`FREEDOM' MOVEMENTS .
SIR,—As a young man, I was for some years a leader writer on a well-known, and still respected, Liberal newspaper. One night our Berlin correspondent, having, I suppose, nothing else to do with his time, attended a 'demonstration' harangued by an Austrian agitator newly arrived in the capital. His report was amusing and we printed it; the Austrian's invective against `the Jews,' and others, had been picturesque, and the whole affair entertainingly stage-managed—although (our correspondent concluded) it was difficult to believe that this mountebank could have any effect at all on solid, sensible German opinion, in the country of Goethe, Heine, etc., and, of course, Stresemann, etc.
This memory came back to me when I read the comments of Pharos on the People's League for the Defence of Freedom—to which I do not belong. I cannot help feeling that instead of sneering at the possible sources of its funds (a hackneyed method of denigration of any movement not supported by the war- chests of the established parties) Pharos would be better occupied in asking himself just why the League, and other similar movements (the Society for Individual Freedom, the Middle- Class Union of Mr. Price, MP, Sir Docker's 'Cut-the-Costs Campaign,' etc.), ha recently come to the fore in Britain.
Mr. Edward Martell is no aspirant Hitler. nor (I fancy) is M. Poujade. But the conditions in Britain and France today have—can any" one deny it?—some resemblance to those in the Germany of 1931-32, under which the middle classes and the skilled artisans were ' being steadily ruined and the established parties had neither the nerve nor the wit OW even the will) to do anything about it. Pharos quotes 'a politician' as saying that the People's League might be, 'dangerous. Dangerous? What to? His chances of being re-elected.—Yours faithfully,
vc
Reform Club, Pall Mall, SW 1
JOHN PRINGI
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