AN ANZAC ON ENGLAND
StR.—While not wishing to defend this country in its many obvious errors, I cannot help, as an Englishman and host of our brave Anzacs, wishing Mr. Sydney Melbourne had brought the faculty Of understanding along with his critical and enquiring mind.
We are ashamed of our slums. And of our dirt. But I wonder If they would have seemed so fantastically bad to Mr. Melbourne if he had seen every single slum and tenement and broken-down borne in Australia lumped* together in one not very spacious area. If he had, well, then he would have something approaching a Proper basis for comparison between Australia and London or the Midlands.
We know the "Tommy" is underpaid. But does Mr. Melbourne realise that we people of Britain have to bear extraordinarily heavy exPenses in the fighting of this war? We appreciate all that the brave new world is doing to help us, but we cannot forget that almost the entire expense of the economic war, the sea war and the air war has to be paid for by us. lkisain, with its 42,000,000 people, is already finding as much money for this war as Germany, with its go.coo,000 people.
.Mr. Melbourne looks in vain for the man who wall rebuild this chrty, crowded, slack, verminous, inefficient Britain that his critical and enquiring mind shows him. That is because he is looking for
one man, for some commanding figure, some leader. He should just look around him. Those courageous victims of bombardment, those underpaid " Tommie.s," those perpetual-motion munition workers, those young men, those young women, he can see all about him and for whom he has spared a word of praise—they arc the people who will rebuild the nation in the years to come. If Mx. Melbourne hasn't noticed the change that has cope over the hitherto com- placent, conservative, tolerant, easy-going Englishman in recent months he has missed the most significant thing that has happened
in the course of this war.—Yours faithfully, DOUGLAS LONDON. Clock House Mead, Oxshott, Surrey.
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