Mr. Walter Lippmann has been taking an odd political line
lately, as a result of his obdurate opposition to the Atlantic Pact, but fortune has rarely treated him so ill as it did this week. His article in Tuesday's Daily Mail was devoted to deriding the Allied policy of working for a Western German Constitution: " We were to confront the Soviets with a democratic State in three-quarters of Germany which was on the road to economic recovery and to a position of political equality and self-respect among the free nations." But, says Mr. Lippmann, we are in a hole ; the Western German State has not materialised ; we could, of course, force the Germans to set up a constitution, but there are obvious objections to that. "The Germans do not believe in our conception of the Western German State. They would rather not have it." And Mr. Lippmann concludes with the astonishing affirmation that .the Russians are negotiating direct with the Germans and that "no one who knows anything about Germany and her history can have any doubt about the seductiveness of a German-Russian understanding." Well, anyhow, all this was on page 4 of the Mail. On page i in large type appeared the heading " Germans Agree on a New Nation " over an article announcing full agreement between the two German parties and between two of the Allied Military Governors over the new West German Constitution. The Western Allies, after all, begin to have a. semblance of a leg to stand on.
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