A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
LORD RUNCIMAN has a wonderful constitution and a virile hold on life—he has been looking forward to enter- taining a large party of friends on his yacht ' Sunbeam ' for the Coronation review at Spithead—but serious illness at the age of 89 cannot but provoke grave anxiety, nor fail to serve as a reminder of the translation to the Upper House which must by the nature of things in due course befall Mr. Walter Runciman. That consideration may play its part in the reconstruction of the Cabinet that will follow Mr. Baldwin's retirement, since it is generally accepted that the President of the Board of Trade must be a Member of the House of Commons. A change in that office would be important, for so far as can be seen any improvement in international relations must at the moment be affected by an economic rather than a political approach, and the President of the Board of Trade may therefore have as important a part to play as the Foreign Secretary. Mr. Runciman has been assiduous in negotiating bilateral trade treaties, but he torpedoed the Belgo-Dutch tariff-reduction agreement of 1932 and he is credited with some lack of enthusiasm for a trade treaty with America. A new President, of like spirit with Mr. Eden, might materially change the inter- national situation.
The Rothermere-Beaverbrook conflict over newsprint is a curious business, for it is hard to see what is to be gained by it in either camp—short of entering on speculations from which I deliberately restrain myself. Lord Rothermere and his papers should not on the face of it be worrying much about the price of newsprint, for their own requirements are supplied from their own mills in Newfoundland. But their every energy in the last few weeks has been devoted to " buffing " newsprint shares while Lord Beaverbrook's organs have been as assiduously " bearing " them. In the Daily Mail the argument has overflowed from the City Page into the leader columns, and an editorial in that journal last week (preceded by a leader-page article on the same subject) warned all and sundry to lay in stocks before the price soared higher still. The Beaverbrook papers meanwhile are insisting just as vigorously that newsprint shares have been forced up to levels for which there can be no reasonable warrant. All rather odd.
* * * * Listening to the broadcasts from Spain on a quiet evening in an English village is an odd and disturbing experience. On the one hand Radio Seville, with a firm guttural voice speaking in Spanish,without any interference, of insurgent victories at Cordoba and elsewhere ; on the other the Govern- ment broadcasts from Barcelona—very different ; first a Spaniard, then a German, then an Englishman, talking in a rather languid voice, like a B.B.C. announcer ; their voices contend with almost continuous interference, and after a time you realise that its intensity grows when particular subjects are mentioned. It was slight, for example, when the German, who was an excellent broadcaster, clear and per- suasive, merely gave news of the war ; it increased when he said, " Tomorrow is the birthday of Ernst Thaelmann, leader of the German Communist Party, who for four years has been in Hitler's prisons" ; it rose to a shriek, almost drowning his voice completely, when he spoke of religious freedom in Republican Spain and contrasted it with the persecution of the Catholics in Germany, and described the recent trial of priests in Berlin for high treason. It sounded like a machine-gun directed at the speaker. * * * * _ Good marks should be given where good marks are due, and one good mark at least must go to the Fascist regime in Italy, on the strength of an incident I heard of this week. An Englishman just back from Sicily had an interesting experience on chartering a car for an excursion there. Ha hired it through the local representative of a travel agency, who named a stiff price, which the visitor none the less paid. Shortly after his return from the trip he was accosted by a rather abashed agent who explained that through some miscalculation he had put the price too high, and returned about a third of what had been paid. It turned out that the bargain had been enquired into by a policeman, who saw to it that Signor Mussolini's orders that foreigners should not be fleeced were carried out. * * * * There is something impressively solemn and elaborate about the reasons given by the Foreign Office, the Admiralty, the Home Office and the rest of them to the St. Andrews Societies of London and Glasgow (the protest was dated St. Andrew's Day, 1935, and the Government Departments affected have therefore produced their answers in considerably under two years) for the use of " England " and " English " . where Scotsmen think " Britain " and " British " requisite. It is an old grievance and it will never disappear, for though you can and should say " Britain " where Britain is meant, there are cases where you really cannot say either " Briton " or " Britisher." " In spite of all temptations, To belong to other nations, He was "—a Britisher ? And could Henley have written "What have I done for thee, Britain, my Britain "?
* * * * A volume called The Road to War is, I see, announced as " by a group of writers overlapping, but not identical with, ' Vigilantes,' author of the famous Inquest on Peace." This raises my curiosity. How, in fact, do you overlap an author ? I have been overlapped by one more than once—Mr. Chesterton, for example. Is that what the new group have avoided doing? If so they were no doubt right.
* * * * Circular Progress
" Germany at present is in a very anomalous position. Her people are the best scholars in Europe, but they are without political freedom ; they know nothing practically
of representative self-government. . . . Government—paternal government—is carried to a revolting extent. Absolute ministers dictate to the people—a full-grown adult people—
what they shall read. Only a certain number of foreign news- papers can enter Prussia, the Press is submitted to censorship . . . Schonlein, Oken, Arnold—names which, pronounced
before a German student, make his countenance light up with recollections of glowing thoughts and revelations of Nature—
the most illustrious men have been driven, for liberal opinions, from their natural spheres—from the unnatural country, of which they were the glory, and are the shame."
Date is 1837. The quotation (reprinted in last week's Nature) is from the British Annals of Medicine of April 21st
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