18 NOVEMBER 1932, Page 6

The Disarmament Meeting at the Albert Hall on Tuesday was

a surprising and significant affair. The packed audience consisted, no doubt, mainly of League of Nations Union supporters and sympathisers, but it was to all appearances a typical and representative middle- class gathering. It listened to admirable speeches by Lord Cecil and the Archbishop of York and Sir Stafford Cripps (who appealed in a fine phrase that we should "sacrifice our fears upon the altar of our faith ") and it warmly applauded an earnest and rather definitely Conservative speech by Lord Eustace Percy—and then when Mr. Beverley Nicholls denounced the before the mcetair, resolutions, on the ground that they did not con- tam the, to him, vital words "Peace at any price," and added that the best thing a soldier's wife could pray for her sons was that they should be conscientious objectors, the tumult of cheers rolled on in continuous and insistent waves. It was left to Lord Cecil to adjust the balance from the chair, by observing that while much of the audience obviously shared the opinions just expressed, some of them held other views and the essential fact was that speakers so different as Mr. Nicholls and. Lord Eustaee Percy could unite on the same platform in: the sarn crusade. It would. be interesting to know, what there is no means of discovering, how considerable a body of opinion outside the opinion inside represented.