WILL be your leader," an English monarch once
NEWS OF THE WEEK
said to a throng of English workers crushed by poverty and burning' with a grievance. In much the same spirit King Edward VIII, with his unfailing grasp of a situation, addressed half-a-dozen admirable sentences to the unemployed of South %Vales at the end of his first day's journey through that area on Wednesday. The King, fortunately, was not spared a full sight of the full depression.- He saw the shuttered factories and the smokeless pit-heads ; he talked to the men who had not forsaken their work but whom work had forsaken ; and -with great wisdom he summoned both the new and untried Commissioner for the Special Areas and his experienced and disillusioned predecessor to dine with him and discuss the outlook before he started on his second day's tour. As for the -King's own impressions and -convictions, they are summed up in the words he is said to have used when he saw the derelict steel works at Bowlais,—" These works brought these men here ; something ought to be done." It is the more likely to be done now that the King has given his own thoughts expression. A constitutional sovereign can initiate action no less than a dictator.
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