NEWS OF THE WEEK
PERHAPS the most important passage in the Prime Minister's speech on its political side was the reference to the forthcoming meetings between• representatives of Great Britain, the United States and Russia. There is to be, as it were, a three-storeyed structure, consisting of the standing Mediterranean Commission (on which the French Committee of National Liberation will also be represented), the forthcoming meeting between Foreign Ministers, and as coping-stone a conference between the principals, Mr. Churchill, President Roosevelt and Marshal Stalin. It was known that all these gatherings were in prospect, but it is satisfactory to have the Prime Minister's explicit assurances on the matter, and in particular to know regarding the meeting between the chiefs of States (which is all that we shall Or ought to know about it till it is over) that it is intended to take place before the end of the year. The need for such a development of contacts needs no emphasis, even though overdrawn pictures of misunderstandings between Russia and the Western Allies have no justification. But the truth of the assertion that les absents ont toujours tort is demon- strated daily, and on the whole it operates more against the Western Allies as seen from Moscow than vice versa. The coming meetings, prefaced as they are by the Prime Minister's emphatic declara- tion about the impending Second Front, should do much to promote harmony and mutual comprehension. The spirit of understanding is better than any formal understanding, but the two together may be better than either, and the suggestion already made here for Anglo-American and Russo-American treaties as complement to the existing Anglo-Russian treaty, may be repeated and emphasised.
