A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE man who once summed up Mr. Chamberlain as " quite a good Lord Mayor of Birmingham—in a lean year " might perhaps be disposed today to reconsider his verdict. The House of Commons speech on Wednesday will stand as one of the great utterances of all history. Nothing could have been simpler or more unadorned ; in that it resembled Grey's speech of August 3rd, 1914. Nothing could have been more human. Nothing could have been more unassuming. Compare the use of the personal pronoun " I " in the Chamberlain speech and the Hitler speech in the Sport Palast on Monday. If from the speech half a dozen sentences leap to the eye and impress themselves on the mind that is due to their content, not their form. And yet the very simplicity of the words gives them sometimes an unintended emphasis. As supreme example of that I would select this first : " Thereupon Herr Henlein fled to Germany." To which may be added, among those I have underlined in red for my own convenience, " Herr Hitler declared categorically that rather than wait he would be prepared to risk a world war." " I have no doubt looking back that my visit alone prevented an invasion, for which everything was ready." Mr. Chamberlain was manifestly striving throughout to be studiously fair to Herr Hitler. Actually a more damning indictment of a national leader can rarely have been drafted. * * * * Herr Hitler in his speech on Monday has dramatised the threatened carnage as a conflict between himself and Dr. Benes. It is a sound instinct—and Dr. Benes could ask nothing better. The believer in brute force is pitted against the believer in reason and discussion. Herr Hitler is a man of the people—and he is none the worse for that—but Dr. Benes happens to be both a man of the people and a man of knowledge and culture. He is a linguist and can talk with equal facility with Englishmen and Frenchmen and Germans in their own language—an achievement which opens to him possibilities of exchange of thought and enlargement of experience quite unknown to the German Chancellor. As for personality, the public declarations of the two men are on record. You may prefer vituperation, mendacity, hysteria, vulgarity ; or you may prefer dignity, restraint, courage, and objectivity. Whichever your choice, you know from which man to get it. Nothing could be truer than that " two men face each other ; there is Herr Benes and here am I ; and we are two different men." It might have been added with equal truth that each of the two men precisely typifies the bearing and demeanour of his followers.
* * * * Light on the realities of the international situation comes from unexpected quarters. There has just reached my desk a propaganda booklet, produced in English and printed and published in Vienna, on the grievances of the Sudeten Germans. It contains a foreword written by Karl Frank, one of the more extreme of Herr Henlein's lieutenants. In his first sentence he sets out the Sudeten Germans' demands ; as follows : " As is universally known three things are at present claimed by the Sudeten Germans, complete self- government as far as their own affairs are concerned, adequate participation in political decisions affecting the whole of the State, reparation of the wrong done to them in the past in moral, cultural and economic aspects." About secession, about the transfer of territory, not one word. That is a Hitler demand ; it was never, till Hitler so ordained it, a Sudetendeutsch demand. Herr Frank's foreword is dated July 1st, 1938—less than three months ago.
* * * * As was expected, the plans for the evacuation of elementary school-children from London are being seriously obstructed by the unwillingness of the parents to let their children be evacuated. The gregariousness of the wage-earners and their families is a strange thing. You may not know your next-door neighbour, but there is a sensation of neighbours all round you, and in most homes it is unusual not to share a bed and abnormal not to share a room. Separation, and an excursion into the unknown, is a formidable adventure, to be faced only under powerful persuasion—for in this case compulsion would be a trespass on parents' rights. With secondary schools it is quite another story. A certain public school on the outskirts of a vulnerable city proposes to migrate in case of war. Not a parent or a boy has made objection, and of a minority of dayboys fully half have asked to become boarders that they may go where the school goes.
* * * * The difficulty about such migrations is, of course, that the remoter countryside is not richly stocked with vacant buildings capable of housing three or four hundred boys—possibly for months or years. There is also a financial side, if existing buildings have to be left vacant and new ones paid for. In the case I have mentioned the difficulty was disposed of rather surprisingly. The school buildings were discreetly advertised in a " To Let " column, with little hope of any response at all. Actually, applications came at once from banks and business houses of different kinds anxious to move from the city's centre to some ten miles further out. On the same principle a leading firm of London brokers has informed its clients that in the event of war it will transfer its business to a small office with a skeleton staff in a country town. * * * * Commercial firms are not usually discussed in this column, but even in their case it is permissible now and then to drop a wreath on a grave. And when I hear that the firm of Cuthbertsons', the hatters, has gone, it touches my head as well as my heart. Cuthbertsons' had existed for two hundred years. Its hats were good hats ; I have worn many of them, and for a very sufficient reason. They had a branch at the eastern end of the Strand, close to Fleet Street, and they used to give Fleet Street journalists, of whom I once was one, a special discount—whether in recognition of journalists' intrinsic virtues or of their perennial indigence I need not speculate. Anyhow, they did it. I grieve to think that their liquidation may be partly due to their indulgence to me and others. jANUS.
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