Stk — In your issue of November 17th you print a letter
from a gentleman In a vicarage who says that a Conservative Prime Minister in 1935 subordinated, on the eve of a General Election, national to party interests, avowing in November, 1936, that, if he'd gone to the country then on the necessity of rearmament, this pacific democracy would not have rallied to that cry, and that nothing could have made the loss of the election more certain.
Mr. Baldwin was speaking not of the election which was held in the autumn of 1935 but of a hypothetical election which might (perhaps ought) to have been held in 1933. He made that perfectly plain at the time, and it has since been made plain (often enough, one would have hoped) in reply to slanderous or negligent politicians or journalists.
Anyone who is sufficiently interested in this subject to make public pronouncements about it, and who. may find Hansard difficult to expound, should get hold of the Cambridge Journal for November, 1948.—Yours.
[The point was fully dealt with in an article in the Spectator of January 21st, 1949.—En., Spectator.]
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