Foreign News: My Dear Bishop

“Britain,” complained the Bishop of Rochester, “has sunk into a complaining lethargy. . . . The record of strikes, ca’canny* and absenteeism since God gave us the victory has blotted the most splendid page of all English history.”

The British man-in-the-street was too tired to reply, but into the breach sprang his favorite spokesman, Columnist Nat Gubbins of London’s Sunday Express.

“I haven’t pounced on a bishop for a long time,” wrote Columnist Gubbins. “For many years they have kept rather quiet. . . . But even if bishops . . . are not now saying the delightfully foolish things they used to say, they can always .be relied on to state the obvious at obviously the right time.

“So, at a time when our rations are cut again, when after a year’s peace the income tax is still high enough to kill initiative . . . when most of us are deeply humiliated by the Washington debate on the American loan, it was obviously the right time for the Bishop of Rochester to observe that Britain had ‘sunk into a complaining lethargy.’ It has. . . .

“You can’t blame a man for stating the obvious, however dull it may be. But . . . has [the Bishop] never observed, or even heard, that after an exhausting effort men and nations are inclined to be irritable and critical and also inclined to absenteeism . . . except, perhaps, bishops, who are not as other men.

“I am tired and irritable because, although the U.S. . . . would not now exist but for the war exertions of this country, we are being treated in the American Senate like a defeated nation. I am also wearing a shabby suit.

“I am tired and irritable because, although this loan would be of far more advantage to the U.S. than it would be to us, American senators have deliberately [tried to] embarrass and finally wreck the British Government, the constitution of which . . . is none of America’s business. I also have holes in my utility socks.

“I am tired and irritable because our greatest soldier [Montgomery] has been libelled and insulted by a scribbling American, Ralph Ingersoll, with little knowledge of military matters, to launch his best-seller [Top Secret]. . . . I also have holes in most of my shirts. . . .

“And as for absenteeism, if income tax is not considerably reduced by next April I shall probably give up work too, which would be a break for bishops. Did I mention also that half my handkerchiefs are in rags?

“So there you are, my dear Bishop. We are certainly ‘sunk into a complaining lethargy,’ and we are entitled to be sunk in it, without blotting the pages of English history and without any nagging remarks from you.”

* Deliberate slowdowns: lit. “call cautious,” an old Scottish phrase introduced into British labor parlance by Clydeside shipworkers.