A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE smashing news of the Austro-German Agreement broke upon the Cabiriet in an hour of extreme bewilderment. Mr. Eden had taken his week's rest as the Prime Minister was feeling most sorely the diffi- culty created by the several deliberate indiscretions of his colleagues, the effects of which, obviously, could not be removed by platform tributes from other Ministers. The situation of the present year imposed a plain duty upon all members of the Cabinet. They are serving under an admired Chief who comes under the once-famous description applied by Balfour to Sir Redvers Buller —" a good peace General." They are on the whole in earnest in wishing to keep him at the head through this compelling crisis. That being so, they ought to have seen to it that he was protected from careless or interested thinkings-aloud by important Ministers. Hitler's latest masterstroke, I understand, is by no means unwelcome to the stronger portion of the Cabinet, but who could say that it makes Mr. Baldwin's task any easier ? One thing, however, is incontrovertible. The Agreement, it may be hoped, brings the National Govern- ment a positive stage nearer to decision upon the crucial European issue. There is only one.
* * * * When the Postmaster-General ended his wireless talk on the new telephone scales, a few millions of his listeners were undoubtedly thinking : Why all this for a minority and nothing for a whole people paying postage ? The Post Office is making a splendid profit and the nation earns it with hardship. Our people write, and need to write, many more letters than of old. Families are scattered as they were not in Victorian times, and the population is far more mobile. The present rates amount to a severe tax upon the majority whose small earnings admit of no extras. The penny letter and the halfpenny postcard stand for a bare decent minimum, although successive Postmasters-General have not been able to see this. Why Major Tryon with his large surplus does not, I cannot say; but a reform is urgent and I offer a suggestion. If we cannot have the famous old boon, then a penny double postcard, or letter-card with open ends, is an obvious compromise which would be widely welcomed.
* * A career such as that of Dr. S. Parkes Cadman, of Brooklyn, N.Y., who died this week, would not be possible in England. He • was the son of a Shropshire miner and worked in the pit as a lad, made his way through a Wesleyan college and went to New York as a young preacher. He became thoroughly American, and a minister- citizen of national prominence. I came across him first in connexion with an enterprise that gave him a front place in American broadcasting. For many years he addressed a large Y.M.C.A. audience on Sunday afternoons and replied to questions. When radio arrived the meeting was put on the air, with the addition of a few answers to queries which came over the telephone during the address. The Cadman circuit comprised some fifty broadcasting stations. As programmes became crowded and air-time costly, the feature was transferred to a New York studio and became a formalised half-hour, with the questions selected and the answers typed in advance. Parkes Cadman was a dynamo, his energy as inexhaustible as his flow of words. The sentences poured out without pauses and with a swift, unvarying punch. His signature was not unknown in The Spectator.
* * * * Mr. Somerset Maugham the other evening had a little apologue in The Star. It was a variant of the familiar Oriental story concerning an inescapable rendez-vous with Death; it has given a title to an excellent American novel, Appointment in Samara. He told of a merchant's servant borrowing his master's horse to ride from Bagdad, where Death had caught sight of him, to Samara, where they were destined to meet. English readers know this ancient fable best as the Spanish Jew's tale in Longfellow's Wayside Inn, where the characters are King Solomon and Raja Runjeet Singh from India. The version I like best is that given by Mrs. Edith Wharton in her delightful reminiscences, A Backward Glance. She says that Cecil Spring-Rice, when a young secretary of legation, told it to her as a perfect story. He made it a terrified man demanding from the Sultan in Damascus his swiftest horse, for Death had threatened him in the courtyard and he must away to Baghdad. The same fatal upshot, of course ; the everlasting dilemma of determinism, as William James would have said.
* * * The merry war of the big circulations has been given a fresh start with the £1000 challenge to the Daily Herald by the Daily Express. Lord Beaverbrook's morning paper takes its stand upon a 2,100,000 record for June, and dares the Labour daily to show an accountant's strict figure in excess of this total. The Mail's acceptance of a modest third place is remarked upon by all journalists who knew Northcliffe. Two points in this excited and largely unreal contest seem to me worth particular mention. First, the intensive campaign for readers becomes con- tinually more difficult, and secondly, the builders of mass circulation take for granted that the millions can only be tempted by a chaotic sheet. And yet Northcliffe was a craftsman. He would have hated virtually every change in form and style brought into popular journalism during the past ten years.
It is agreed among those who attended the Inter- national Conference of Social Work, just ended in London, that praise for the success of a notable gathering belongs largely to the chairman. Dr. Rene Sands is emphatically what we mean when we speak of a good European. His amazing knowledge of the world and the men and women who are doing things was accumu- lated in the long period during which he directed the international League of Red Cross Societies. A Belgian by birth, there is no important language that he does not know and he seems equally at home in all. At this year's conference the delegates had before them a mass of testimony unlike. anything known to the social workers of the past—I mean the records of the remaking of man under the implacable pressure of the Totalitarian
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