GREAT BRITAIN: Dictators Challenged

Dictators Challenged

With all the honesty of his one-way mind, King George last week was nobly troubled, and so were the best of His Majesty’s subjects. No English gentleman who has been taught with the rough end of a strap to write Latin verse at Eton ever thinks of Eternal Rome with other than profound cultural respect, and Pope Pius XI was probably right in thinking last week that the last place on which British bombs will ever fall is the City of the Caesars. All the same, Kaiser Wilhelm II became a “beastly Hun” for some years to his cousin George V, and Benito Mussolini was rapidly becoming even worse last week to English newspaper readers of whom none is more inveterate than His Majesty. In the catch-phrase of Fleet Street’s more blatant organs, “Mussolini is out-Hunning the Huns!”

It would have distressed King George, it would have made the good man wince, if His Majesty had heard and believed reports current in Wall Street, Thread-needle Street and on the Paris Bourse that a secret deal had in fact been made between the Italian and British Governments (see col. i). In the United Kingdom no hint of this reached the mass of voters who must ballot before this time next year in General Election.

Giant P. The Conservatives now dominating His Majesty’s “National Government” have made splendid and honest use of their opportunity to take over as their specialty and to champion before the World the particular brand of pacifism with a giant P plus zealous support of the League of Nations (hitherto the forte of the British Labor Party) which recently proved their pulling power with British voters by winning 11,000,000 ballots in a nationwide straw vote (TIME, Sept. 2). Last week the Labor Party, in convention at Brighton, were so carried away by their loathing of Fascism and the momentum of their years of Leaguophilia that they passed resolutions in effect endorsing the policy of His Majesty’s Government. All this made the Conservative Party convention at Bournemouth last week cheerful to the point of overconfidence. Fresh from an audience at Buckingham Palace with King George, the Prime Minister preened himself in a speech referring almost with reverence to “all the responsibility that falls upon me as principal adviser to His Majesty.”

Hand of God. Even irrepressible Winston Churchill, who alternately reviled and ridiculed the Prime Minister all last year over India’s new Constitution which was enacted anyhow (TIME, June 17), humbly sealed his peace with Leader Baldwin last week. “In the Prime Minister we have a statesman,” cried Mr. Churchill, “who has gathered to himself a greater volume of confidence and goodwill than any other man I can recollect in my long public career!”

This was exact. Stanley Baldwin, cutting exactly the figure of John Bull, sounds the note most appealing to Britain’s masses, and even when he has bumbled-usually in foreign policy-his air of wisdom, serenity and candor keep him as popular as his evil-smelling briar pipe. To the convention of his Party last week Leader Baldwin promised:

1) “To play our part … in which the hand of God places us.”

2) Not only to support the League but to try at this late date to get nations not named by Mr. Baldwin but evidently including the U. S. into it. “There is no doubt in my mind,” said the Prime Minister, “that had the whole world joined the League of Nations, and had the will to restrain war been there, the League could have prevented war. … It [may] still be possible to get the nations of the world inside it.” 3) To refrain from enmity with Italy. “There has never been,” cried Mr. Baldwin, “and I hope there never will be national enmity between my country and Italy!”

4) To launch immediately a large-scale program of British rearmament because “the whole perspective on the Continent has been altered in the last year or two by the rearming of Germany. … I do not look on Germany or any other country as necessarily a potential foe. . . . But I cannot be blind to facts!”

“Let Us Show the World!” From this the Prime Minister swung into an excellent electioneering speech. “We have to guard in this country a social life and standard of living better than any that exists in Europe,” he cried with compelling sincerity. “We have also to guard certain spiritual values of infinitely more importance and value toward mankind-love of freedom and justice, without which we could not survive. . . . Dictators of the world are saying that peoples inside demo-cratic countries are inferior to them because they are always quarreling in politics and never will agree on policy. Let us show the world when the next election comes that whatever issues there may be, the people of an ancient democracy will show that their cohesion, their purpose, their will, can be no whit inferior to that of any dictatorship that ever existed in this world or ever will.”