17 FEBRUARY 1933, Page 6

Surprising, and possibly significant, as the now notorious vote of

the Oxford Union against fighting "for King and country" is, the one mistake of all mistakes is to

• get portentous about it. I can imagine nothing more portentous than the attempt to whip up old Oxford men to go in masses down to Oxford on some day in March and get the offending motion expunged or reversed. Surely we have heard enough of the country parsons who flock to Oxford and Cambridge, when some vital issue is up, to swamp the resident vote with non-placets. If the Union resolution is worth reversing I should have thought the job might well be left to undergraduates like those who carried it. When all this stir is made about a Union vote, episodes that would soon fall into oblivion get imprinted on the public mind.