A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK I CANNOT help feeling rather sorry for Mr.
Attlee, his fellow-travellers and everyone connected with their excur- sion to the Far East—the editors who will have to do ;oniething with the articles they write, the correspondents who had to record the unexciting details of their not always very urbane progress, the hosts who had to put them through the glossy mill of totalitarian hospitality, and all the Americans who found in their journey a cause for indignation or alarm. A couple of decades ago, the Japanese (though they never landed such big fish) used to organise roughly similar goodwill tours in the hopes of advertising the benefits they were con- ferring on Manchuria; these always ended in tears. However carefully bear-led, the delegates were constantly finding, as Mr. Attlee and his friends did, skeletons in their hosts' cup- boards; and the fulsome attentions which they received were in marked contrast to the treatment accorded to less ephemeral British institutions in the area. It became, in the end, a little difficult for them to produce the expected encomiums on a brave new world; but there was one stock topic on which they could always fall back. 'Whatever else may be said against the new regime,' they used to insist, 'sanitary conditions have greatly improved. We saw hardly any flies.' This gambit seems to have worn well.
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