11 NOVEMBER 1932, Page 6

Mr. Roosevelt will be universally described as the thirty-second President

of the United States. He is the thirty-first. • The mistake is made in the United States by counting Grover Cleveland twice over because there was an interval between his first and second terms. But I see no more reason for calling him the twenty- second and twenty-fourth than for counting as two all the other Presidents who served a full double term. They were elected twice. The distinction reminds me of a metaphysical argument by which Cardinal Newman in his Oxford days defended his right to the seat he had seized in the stage-coach at Rugby. The man who had occupied it from the North claimed it in anger. Newman insisted that it had by stopping become the Rugby- London coach, and he would not budge.

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