4 OCTOBER 1935, Page 6

It is comforting to be so often in agreement with

Mr. Garvin. Last week we found common. ground on dogs ; this week we are at one on men. For there can be no two opinions about the youth of Mr. Eden. " When young Mr. Eden," says Mr. Garvin, " was appointed Minister for League Affairs and began to magnify his function ; when he went to Rome with the ambitious idea of mobilising the League at need against an obdurate Duce . . ."--why, then, of course, all the fat was in the fire. How true. And how sedative a simplification of the issue. All the mischief coming from the fact that Mr. Eden—young Mr. Eden—was born in 1897 and can no longer get his .head into a hat the size, say, of Mr. Churchill's. Here is this Mr. Eden—young Mr. Eden—no more than 14 years older than Pitt was when he became Prime Minister, going about negotiating with foreign statesmen at Geneva and all sorts of places, with no one on earth to hold him in check except a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary and nineteen other Cabinet colleagues, and some 20 odd million electors.. The trouble is that they are not even trying to stop him. They show every sign of backing him up. That being so, should we after all be much better off if young Mr. Eden were as old as Mr. Rockefeller ?