The romanticism of the Attorney-General's recent statements about the ownership
and conduct of the Press aroused general and searching comment. But what is to be said of the speech he made on housing at St. Helen's last Friday? He was drawing the usual contrast between the Tory record in house-building after the last war and the present Government's achievements after this. " Then," said Sir Hartley Shawcross, according to the Daily Herald, " it took four years to put up zoo,000 houses. On that basis we were now moving, in the first year of peace, at least four times as fast." That means, according to the only rational interpretation of plain words, that in the first year of peace we have " put up " 200,000 houses. This, of course, is nonsense, and the Attorney-General himself a minute later gave the actual figure as 17,400 permanent houses. It was, of course, permanent houses that were put up after the last war ; it is no use throwing in repaired houses, and temporary houses, and converted houses, though even all that would not make up the required zoo,000. Something more than mere legal niceties seems to be involved here.
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