A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is a melancholy reflection that the Washington Naval Treaty, the one considerable achievement in the field of disarmament since the War, is no longer in force. It expired on Thursday and left no successor— apart from one or two agreements of quite subsidiary importance on sizes of ships and methods of submarine warfare. Gone too are most of the figures who played their part so honourably at Washington—Lord Balfour, Beatty, Briand, Viviani, President Harding, who de- clared the Conference open, the inscrutable and tenacious Japanese Baron Kato. Secretary Hughes, now Chief Justice, survives in full activity, and so do two of the three British delegates, Lord Lee and Sir Auckland Geddes. To one who was there, as I was, the scene will remain historic, in spite of the shattering of all the hopes that the sense of accomplishment set so high. We shall never again see a million tons of shipping sunk by a single sentence. Instead the rival fleets must be building afresh at ruinous cost as mutual menaces. December 31st, 1936, is a date to mark in black.
To say that Mr. Arthur Brisbane was the most famous of American " columnists " (writers of a signed column in a daily paper) would be to invite challenge as to the definition of fame. " Notorious " is a safer word. Brisbane was said to earn £75,000 a year by his writings, and he made a great deal more by shrewd investment. His journalistic success was due mainly to facility in exploiting the ignorance and prejudices (he was full of ignorance and prejudice himself) of the readers of the Hearst Press. His chief obsession was hatred of Great Britain and all it stood for. He may have hated the League of Nations and other institutions with any touch of ideals about them even more, but there was not much in it either way. It is a depressing reflection that fortunes are made that way, while serious and responsible jour- nalists are hard put to it to achieve a modest competence. But other instances could be quoted—some of them nearer home.
* * * * Not all that might be said about Lady Houston can be fittingly said at this moment. She had a remarkable life and played some remarkable parts, inter alia as wife of the ninth Lord Byron and subsequently of Sir Robert Houston, the Liverpool shipowner, whose millions she inherited. In recent years she has been known mainly through the placards of the Saturday Review, which she acquired and used as a pulpit for her singular doctrines. She flung herself with zest into the controversy over King Edward and Mrs. Simpson, and takes her place with Sir Oswald Mosley, Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Harry Pollitt, Lords Beaverbrook.and Rothermere, among the ex-king's leading champions. Unfortunately for her journalistic reputation she mis- judged the situation rather seriously, with the result that her article in the Saturday Review of December 12th, the day after the abdication, announced (under the heading " Love Conquers All ") that " A woman's love has saved the situation. The plot to get rid of the King has failed— as it was bound to do. And this conspiracy will, like the boomerang, recoil on the head of its projector. Today the King reigns greater and more firmly than ever in the hearts of his people." The next week's paper bore on its cover the following poem, over Lady Houston's initials : Goodbye—Goodbye We cry with a sigh, Driven away By a law that's a lie,
Great King and True Lover
For you we would die.
Will you never return, Sir, To gladden our eye ?
What will happen to the Saturday Review now remains to be seen. It has great traditions behind it. But that English journalism will ever see again anything like the Saturday Review under Lady Houston is in the highest degree unlikely.
* * Someone, I see, has been rather depressed at the .fall of Witwatersrand Areas shares to the beggarly-figure of £18. The shares were issued at 10s. and not an ounce of gold has been produced from the property yet—for it is still in the exploration stage. But I see the latest quotation is £18 10s., so the position of the anxious share- holders who bought at 10s. is not desperate yet. In the art of living on expectations they can give most people points. (There is, let me add, every reason to believe that the expectations 'have a fairly firm foundation.) No one doubts that plenty of gold is waiting to be mined.
* * * * I reckon myself fairly competent as an interpreter of American newspaper headlines, but the Washington correspondent of the Morning Post sends one which, even with his translation as guide, I still find baffling at points. It reads
" MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF TO DOPE YANK TALK "
and its purport appears to be that the University of Chicago has invited an Oxford professor to supervise the production of a dictionary of American English. Most of it, of course, crystal clear. But—Midway ? And Limey ?,
JANIL:S.
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