A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
AFTER a lively discussion at luncheon one day this week on the motives that may have prompted the aston- ishing series of confessions in the Moscow trial I picked up by chance in the evening a volume of a hundred years ago containing a comparison between legal procedure in England and in Bavaria at that time. The con- spicuous feature of the latter was the remarkable preval- ence of confessions of guilt. In this country pleas of not guilty immensely predominate. In Bavaria, accord- ing to the well-known jurist Anselm von Feuerbach, there was hardly an accused person—regardless of sex or rank or character—who was not convicted on his own confession. Why ? The answer to that question may have some bearing on what is happening at Moscow. Feuerbach gives five reasons : (1) In about one case in a thousand, remorse based on real guilt. (2) Much the commonest—the prisoner's inability to resist a rigorous cross-examination. (3) Desire to end suspense (often after weeks of solitary confinement) anyhow. (4) Lack of spirit. (5) Hope of securing some mitigation of punishment by giving the judge what he is so anxious to obtain. Of these, number two seems, on the face of it, most likely to be applicable to Messrs. Radek and Sokolnikoff and their friends. But even that leaves a vast amount unexplained.
These Moscow trials make it a little embarrassing to he receiving hospitality from a Russian diplomat, for it is impossible to suppress secret speculations whether your host will have been tried and shot by this time next year. Take M. Sokolnikoff. Nothing could exceed the quiet correctness of his luncheon-parties at the Embassy in Kensington Park Gardens. I often sat by him eating caviare and declining vodka, and thought how much more agreeable he was than a great many other diplomats I could name. Or M. Rakovsky, also Ambassador (or was it Minister in those days ?) in London. He so far is only under suspicion, but an insurance company would demand a substantial premium for an official under suspicion in Russia today. Him, like Kameneff, executed after the last trial five months ago, I remember at the Trade Delegation offices in Bond Street, and before that at Mr. Lloyd George's famous Genoa Conference in 1922, when Rakovsky's voluble addresses to the journalists of all nations put the Russians well in the forefront in the international propaganda competition. Most people who knew Sokolnikoff here will feel very genuine sympathy with him in his present plight. * * * The resignation of the Dean of St. Paul's from the Presidency of the Modern Churchmen's Union, and of men like Canon Sheppard and the Master of the Temple and Dr. Norman Sykes from other positions in the Union has not been officially explained. But there is little doubt where the trouble lies. A glance at the address Dr. Matthews gave when he accepted the Presidency clearly revealed his idea of the Union's functions. He has always wanted to see it as a comprehensive body- " it wculd be disastrous if Modernists were simply-a third group along with Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals and since the Protestant element had always been the more largely represented his appeal was primarily to Anglo-Catholic Modernists. From that attitude the Dean of St. Paul's has never wavered, and I shall be much surprised if his and the other resignations mean that he has acknowledged defeat. The Modern Churchmen's Union has always been a live and virile body, but its influence in the Church must remain limited till it achieves the comprehensiveness for which its late President is standing.
I am very glad to see that the League of Nations Council is to take up the question of the status of foreign journalists in Geneva, for the Swiss Government has unfortunately taken to acting in such a way that protec- tion against it is urgently needed. Time was when two voices were there, one was of the sea, one of the moun- tains, each a mighty voice. What is more, " they were thy chosen voices, Liberty." There is nothing mighty about the voice of the mountains nowadays if any question of offending Fascism is involved ; it becomes then an all but inaudible twitter. Consequently when an anti-Fascist journalist named Signor a Prato, a member of the staff of the Journal des Nations, which is published at Geneva, incurred disapproval abroad on the ground of unsigned articles which he was supposed to have written, the Swiss Government revoked his permission to live in Switzerland, and he has to leave the country. Foreign journalists at Geneva have rightly protested against thr decision by every means in their power, and it is some- thing to have interested the League Council in the matter. For if liberty of speech and writing are to be denied under the very shadow of the Palais des Nations, their chance of survival anywhere is small.
As in private duty bound, and in the name of my own generation of Cambridge men, I must note with sorrow the death at Honolulu of the Rev. G. A. Johnston Ross. In the first decade of the century, when the Presbyterian's had " the Jag-rag " at St. Columba's Church, and the Congregationalists Dr. Selbie, later of Mansfield, ' at Emmanuel, Cambridge Free Churchmen could count on hearing as good a sermon every Sunday as any college chapel or Cambridge Church could offer. Johnston Ross, after a two-years' charge at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, forsook the pulpit for the lecture-room and held Professor- ships at Montreal and the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Bad health drove him in the end to Honolulu, where he died last week. He called his house there, like his house at Cambridge, Iona—strange linking of the misty island with the sunlit.
Noted in Passing "My position in'the House was further improved by a speech [in 1866] in which I insisted on the duty of paying off the National Dcbt before our coal supplies are exhausted." 'Autobiography of John Stuart Mill.
Jixt s.
Previous page
