GREAT BRITAIN: Great Experiment

The First Lord of the British Admiralty, dynamic Sir Samuel (“Flying Sam”) Hoare, continued last week his series of public speeches, which are proving so popular in the United Kingdom as to build him up handsomely as a candidate to succeed Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Sir Samuel has already cheered Navy-loving Britons by telling them that the battleplane has by no means yet supplanted the battleship. Last week he drew thunderous London cheers with a bristling disparagement of both Fascism and Communism.

“To talk of a class war in Great Britain and the British Empire is to talk of a calamity that has not the least chance of befalling us!” was the First Lord’s welcome prophecy. “When I hear people speak of Communism and Fascism as if they were the greatest constitutional experiments of our time, I feel how little do these fanatics and theorists understand the magnitude of the experiment of the British Empire.”

Immediate construction of two new capital ships, the King George V and the Prince of Wales, each costing $40,000,000, was lately announced by Sir Samuel. In this the Admiralty is supported by the Committee on Imperial Defense which last week arrived at two blunt conclusions after months of exhaustive research: 1) “It is plain to us that capital ships cannot be constructed so as to be indestructible, by bombing from the air”; 2) “We need ships equal in fighting power to those to which they may be opposed.”