25 AUGUST 1939, Page 6

Advancing years seem to bring to Mr. Robertson Scott, the

Editor of The Countryman, ever brighter ideas. What could be better than his suggestion that the copy of Magna Carta at present being exhibited at the World's Fair in New York should be presented to the United States? No act would be more graceful, and none more pointedly symbolic at a moment when the very foundations of the democracy of which we and the Americans and the French are the chief representatives in the world. Our present liberties are not based on Magna Carta as much as is sometimes supposed. but what that historic instrument stands for in the popular mind means almost as much as what it actually was.

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