A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
EVEX. allowing for everything the ' Queen Mary ' is and stands for, the public interest and enthusiasm over her passage from the dock to the ocean, after a couple of adventures that might have had serious consequences, is astonishing in its volume. It is not simply a question of mere bigness; though " the world's greatest " anything is an incitement to excitement in itself. (And apparently the Normandie ' has succeeded in adding on to her- self a few feet that make her longer than ' Queen Mary'.) But for that matter, The Times has been at pains to insist that so far from being the biggest and fastest vessel the constructor's art could devise, the Queen Mary ' is the smallest and slowest that would do the job assigned to her—which is to carry out one-half of a two-ship weekly Atlantic service on a paying basis. It is almost suggested that the constructors feel actual distress that their modest aims should result in such inflation. But what gives the new ship her real appeal is the hope that she will regain the Atlantic record for this country, as the gallant Mauretania ' did close on 30 years ago. There is a sporting element in that, and emulation in the arts of peace is always wholesome. As for the Queen Mary's ' first transatlantic voyage, felix atque frustum sit, and no doubt it will be. Yet I can never forget—ill-omened though it seems to recall it—when any vast liner starts her career, the evening paper posters in the Strand on an April day in 1912 telling of the tragedy of a maiden voyage in the two stark words " TITANIC SINKING."
* * * The action of the Dean and Chapter in omitting prayers for the Cabinet at the people's service at Liverpool Cathedral on Sunday night, and then, lest the omission should pass unnoticed, calling attention to it and ex- plaining it in a kind of minor manifesto, is a strange aberration. Do Ministers need prayers at all ? And if so, do they need them most when they arc going right or when they are going wrong ? I should have thought the latter. But the Dean and Chapter evidently think not, for they are convinced that Ministers are wrong, and therefore they stop praying for them. The Arch- bishops and other Bishops and clergy arc on much firmer ground when in their letter to the Prime Minister on the international situation they include the sentence "Remembering your great responsibilities, they offer you the further assurance of their prayers." I have not seen the actual liturgy used at the people's service at Liverpool, but if, as nuist surely be the case, the prayer for Ministers is that they may be rightly guided by God, what, conceivably, can the purpose of its omission be ? Do the Dean and his colleagues mean that Ministers arc literally past praying for ? Their action has provoked many reflections about prayer—and the wisdom or otherwise of mixing prayer and politics. I am glad the Bishop of Liverpool has dissociated himself from it.
A comment from Nuremberg : " If British and Italian troops do come to the Rhineland, the German police -ought to be strong enough to keep them apart." Public opinion is a strange thing, always difficult to gauge accurately, yet something of which every Govern- ment has to take careful account. Views expressed in leading articles are less important than the fact that at the cinemas (so I am told) the picture of Baron von Ribbentrop arriving at Croydon is greeted with cheers. Why ? No doubt because he is thought to bring an offer of peace. And because Herr Hitler is talking peace, even though he commits at the same time what is half-way to an act of war, and the French seem to boggle at it, this country is definitely more pro-German than pro-French. (Yet the idea of the Germans getting possession of the Channel ports would cause as much alarm today as it would have any time the last fifty years ; no one has lost a wink of sleep because the French hold them.) The passion for peace can never have been as strong in this country. That at a time when unemployment on the two-million scale seems a permanency it should be impossible to recruit the army up to strength is an astonishing fact. Nothing is more essential for the world than the spirit of peace. When it is sufficiently diffused we shall hardly need a collective system. But till it is, even the most peaceable countries must be ready to do their part in making the collective system work.
* * * * There is one step which Mr. Eden, as a Foreign Secretary whose belief in the League of Nations no one questions, might with advantage find some tactful way of taking. That is the despatch to British Ambassadors and Ministers abroad of a reminder that their attitude towards the League should be so far as possible what the Foreign Minister's and the Government's is. There are in all diplomatic services by this time men who know the League at first-hand and believe in it—the British Ambassadors at Rome and Nanking, the Italian Ambassadors in London and Berlin, are cases in point. But in the British service there are still too many men in prominent positions whose general tendency is to refer with polite contempt to " the Geneva show," or " these people at Geneva." That kind of attitude, particularly in the case of a diplomat who happens to be accredited to a country lukewarm about the League, is singularly unfortunate, for Geneva is not the only place where a British lead counts for much.
* * * * The emergence of the Oxford Group Movement in House of Lords' debates twice in a week is not without its interest.
" In the words used by a great movement in this country today, what were wanted were God-guided personalities, to make God-guided nationalities to make a new world."—LORD SALISBURY, March 19th.
" We should consider ourselves as stewards en- trusted by the Father of the family of nations to administer our resources for the benefit of every member of that family according to the needs of each, and in accordance with His principles and His LORD ADDINGTON (a Group adherent), March 25th. JANUS.
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