GREAT BRITAIN: Voice for No Reform

In his long day, the 80-year-old Marquess of Salisbury had viewed many things with alarm. He was horrified (1934) at the idea that his government might offer India dominion status—”the ideal of Gandhi!” He thought (1936) King Edward’s abdication “a disaster that left [the body politic] mutilated and torn.” He considered (1937) that allowing divorce on the ground of desertion or incurable in sanity would “launch the marriage laws of England on a path of which one cannot see the end!”

When William Temple as Archbishop of Canterbury placed the rank and in fluence of his exalted office behind the forces of economic and social reform (see p. 59} that was a final challenge to this onetime leader of the House of Lords and champion of the Oxford Group. While younger Tories felt that now was the time for them to be comparatively silent, blue-blooded, hearty Lord Salisbury took issue. In a booklet issued last week, Post war Conservative Policy, he accused those who “question the social and political standards, even in our own country,” of being “betrayed into advocacy of rash opinions and ill-balanced remedies.”

Amid cries of Church and Labor for social reform, the tough old Tory had the courage to stand up for igth-Century Cap italism as a good way of life. In the peace to come, he maintained:

> The right and power to make and preserve the private fortune must be jealously guarded. . . . The body politic cannot flourish unless people are not only allowed but encouraged to accumulate and retain private wealth.

> Trade-union members must be “protected by the state from unfair political pressure by the organizations themselves.”

> There should be an approach within the Empire as near as possible to inter-Imperial free trade.

>-“Equal education of all children is impracticable.”