GREAT BRITAIN: Hammer Blows

Amid the glens and greensward and deep foliage of rustic North Wales last week, tired Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin rested with his good wife Lucy. In Whitehall his secretaries did their best to keep down the contents of the red morocco dispatch box which had to be sent to the P.M. each day. The strategy of His Majesty’s Government for the time being was comfortably described as “masterly inaction” and yet they were in fact most active.

Palestine-It made no difference that War Minister Alfred Duff Cooper was lolling in the Balkans on a yachting cruise with King Edward. There were plenty of capable subordinates on hand when emergency cables began pouring into London from Jerusalem last week. A crisis of the most extreme urgency, in the opinion of the British residency in Palestine, was emerging from the Arab General Strike now in its twenty-first week. Abruptly 15,000 British troops, already drawn up in mock battle array for war games in Sussex, were piled aboard trains, rushed to Aldershot where overseas war equipment was issued to them, and shown to transports for Palestine. One battalion each of the King’s Coldstream and Scots Guards was left in Britain but the rest of the First Division was headed for Palestine by ‘ week’s end.

To put the crisis in a nutshell, the Arabs on strike demand the cessation of Jewish immigration to Palestine and have put British High Commissioner General Sir Arthur Grenfell null sufficiently on the spot to make him welcome mediation between Britons and Arabs by the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Nuri Pasha as Said. This Moslem statesman sent up a trial balloon to test Christian public opinion by letting it be known in Jerusalem that he thought the British were on the point of closing the immigration gates of Palestine with a new policy of “No More Jews,” temporarily at least. No sooner was this “leak” well out in London than Jewish leaders in the Empire capital brought their influence to bear. The result was last week’s dispatch of enough troops to squelch the Arabs and in due time make Palestine a real “Jewish Homeland.”

Malta-Another hammer stroke of British policy last week was dealt on the Island of Malta whose predominantly Latin-Levantine-blooded citizens in 1921 were given full Responsible Government with their own Constitution and freely elected Legislative Assembly. Some of these swarthy British subjects have since shown for Italy a preference so marked that tension in Malta was extreme while Stanley Baldwin was pressing on with “Sanctions” against Benito Mussolini. Last week the Malta Constitution was abolished by His Majesty’s Government, Malta was dropped from Responsible Government to the status of a Crown Colony in which the British Governor has the authority of a Dictator. The Italian language, banned by Britain in 1934 from being taught in Malta schools or spoken in Malta law courts, was last week “permanently banned.”

Egypt-Although Captain Anthony Eden, the youngest (39) British Foreign Secretary since Earl Granville (36), in 1851, was suffering from an attack of chicken pox last week, just before he went to bed he presided in the magnificent “Locarno Room” of the British Foreign Office at the signing of a new Treaty of Alliance between Britain and Egypt (see cut). Some five months of expert drafting produced this pact and to get Premier Mustafa El Nahas Pasha in a frame of mind to sign it has been the triumph of British High Commissioner for Egypt Sir Miles Lampson. Many London papers called him “The Prince of Pacificators”—this accolade reputedly having been bestowed by Sir Austen Chamberlain, Knight of the Garter, who received his knighthood for having been one of the co-makers of the Treaty of Locarno.

In the Locarno Room, where the “Spirit of Locarno” was distilled into a pact which was to have made France and Germany friends (TIME, Dec. 14, 1925), the new treaty was hailed by Foreign Secretary Eden as “a symbol of freely agreed partnership between the British and Egyptian peoples!”

The Treaty is for 20 years, but Article XVI provides that it must be succeeded by a similar pact, and commentators this week called it a Treaty of Perpetual Military Alliance. Under its terms the British Royal Air Force may at all times operate over Egypt. The British Navy will have a permanent base at Alexandria for which it will pay rent to Egypt. And the Egyptians agree to build strategic roads fanning out from the British Garrison in the Suez Canal Zone so that British troops may rapidly reach any part of Egypt.

Over a period of eight years the British forces now holding garrisons throughout Egypt will gradually be concentrated along the Suez Canal, it being estimated that the Egyptians will take eight years to build suitable barracks for them there and complete the strategic roads. Since Egyptian public opinion is exceedingly hostile to continued British occupation of the Citadel at Cairo—equivalent to occupation of the Tower of London by an alien military force—it was expected that the British would soon quit the Citadel and that this would be a popular feather in the fez of Premier Nahas.

The Treaty proposes to end the system of “capitulations” under which Britain, the U. S. and twelve other States have special extraterritorial rights for their citizens in Egypt. The British promised to approach the U. S. and other States, asking each to surrender these rights. It was also promised in the Treaty that Britain will urge at Geneva admission of Egypt to membership in the League of Nations.

Finally the Treaty provides that some Egyptian troops and Egyptian colonists may enter the Sudan. In 1924 eight Egyptians assassinated the British Sirdar General Sir Lee Stack and in punishment Britain excluded Egyptian soldiers from the Sudan, closed it to Egyptian farmers who wished to move in, and exacted from the Egyptian Government cash damages of $2,500,000 (TIME, Dec. i, 1924 et seq.).

Norway. With Palestine, Malta and Egypt thus strongly dealt with last week, the next British move was to crack at Norway in the dispute over whales (TIME, Sept. 7). Britain’s whaling fleet, which is normally manned by Norwegians, remained last week tied up in a fjord near Oslo. Both the Norwegian whalers’ unions and the Norwegian Government maintained that British soapmakers, who own many of the whaling ships, want to kill whales at such a rate that the great mammals would soon be exterminated. London papers last week described the British Government as having decided to brandish a “big stick” and as having informed the Norwegian Government that the present “closed whaling season” (December to March) will be disregarded by British firms which will send their ships south “at once.”

This left open the problem of w?ho is going to man the ships. In London soap circles, it was said that, while enough British seamen trained in whaling simply do not exist to man the British whaling fleet today, it could perfectly well be sent to Southern waters with British crews who could learn to hunt whales as they went along. In case the British whaling ships actually are sent south now with green crews, Norwegian whalers vowed last week that they will send their ships and experienced crews speeding ahead to the Antarctic and start a free-for-all destruction of the whale.

Acting Head of the extremely active British Government last week was the Home Secretary, Sir John Allsebrook Simon, whose functions are normally the sinecure of preserving order in the well-behaved British Isles and advising His Majesty in cases where the royal prerogative of pardon should be exercised.