I have been invited to voice the distress many readers
of that great paper, the Manchester Guardian, appear to feel at the departure its Election leaders—in particular the virulence of the attacks on the Prime Minister—have marked from the high traditions it has inherited. It is no part of my business to do that, but I do feel im- pelled to comment on what looks like a flagrant misinterpretation of
some famous words of Mr. Churchill's.
" Mr. Churchill," wrote the Guardian last Saturday, " has given the world phrases that will live, but one of his most-quoted passages will look wildly untrue in history. ' What we have we hold,' he said at a moment when the eyes of the world were on Britain. Could anything be farther from the truth? For the last twenty-five years the British people has been liquidating the most famous of its possessions."
Now this is sheer perversity. At the Mansion House in 1942 the Prime Minister, just after the landing in North Africa, made it crystal clear that we desired no territorial expansion there or any- where ; we coveted not a square yard of any other nation's territory ; on the other hand, we had no intention of transferring any of our own to other hands.
" We mean," he said, " to hold our own. I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire."
The meaning, in the context, or even without the context, is unmis- takable. There is not a particle of justification for the suggestion that Mr. Churchill was opposing the evolution of colonies to self- government, and even independence, nor is it possible to conceive how any reasonable person reading the speech could suppose he was. Did Great Britain " liquidate " South Africa when it conferred self- government on the conquered provinces?
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