Any Ministry of Information is as receptive a target as
St. Sebastian for arrows from any and every quarter. It is there to be shot at. If it escaped it could only be because it wasn't worth notice. But the Malet Street Ministry, with its succession of Ministers, Lord Macmillan, Lord Reith, Mr. Duff Cooper, Mr. Brendan Bracken, its simultaneous succession of Directors—General Sir Kenneth Lee, Mr. Frank Pick, Sir Walter Monckton, and its series of distinguished in-and-outs like Lord Camrose, has never had half a chance to settle on a steady keel. It is getting hard to believe that it ever will, until some small, sharp-nosed and summary committee is appointed to decide exactly what a Ministry of Information ought to do, and define once for all its relations with the other organs of publicity, some familiar, some nominally secret, which are absorbing a great deal of talent and a good deal of money and doing little to disturb Goebbels' sleep. Mr. Brendan Bracken has a great chance to make a fresh start. I predict that he will succeed notably or fail badly ; there will be no mere routine revolutions of the machine. The trouble is that what matters essentially is not the stopping or release of news at home, but quick and full releases abroad coupled with effective propa- ganda in foreign countries, particularly Germany, specially adapted to each country's special capacities for absorption. It is hard to believe that Mr. Bracken and Mr. Thurtk know half as much about foreign countries as Mr. Duff Cooper and Mr. Harold Nicolson. But they may have other virtues. V.
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