Foreign News: Dark Line

Novelist Herbert George Wells went up to Oxford last week to make a speech before the Liberal Summer School. He was moved. Roundly he attacked all British political parties, urging a sort of diluted British Fascism of his own invention. The Oxford audience listened politely when he said that the Laborites were “a party of spouting mouths and clutching hands with no brains.” But if the Archbishop of Canterbury had shouted a string of four-letter Saxon expletives they could not have been more shocked than they were at what came next from beneath Novelist Wells’s grizzled mustache—an attack on King George!

“The King was so ill advised as to depart from his proper political and social neutrality and lead a movement for cheese paring and grinding the faces of the needy in the interests of the debt collectors. And not a soul in the Labor party has said what ought to be said about the King or about the miserable campaign of unintelligent economy which cast its dismal shadow over the closing months of 1931.”

Not since the days of Victoria and Palmerston has public criticism been leveled against the Crown in Britain. The audience filed out in shocked silence. Newshawks hurried to the platform to interview the Master of University College who presided. Sir Michael Ernest Sadler,* scowling purse-lipped over his doctor’s gown, said he: “I consider Mr. Wells’s references to the King simply a dark line in the historian’s larger contributions about national life.”

*Not to be confused with Sir Michael is his better known son, the biographer and publisher, who spells his name Michael Sadleir.