THE STATE OF DENMARK "
SIR,—I congratulate Janus on nailing to the counter in your last issue the suggestio falsi directed against the Prime Minister in a recent number of the Manchester Guardian. You may be interested in the following recent experience of my own with that paper. On June 6th I sent to the Editor the following signed letter :— "As a Conservative candidate in the next election I feel it is only right that inaccuracies of fact in leading articles should be brought.to the attention of the public. In the first leader in the Manchester Guardian on the 5th June they refer to the election of 1931:
" when a Government was elected in a panic to save the pound and then immediately ate its words and went off the gold standard.'
" These facts are completely wrong. The pound went off gold on the zest September, 1931; the election took place on the 27th October, 1931. (Annual Register, 1931, pages 76 and 82)."
The Editor agreed, in a reply to me, that the paper had made a blunder, but he has not published either my letter or ony other correction of it. Rather than admit to his readers a venial mistake, he has preferred that they should continue deceived. Such stubbornness in error is, surely, below the standards of fairness and candour which we have come to expect of the Guardian. This suppression, taken along with the serious misrepresentation of the purport of a speech which Janus has exposed, has led more than myself to fear that the state of Denmark is not what it was.
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