TAKING STOCK
Mr. James Henderson Stewart, Under-Secretary for Scotland, has criticised the Scots farmers who failed to make provision for the recent storm. They should, he considers, 'take thought for the future and lay in stocks; it is an elementary duty!' But in the next breath he refers to the Governmenes.action after the storm as 'an example of the extraordinary British capacity for providing, by improvisation, the right machinery when an emergency arises.' If Mr. James Henderson Stewart and his predecessors had 'taken thought for the future' there should have been no need for improvisation; the machinery for Opera- tion Snowdrop would have been ready to put into action at short notice—as was planned after the 1947 blizzard. It is, after all, the elementary duty of Under-Secretaries for Scotland to make such provisions, instead of chatting about them : they would be sensible in future to mind other people's business less and their' own more.
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