A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
* * * There can be no doubt at all of the most significant utterance in Parliament this week. It was the Chancellor of the Exchequer's acknowledgement that there is no reason to regard Mr. Churchill's oft-repeated estimate of German rearmament as excessive. His figure is £800,000,000 for the current year, or £1,500,000,000 for the past three years. In other words, the Reich is spend- ing an annual sum certainly not less than the combined arms budgets of three other Great Powers. Consider what this admission by the Government does for Mr. Churchill and his standing in the country. For two years or so he has stated and restated his case in a manner that makes a notable contrast to the recklessness of his assault on the India Bill. He has been consistently powerful and brilliant, and now the Cabinet confesses that he is accurate. We cannot minimise the importance of this development, and I will make my own guess that it marks the opening of a decisive new stage. Since the Critical date in March the importance of Mr. Churchill has steadily increased. Hitherto he has been looked upon as, in the greater matters, unlucky. Who would care to assert that this will count against him tomorrow ? • * * But the stars, after all, may not be in favour of Mr.
Churchill. If there is one assumption made on all sides of our politics today it is that the National Govern- ment is immovable, no alternative being in anywise discernible. England, however, without an alternative Government has always been spoken of as unimaginable, and I suggest that it might be well to face the possibility that within the next two or three years the country may be driven by events to make a Coalition of the Left and Left-Centre. We have, needless to say, to pre- suppose a Popular Front, and if so, why not take for granted that such an alternative Government could at least compare in ability with the Baldwin Cabinet ? I throw in a few names : Mr. Herbert Morrison, Mr. A. V. Alexander, Mr. Attlee, Mr. Noel Baker, Sir Herbert Samuel, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Sir Arthur Salter, Sir Josiah Stamp. There would, of course, be strong support for Mr. Lloyd George as Lord President, and no doubt Lord Lothian would have his backers. The net would have to be thrown well beyond the circle of men now in politics, and new peerages would be inescapable. * * The lamentable exhibition in the House on the day of the Means Test debate afforded the best argument we have had this year for a drastic reform in procedure. I can see no justification for keeping up the old practice in shaping administrative policy of this important kind. The new rules, of course, were already common property, but the Minister of Labour was resolved to cover the fizld, and being Mr. Ernest Brown he could not refrain from provoking the Labour Party at every turn of his able speech. Mr. Brown knew what he was in for, and the House got what it expected ; but this does not alter the fact that an opportunity for a debate on essentials was largely . missed. The occasion was properly one for exposition and reasoned attack and defence. As things fell out, one • came away with a reinforced conviction that parliamentary method must be changed or else the Mother of Parliaments, like so many of heruffspring, will be lost. The Scottish Members, by the by, have not a little to say on this head. They tried a meritorious experiment on their own- account last week by means of a, self-imposed fifteen-minutes limit, and what happened:? The Front Bench was not responsive, and the newspapers rewarded them by giving a meagre report of their day.
* * * I am interested in the announcement, following the appointment of a receiver, that Mudie's Library is to continue its service. This is the oldest institution of the kind. Victorian London -knew its founder in private life as the earnest lay minister of a little mission chapel near Victoria Station. Hence nobody was surprised that C. E. Mudie should insist upon keeping the word " select " in the title of his library. It meant, of course, a limitation that could not be kept up against modern competition. London today is remarkably well supplied with library facilities, but curiously enough in the organisation of a distributing system it is a long way behind other great cities I could name—New York for one. I have often wondered at this, and particularly at the failure of the larger companies to provide them- selves with additional offices of call. Here, for instance, is Charing Cross, the centre of what is, I suppose, the most numerous class of professional and office workers in the world, nearly all of them potential subscribers. And yet nowhere within easy reach of Nelson's column is there a branch library where one can see the new books and leave one's order for the day.
The Poet Laureate's memory was at fault in the matter of Thomas Carlyle's penmanship when he awarded the Galsworthy prizes for handwriting to London boys and girls at the County Hall. Mr. Masefield told a story about a printer who fled from Edinburgh to escape Carlyle's manuscript and then had the ill luck of having to handle more of it in London. But there was hardly a man of letters during last century who wrote a more distin- guished hand than Carlyle, Froude, who notes that he altered it in later life, lays emphasis upon the beauty and clearness of the earlier script. The letters preserved in the house at Ecclefechan are all a pleasure to the eyei • * * Mr. Angus Watson's question as to what I meant by " American mechanisni " at the Group meeting is very simply answered. It is an American rather than an English practice to furnish the Press at a meeting of this kind with typed copies of the speeches. In such circumstances they must be lacking in spontaneity. A correspondent last week accused me of " sickening national snobbishness " for making mention of this difference. * * * * I learn that the disappointment over the Queen Mary' which since the first return voyage has found expression in the Press, is not reflected in the considered view of the responsible authorities. They are confident of removing the two recognised defects—the turbines, and the shower of grime from which the tourist passengers have suffered. Wait, they . say, till September for
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