Foreign News: Reds Warned

With alarums, excursions and whoops London Reds staged an impassioned demonstration last week before Bow Street Police Court. Red flags were swished and flaunted, the Communist Anthem was chanted ferociously off key. Within the court, Britain’s “war on Reds” (TIME, Oct. 26) was gathering cautious headway amid all this tumult. The noted Communists* arrested a fortnight ago were arraigned at a Magistrate’s hearing, and Sir Travers Humphreys, acting for the director of Public Prosecutions, set forth the new policy of the Baldwin Government in resorting to stern measures against the Reds, as follows:

“The view of the prosecution is that all persons who disseminate by word of mouth or by published writings the doctrines of what the defendants call Communism, are liable to be prosecuted for sedition. . . . The defendants before me are not prosecuted because they are Communists. . . . The prosecution suggests that Communism, as it is understood and explained by these persons and their associates, is illegal because it involves three things: first, the overthrow of the constituted Government of the country and the established forms of Government by force; second, the creation of antagonism between different classes of His Majesty’s subjects; third, seducing from their allegiance of the armed force of the Crown.

“If the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat and the elimination of the capitalist can be done by lawful means, I am not here to suggest that it is a crime to advocate it. But it is perfectly well known that some ends cannot be achieved and are not expected to be achieved by lawful means.”

In conclusion, Sir Travers read extracts from a book called Lenin and Youth, which he declared had been “recommended by the defendants to young Britons”; and positively asserted that the Communists before the court had received orders in the past from Moscow. The session was then adjourned pending the opening of the formal trial proceedings, and the twelve defendants trooped forth and were promptly hailed as heroes and crusaders by their flag-waving sympathizers. With them walked famed and unique Communist M. P. Shapurji Saklatvala, whom Secretary Kellogg recently barred from the U. S. (TIME, Sept. 28 CABINET). Shapurji had previously supplied bail for several of the accused; attentive, he had harkened to the words of Prosecutor Sir Travers, with intent to make good use of them in stirring up Communist resentment against “British Fascism.”

*They now number twelve. To the eight named in TIME last week have been added: Arthur McManus, head of the colonial department of the Communist party; John Thomas Murphy, head of its political bureau ; Robert Page Arnot, director of the labor research department; and Walter Hannington, organizer of the National Unemployed Workers’ Committee Movement.