25 MARCH 1938, Page 6

The efficiency of the daily papers as interpreters of the

United States to this country is a good deal under discussion in The Spectator and elsewhere. But I wonder whether the predestined instrument is not the radio rather than the Press. I wondered that particularly as I listened to Mr. Cordell Hull's speech last week. The marvel of wireless, I confess, impresses me still. Here was the Secretary of State speaking 3,000 miles away in the Washington Press Club, which I happen to know well, and I could sit in my study and hear the tap of the chairman's gavel and every syllable both he and the chief speaker spoke. We have by now acquired the habit of listening to our own political leaders by wireless. The more we can listen to American leaders the better. And the more we listen to them the more we shall want to understand the background of their speeches. Mr. Raymond Gram Swing, with his Saturday evening talks on current politics from New York, is helping a good deal over that. But there is room for much more mutual educa- tion yet. Two great peoples with a common language have the opportunity to speak, and keep speaking, to each other today as never before. It is a question not of propaganda but of the cultivation of understanding, and there are few fields in which a little judicious expenditure would be richer in results. The B.B.C., the Post Office, Sir Robert Vansittart's committee on this side, and one or two of the great broad- casting systems on the other, ought to be considering means of doubling and trebling the few existing transatlantic programmes.