A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is a pity that General de G'aulle's broadcast should have had to be cancelled last Sunday, and a greater pity that publicity should have been given to the fact in the House of Commons. No one is in a position to judge whether the decision was right or wrong unlesi he knows what General de Gaulle had intended to say and—at least equally important—what were the considerations which made the Prime Minister and Mr. Eden feel that it had better not be said. But if one assumption or the other must be made it is that Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eden were right. The delicacy and complexity of the various relationships existing in North Africa is obvious to everyone, and must be a great deal more obvious to members of the War Cabinet, with all the knowledge they have at their disposal. No one is entirely happy about the position and attitude of Admiral Darlan, M. Nogues and M. Boisson; and, as President Roosevelt clearly indicated, all that will have to be regularised in due course. But it has to be recognised that both Darlan and Boisson have, so to say, delivered the goods, and very substantial goods indeed. If they had acted differently the initial fighting might have been seriously prolonged, at heavy cost to life on both sides. In any case all North Africa is a field of military operations, and General Eisenhower is in supreme command there. It is of the first im- portance that nothing should go out from London which would cause him the smallest embarrassment at what is still a critical phase. General de Gaulle is naturally anxious lest a movement in possible rivalry to the Fighting French should evolve in Africa. In that all sympathy will be with him. But on whether and how far that issue can be raised at this moment without detriment British Ministers must retain the right to decide.
* * * * Whether Sir Stafford Cripps possesses the administrative ability essential in a Minister of Aircraft Production remains to be revealed. A distinguished lawyer once said to me, "lawyers are never good administrators ; their training doesn't fit them for it." But there have been conspicuous exceptions, like Lord Haldane, and Sir Stafford may quite well be another. He was virtually the manager (actually the assistant-superintendent) of one of the largest explosive factories in the country during the last war. He took a brilliant science degree at University College, where he worked under Sir William Ramsay, and was, I believe, the youngest man of his time to read a paper before the Royal Society. * * * *
Whether the Beveridge Report will be published by the time these lines appear, what it will contain and how far I shall venture to disagree with it—none of these things do I know or profess to know. But it is opportune at least to draw attention to its author's quite remarkable qualifications for the work entrusted to him. He began life in London, after his brilliant Oxford career, studying social conditions from Toynbee Hall, of which he became sub-warden, at the same time writing leaders on social questions in the Morning Post. (He was succeeded there, strangely enough, by his brother-in- law, Prof. R. H. Tawney.) He was Director of Labour Exchanges (which he may be said to have created) for seven years, till the middle of the last war, when he went to the Ministry of Munitions to handle employment questions, before moving up to be Permanent.Secretary of the Ministry of Food. As Director of the London School of Economics from 1919 10 1937 he was studying the theoretical side
of social questions in every field and at the same time dealing with some of them very practically as Chairman of the Unemployment Insurance Statutory Committee. His book on unemployment, first published in 1909, has remained a classic ever since. Amid such activities it may well be forgotten that he has been Master of Uni- versity College, Oxford, for the last five years. * * * * I see that Dr. John Orr, speaking at Edinburgh last week, has so spolten as to stimulate the interest in the cure of cancer aroused by Lord Horder's rather optimistic reference to the subject not long before. There is no doubt that a great deal has been added to the world's knowledge of cancer in the last twenty years, but there is still no agreement among the chief authorities about its cause and cure. I suppose the theory of Dr. Gye and others that cancer is caused by a filtrable virus holds the field, though the conviction that it is an inherent structural or bio-Chemical defect in the reproductive elements of certain cells in certain Organs of certain people has considerable backing. What is agreed is that there must be some kind of irritant factor to bring a cancerous growth into being, and there is complete unanimity on the importance of early diagnosis, on which the patient's whole future may depend. But in spite of the progress made with various forms of radial treatment it is, I am afraid, premature to talk about anything like a general cure for cancer.
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One of the legends disseminated by Mr. John Amery through the Berlin wireless, to which he now has access, is that "there is not one single paper in London that is not Jewish-controlled." The assertion from such' a source is not worth noticing, but too many people not in Berlin but in Britain are constantly saying the same thing. To run through the list of all the papers of one kind and another published in London would be a formidable business, but as far as the daily papers are concerned—the Times, the Telegraph, the Express, the Mail, the News Chronicle, the Herald—I know of no single one that is under any sort of Jewish control. The nearest to it is in the case of the Daily Herald, which is owned as to 51 per cent. by Odhams Press, of whose board Lord Southwood (formerly Mr. J. S. Elias) is Chairman ; but this is in fact not relevant, for it is expressly laid down that on the policy side the governing agents shall be the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress. There is no reason why Jews should not be as prominent in journalism
as they are in many other professions, but it so happens that at the moment they are not. * * *
The B.B.C. provided a postscript of a high order on Sunday evening in Sir Richard Livingstone's talk on education—education for a livelihood, education for citizenship and education for sPiritual self-development. It was, moreover, a talk with a practical purpose, for the President of Corpus ended by voicing the Wish he often felt a's he walked among the old, grey walls of Oxford that colleges could be created all over Britain where workers could withdraw for a period into some sort of academic peace and renew the education that circumstances had compelled them to discontinue far too soon. That is most decidedly a dream that ought to be made more than a dream.
jANUS.
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