Mr. Beck, in defending the Government, declared that the Office
of Works admitted that the sums paid to Mr. Meyer were large, but that " the sums saved to the country by Mr. Meye•'s services were infinitely larger." That, of course, is the best line of defence. The timber had to be obtained in hurry, and if it was got quickly and of a good quality through Mr. Meyer's services it would be absurd to grudge him his profit. At the same time, we do not wonder that there is some doubt expressed whether Mr. Meyer, whom nobody seems to have heard of before the war, was really l'homme neeessaire, the one man who could provide the Government with what they wanted. We should have thought that it would have been much better to get together the heads of all the big timber firms and tell them to act as a kind of public syndicate for the supply of timber to the Government under a tempting but not exaggerated scale of profit.
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