A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK T HE various comments on the recall of
M. Maxim Litvinov from Washington rather ignore the fact that no announcement has yet been made as to what the nature of M. Litvinov's new work will be ; the interpretation to be placed on his transfer obviously depends to a considerable extent on that. As things stand two extreme explanations are possible. One is that in a desire to promote under- standing between Russia and Britain and America M. Molotov wants to have the Ambassadors with experience of both countries on the spot. The other is that to awaken Britain and America to a sense of realities the Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs has recalled his envoys in both countries and replaced them by less important men. This latter suggestion can pretty certainly be disregarded. M. Maisky at least has gone back to a really important post, and his return to Moscow means promotion. The same may or may not be true of M. Litvinov ; we do not yet know. As to relations between this country and Russia, that certain differences exist is no secret, but they are not serious, and the assumption that in regard to them all the right is on Russia's side and all the wrong on ours is as inaccurate as it is perverse. There are likely, moreover, to be various opportunities in the near future of making contact and achieving understanding, quite apart from the possible visit of Mr. Eden to Moscow. Various conversations are likely, quite apart from the major tripartite conference foreshadowed in the Quebec communiqué.
* * * * The huge circulation of Mr. Wendell Willkie's book Our World is no doubt due to the way he chose to have it published. There is a cloth-bound edition, of which zoo,000 were sold within a month of publication, but what raised the total sales-figure to over a million in the same period was the one-dollar paper-bound edition, of which 805,000 were sold. (That was up to May 8th of this year ; the figure has been vastly exceeded by this time.) This paper edition is, by our ideas of book publishing, a curious affair, for it is roughly the same size as The Spectator and runs to 8o pages of reading-matter. I calculate that the number of words is well under 70,000, which is less than one would expect for a book of this kind. The extent of the sales can be well understood, for a man who within 49 days has seen and talked with General Montgomery at El Alamein, Marshal Stalin at Moscow, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and a host of lesser people at intermediate points of call must have a story to tell—and Mr. Willkie tells it straightforwardly and well. Inciden- tally he has enlarged my knowledge of the English (or American) language. " The greatest factor," he writes on his last page, " has been the fact that by the happenstance of good fortune. . . ." I see what he means, but why not just " by good fortune."
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It is quite impossible to measure the loss to sane Christianity, to religious unity, to Christian missions, to Christian internationalism, to Anglo-Indian and Anglo-American friendship and understanding, resulting from the sudden death of Dr. William Paton from an operation while on holiday. Paton possessed a combination _of qualities as rare as it is effective,—fundamental convictions and deep earnestness, a lively sense of humour, running when occasion called for it to a timely touch of irreverence, a basic. horror of religious clichés and empty phrases, a statesmanlike grasp of the limits of the possible as a stepping-stone to the realisation of the ideal. To this journal in particular the loss is great. Paton had
written constantly for The Spectator, and would certainly have been called on to write constantly again, for on certain subjects no one else was likely to be as shrewd, as well-informed or as construc- tive. At 57 he had put very considerable achievement to his credit. But his influence and authority would have told more in the next ten years or so than ever before.
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I cannot feel that the institution of a Battle of Britain Sunday is a particularly happy -thought. To set apart two Sundays in one month for our commemorations seems a little excessive. September 5th is, as usual, and rightly, to be regarded as a special Day of Prayer as the fifth year of the war opens. Surely petitions and thanksgivings can be sufficiently comprehensive then to embrace the anniversary of the Battle of Britain three weeks later. Is, more- over, the Battle of Britain Sunday, which was not, so far as I remember, observed in 1941 and 1942, to be henceforward an annual fixture? If the, leaders of the Churches feel strongly that Sundays should be so allocated and have proposed it spontaneously the wisdom of their decision can be respected, though, so far as I am concerned, the respect is divorced from enthusiasm. If the pro- posal comes from other quarters, not commonly concerned with church services and Sunday observances, doubts as to the wisdom of the proposal increase. I know, of course, that, technically, it is the King who has appointed the commemoration, but that- is the way such announcements are always made. And in any case it would not be lese nutieste to differ from the King on such a_matter.
* * * * From the vantage-point created by a seniority of fifteen years— the difference between 1828 and 1843—I congratulate the Economist wholeheartedly on the completion of its hundred years. It is a paper with great traditions, which it maintains in all respects today, expressing its views fearlessly, backing them with accurate knowledge, and coming as near to making abstruse economic and financial questions palatable to the general reader as the nature of such things permits. Founded in the anti-Corn Law interest in 1843, the Economist had among its earlier editors Bagehot (with Sir Robert Giffen as assistant) and Sir Robert Palgrave, and among its latei.Mr. Hartley Withers and Sir Walter Layton. The present editor, Mr. Geoffrey Crowther, promises to go as far as any of them: Bagehot as editor of the Economist, and Hutton as editor of The Spectator were close friends. In a competition between their luxuriant beards the -honours would have gone to Hutton. (In a similar contest today the editors of both journals would start level, from scratch, with the odds, I fancy, in favour of Gower Street.) * * * * I have never felt much temptation to meddle with stars. They are something completely beyond me. That conviction is consider- ably strengthened by an article by the Astronomer-Royal which I read in last week's Sunday Express. Sir Harold Spencer Jones there mentions casually that " the nearest known star is 25,000,000,000,000 miles distant. There are stars in our Milky Way system at such great distances that their light takes about too,000 years to reach us, and distant universes are known whose light takes 5oo,000,000 years to reach us." I have quoted Addison once or twice lately. I wonder what he would have thought if someone had told him that what he described as " the spacious firmament on high " 'meant
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