A SPECTATOR 'S NOTEBOOK
WHETHER the Prime Minister has ever made better speeches than those he has just delivered at Washington and Ottawa is matter for argument. Certainly, with the possible exception of his broadcast talk on the day of the attack on Russia, he has never delivered any more incalculably valuable in their effects. Each had its own high lights: The aside at Washington: " If my father had been an American and my mother British, instead of the other way round, I might have got here on my own," found the target at once, and established at the outset (not that in this case it needed establishing) that rapport so essential between a speaker and his audience. But the outstand- ing sentence in the Washington speech was the question suddenly rapped out in the passage on Japan : " What kind of a people do they think we are? " No passage was more loudly cheered, or more deservedly. At Ottawa the Prime Minister seemed to begin like a rather tired man, but after five minutes he was in his stride and giving the Dominion Churchill at his best. There always seems something a little outre about solitary mirth ; but in spite of all such decent inhibitions I laughed as loud and incontinently alone by my fireside as any legislator in the Ottawa Parliament when Mr. Churchill, after referring to the French generals' prediction that Britain would have her neck wrung like a chicken, commented, with an inimitable inflexion, " some chicken," and then when the tumult of cheers and laughter had died down, roused them again in redoubled volume with " some neck." It is perhaps irreverent to add that the Premier's unheralded lapse into Churchillian French aroused in me the same emotion. Its popularity with his audience was unmistakeable.
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