The conference of .Liberal editors that has been held in
London this week has, I should judge, been very valuable. The editors, twenty-four of them, have come from thirteen different countries, and some of them, like M. Erkko, of Finland, occupy vantage-points of peculiar strategic importance for a journalist. The most important of the older papers represented was the Neue Ziircher Zeitung, with its fine literary tradition, and that notable French provincial journal La Dipeche de Toulouse. Nothing could have been more impressive than the speech, at a dinner given by the News Chronicle on Tuesday, by the editor and proprietor of the Depiche, M. Albert Sarraut, a former Prime Minister of France. In quiet, unimpassioned tones he told of what he had to contend against during the Vichy regime, how later his brother and colleague was murdered and he himself thrown into a concentration camp, while the paper itself was seized by the Communists, from whom it--has only recently been recovered. To the British editors, whose chief sufferings have been from paper-shortage, that restrained recital in a hotel dining-room made a profound effect.
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