29 OCTOBER 1943, Page 12

THE ELEVENTH HOUR

Sta,—I would certainly take no exception to Professor Brogan's reasoned and indeed good-humoured reply to my attack on him tor his book- review in The Spectator of Professor Laski's latest volume ; and it is generous of him to inform me that the Manchester Guardian also objects to the intellectual sanguinariness of this academic revolutionist. After all, I don't think Laski cuts much ice in this country, but unfortunately in America he is accepted as an authentic exponent of British Labour principles, which he certainly is not.

Professor Brogan's reply is almost wholly confined to criticising the literary construction of my letter—an easy task!—but leaves the impres- sion that in the enjoyment of this legitimate diversion he has forgotten the one real vital point -which is at issue. May I assure him that the dilemma in which he is so confident he has placed me in his concluding paragraphs is entirely of his own creation? For by no process of logic known to me dces my rejection of the affirmation that " the mass of the human race is no longer content' to take gratefully what the dominant classes are ready to give to it," thrust me into the obligation of accepting the counter-affirmation that " the mass of the human race is still content to take gratefully what the dominant classes are ready to give it."

I dare not trespass further on your space to reply to your correspondent Mr. Hugh W. Peck, unless it be to observe that I do not quite know what to make of so sportive a gentleman, who yet holds that the responsible Government of the day commits a foul in dispossessing a highwayman of his weapons when he holds up the nation at the point of his pistols!—