen ‘as one of the most important means of eradicating the germs of pauperism for the rising generation and of securing in the minds and morals of the people the best protection for the institutions of society’.

The most important factors in any home are the people in it and the relationships between them. This paper is, however, mainly concerned to discuss other aspects of home making because it was originally delivered at a conference at which the strains and stresses of human relationships within a family were covered by other papers.

Let us look first and very briefly at the economic factor. How do we reconcile the contradictory views of our society which are from time to time presented to us, an affluent society on the one hand, slums and poverty stricken homes, on the other.

Some recent figures of average earnings published by the Ministry of Labour are significant. These include overtime, nightwork and bonuses; they cover both skilled and unskilled workers in industry, mining and quarrying and transport, but do not include employees of the National Coal Board and the National Dock Labour Board for whom separate statistics are given. The figures are based on returns made during one pay week published in February 1961. The heaviest concentration of earners lay between £12 and £14 and more than half earned between £9 and £15. Average earnings in these industries as published last February were £14. 17s. for manual workers and £14.19s. for weekly paid clerical and administrative staff. A very few (0.42 per cent) earned less than £7 and about 5 per cent earned less than £9, all these figures refer to what is described as full time adult work. Skilled craftsmen could well earn a good deal more than the average, but the unskilled man might earn a good deal less.

The sociological writing most relevant to the theme of a conference on ‘The Catholic Family and its Needs’, is that concerned with the position of minority groups and with social change. The minority group with which we are concerned is a social or cultural minority, that is to say, it is a minority distinguished from the majority by the fact that it holds, as a group, distinctive values, attitudes and ideals!

The social scientists who first studied minority groups of that kind concluded rather hastily that there were only two possibilities open to such a minority in the contemporary world—either existence as a segregated closed group, or complete absorption and assimilation to the majority. It has, however, been shown by subsequent research that this was a false dichotomy. As a matter of fact, valid dichotomies are rare in the social sphere, and one should adopt a sceptical attitude to those which are proposed. These dichotomies generally derive from over-emphasis on the determining impact of social forces and they are not usually in accord with a Catholic approach to empirical study of social life, which, when known, can be accepted or rejected, changed or controlled, through the use of the human understanding, and the power of the grace of God. The Catholic in a position of social responsibility should avoid adding to the classical danger of being impaled on the horns of a dilemma the new peril of being split by a false dichotomy. And so it is with regard to minorities—in addition to ‘segregation’ and ‘assimilation’ there is the further possibility of ‘limited integration’.

A first visit to the quarter of a million odd, landlocked square miles of Afghanistan should act on any but a finished, finite clod rather in the same way as Samuel Johnson’s tour of the Hebrides did on him. The analogy is not entirely inapposite for, like the Hebrides, Afghanistan is a land of rock; and where one is lashed by the cleansing sea, the other is bathed in the cleansing light of brilliant sunshine out of clear skies, so that both (and one has St Patrick’s Breastplate in mind) may be considered similarly to uplift the susceptible spirit.

Afghanistan’s rocks, however, are threaded through the valleys down which, in sharp contrast to mauve and grey stone and biscuit-coloured sand, stretch strips of green (from the air, black) cultivation, the fields of corn and millet turning yellow, lush vineyards, apple trees and screens of poplar and willow, the more lacey and delicate for the harsh contrast of the major portions of a country clustered round the southwestern spurs of the majestic Hindu Kush.

What a formidable thing and an evocative word the Hindu Kush is! No wonder the Afghan people, ethnographically varied though they be, are all brave and bright eyed, tending to tallness and litheness of limb—men capable of leaping from rock to rock with the long muskets of independence in a land where everyone is his own Khan. Here might be recalled the answer to a question. In a garden of the Kabul Valley, a garden of gaily coloured flowers, high in the hills with a stream rushing down over the rocks, when some peasants appeared an Afghan host was asked: ‘Do they belong here?’—meaning ‘Are they the men who look after this garden?’ The reply was: ‘No. “Here” belongs to them’.

A visitor from South Africa to England is naturally asked many questions, and is equally naturally interested in any comments or reports of African and South African matters in the British press. Two incidents connected with the name of Bishop Roseveare of Ghana last August appear to me very significant.

The first of these is that the Daily Mail front page comment, discussing the expulsion of Bishop Roseveare from Ghana, went on to suggest that it is a pity there were not Ghanaian clergy trained and in positions of sufficient responsibility to make the statement needed. In other words, while someone had to point out to the Ghanaians that some of them were giving quasi-religious cultus to a human being, Dr Nkrumah, it would be far easier for the Ghana administration to hear this from a Ghanaian Bishop. It might indeed be almost impossible for them to accept it from a white man, a member of the colonial power from whose unjust domination (as they see it), they have just been liberated. We ought to hear truth and justice from anybody, and to fail to do so is flatly wrong. But there is the more excuse for the sin or failure, or whatever one is to call it, if the person who tells us the truth appears in some way himself identified with injustice. Not so very long ago a Pan-African Congress in West Africa passed a resolution to the effect that the white-organized Churches had been identified with the powers of exploitation. To expect Africans wholly to dissociate an individual from his people, a truth from the man expressing it, is to expect much.

Kokoschka is one of the few great modem painters that the art-publishing trade has not preconditioned our minds to. The usual jading influence of a torrent of monographs so bamboozles the mind that, by the time one gets to the pictures, an assessment is the last thing the mind is capable of or inclined to do. The reason for his escape from this kind of attention is, I suspect, because Kokoschka has nothing in common with the art movement that nearly monopolizes our attention, the school of Paris; he is outside the tradition of Paris, owing nothing to the discoveries of the early years of this century there. His unique personality is so secure in its own conviction that far from being in need of lateral help from a ‘school’ he defies any categorization at all. He cuts across any attempt to label him. The question of style which is so central to any evaluation of modem art is brushed aside with protean energy, and it is this unexpected impatience that is the most disturbing and individual quality of the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery.

However extreme and exuberant the artists of the school of Paris were, they possessed that precise instinct for balance and interval in drawing and painting, that instinct for measure that enables even their more unconsidered pictures to retain an authority because of it. Kokoschka’s balance in drawing and painting is imprecise; not only the more obvious lack of it in the paintings but the subtle lack of it in the drawings, gnaws away at our confidence, however attracted we are by the verve and vitality which almost persuade us that the qualities we miss are not central to the problem of all art. In Kokoschka’s painting the intuition seems to have been given full scope and a decisive divorce from any idea of intellectual clarity. One might think here is the ultimate ideal of what the romantic artist aspires to be—always protean, verging on the inchoate, with more than a dash of madness.