We have dealt in our leading columns with the Government's
amazing handling of the coal industry. Here we may try to guess whether there is any meaning in their wild and zigzag policy, and if so, what.. In Webster's play, Bosola•, when asked by the Duchess why he has done certain weird and unintelligible things, replies : " To bring you by degrees to mortification." Has the Prime Minister, we wonder, run his strange rigs in the coal industry in order to bring the nation by degrees to nationalization ? It really looks as if that might be the policy at the end of the passage. Has the coal trade been kept in such a state of unrest by the miners and the harassed coal- owners on one side, and by the undecided Government and the bewildered public on the other, in the hope that the nation may at last -say : " Give us the clean cut of nationalization. Anything is better than this perpetual muddle and effervescence " ?
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