A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
HAS the Hiss trial ended or not ? The trial that has been in progress for over a month at Washington has certainly ended, the jury having failed to agree and letting it be known that four of them were for Hiss and eight tgainst ; a re-trial is not quite certain. So far it has been one of the most remarkable court cases in the history of any democratic country—on the one side Alger Hiss, young, able, intelligent, distinguished former Harvard graduate, State Department official, present in a high position at the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences at which the United Nations took shape, personal assistant to President Roosevelt at Yalta, now charged with having turned over copies of secret State documents to one Whittaker Chambers for transmission to the Soviet Government. On the other side Whittaker Chambers, former Communist, self-confessed perjurer, now an editor of Henry Luce's well-known magazine Time. Whit- taker Chambers was the sole witness for the prosecution, Chambers and an old Woodstock typewriter, alleged to be the machine with which the documents were copied, and admitted to have belonged at one time to Hiss—though up till what time was the vital and violently contested question. And the jury have come down eight to four against Hiss. From what I have read of the case I should have been with the four. A legal friend with great experience tells me he would be with the eight. An American friend who knows Hiss personally says the thing is incredible, but—. On one point there can be general agreement. The Manchester Guardian, in finding anything up to two columns a day for the brilliant reports of the trial its American correspondent Alistair Cooke has been sending, has shown a sense of "copy-value" curiously unique.
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