A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
SUNDAY, November 22nd, will be Salvage Day in the churches throughout the cotintry. On that day "congregations will be urged to save every scrap." A gentleman connected with the Ministry of Supply apparently preached at St. Martin-in-the-Fields last Sunday on a text of his own devising, running :
Whatsoever a man wastes, that shall he lose, and he shall lose more than he wastes, and his children's children shall lose after him, —which does not seem an appreciable improvement on the New Testament. It is lamentable and astonishing that the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Hinsley, if they have really given their blessing to this movement, as is stated in the Press, should be willing to proffer the pulpits of the churches of the coun- try for advertisement campaigns for this or that Government department. No one can charge the churches with failing to support the war-effort to the full, but the Church's sphere is pre-eminently the spiritual sphere, its message is pre-eminently spiritual, and to preach eternal truths in season and out of season is the greatest service it can render to the nation today. Saving scraps, shorter socks, fuel targets and the rest chime singularly ill with such a mission. There is an elaborate apparatus of publicity for such things elsewhere. The churches will only at the best play a very minor part in it. The professional propagandists can do it ten times better.
"I preached as never sure to preach again, And as a dying man to dying men" —on scraps and scrapings. If the churches choose to make them- selves submissive adjuncts to the Government publicity machine, the public will estimate them accordingly—and deservedly.
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A recent issue of the New York Nation contains the report of an interview with Mr. Gandhi, which incidentally throws an instruc- tive light on the vagaries of that singular man's policies. "Shortly after the collapse of the Cripps talks," it is stated, "Gandhi announced his 'British Must Go' demand. He told me that it came to him suddenly in the night as he lay in his bed under the stars in Sevagram village." This is curious ; it is the sort of thing that is said to happen to Hitler ; and one would imagine that the revelation would have a powerful compulsive force. Not at all. Mr. Gandhi promptly turned the disclosure into a slogan and launched it on India to work effectively for ill, but then "followers and friends argued with Gandhi and convinced him, and after a brief period he announced publicly that he had altered his views.". So evanescent was the nocturnal impulse. That, of course, is the real trouble about Mr. Gandhi. He is perpetually altering his views. Anybody, from Mr. Amery to Mr. Pollitt, who wants• a useful quotation from Mr. Gandhi to clinch an argument with can get one in five minutes out of Harijan or some recent public speech. There is still some mystery, by the way, about Sir Stafford Cripps' statement in the House last week that Mr. Gandhi had been responsible for the rejection of the Cripps proposals by Congress, and denials of that allegation from India. Professor Coupland, who was in Delhi at the time, wrote some months ago regarding the causes of the breakdown: "First, there was Mr. Gandhi. That he was against a settlement is virtually certain." However that may be, the argument that Mr. Gandhi could not have been responsible for the breakdown because he had left the Congress conference before the breakdown happened is far from convincing. India has an admirable telephone-system and the
Mahatma by no means abjures such modern inventions. * *
Mr. Harold Nicolson's disclosures regarding agents provocateurs acting for Government Departments, as set out in one of his recent Marginal Comment articles in The Spectator, have, I see, been made the subject of questions and answers in the House of Commons. There is, of course, here one really difficult question. Rationing departments like the Ministry of Food and the Board of Trade have an obligation, in the interests of general equity, to discover infringements of their regulations and bring the offenders to trial or take other action against them. How can they get evidence to sustain convictions? Clearly they must employ agents. Clearly the agents cannot be uniform ; they must obviously act as ordinary members of the public. Quite as clearly they must in no circum- stances incite shopkeepers or anyone else to break the law, and it is due to the Board of Trade in particular to say that its instructions to its agents regarding that are explicit. Some cases are simple. If, for example, a couple of Ministry of Food agents, as the result of information received, go to a restaurant, order dinner, say they will only drink water, and are told that dinner is not served without wine (an illegal condition), they have perfectly legitimately acquired the evidence they needed. But suppose they are given to under- stand that a certain establishment is notoriously lax in its handling
of coupons, what then? To investigate without inciting is not easy. * * * *
The episode of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse and his broadcasts from Berlin in the middle of last year is pretty much forgotten now, and no one, I suppose, knows where Mr. Wodehouse now is or what he is doing. The fullest story I have seen of the broadcast affair appears in the latest of the books written by American correspon- dents in the German capital, Assignment to Berlin, by Harry W. Flannery, published this week (Joseph, I2S. 6d.) Mr. Flannery speaks with knowledge, for he was representing the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, and he put Mr. Wodehouse "on the air" quite legitimately, of course, before the Nazis. He fully con- firms the assertions of many of Wodehouse's friends that the novelist was completely naive, and devoid of any political sense. Why shouldn't he broadcast on the German radio? he asked Flannery. Flannery tried to explain. "But ' we ' are not at war with Ger- many," he protested—for Wodehouse apparently regarded himself as an American, though he had (characteristically) neglected to get naturalised. He had not, according to Flannery, been in England for seventeen years. His one concern about his broadcasts was whether they would be likely -to injure the sale of his books in Britain and the United States. Flannery told him bluntly that they probably would. And I have no doubt they have. * * * * Mr. Justice Birkett was the speaker last Sunday at the very popular monthly conference on "Christianity and Life" at Cares Lane Church, Birmingham. His address, on " Law " in that connexion, produced a heavy crop of questions, one of the more searching running : "Before Assizes the judges attend an Assize Service; are the prisoners invited, too?" "No," replied Sir Norman at once.
"No. Only the judges. They need it more." PICUS.
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