I was not at the Christian Action meeting at the
Albert Hall on Sunday, but I was considerably impressed by the speeches, particularly Lord Halifax's and Sir Stafford Cripps's, reported at length in The Times and other papers. But the comments of a Manchester Guardian representative who was present are a little disconcerting. The enthusiasm, he writes, was tepid, mainly because "all the speakers except M. Andre Philip read essays from manu- scripts." That, if it is true, as no doubt it is, seems rather deplorable, and in the case of speakers so practised as Sir Stafford
Cripps has long been, and as Lord Halifax must have become in the United States, if not before, there can be no good reason for it— unless, in Sir Stafford's case, time could not be found for the much fuller preparation which a speech from notes calls for than a speech written out in full. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who was present and who certainly would not have made this mistake, did not speak at all. All this raises a larger question, the decay of the best type of British oratory. In the House of Commons today practically every Minister, contrary to all the rules of the House, reads any statement he has to make from a document which he, or quite possibly an official, has drawn up beforehand—a lamentable decline from the days when Mr. Sonar Law would introduce a Budget with no aid to memory beyond notes on a single sheet of paper. Back-benchers, it is fair to say, sin far less flagrantly, and I not long ago heard Lord Vansittart in the House of Lords deliver a long, important and in some ways intricate speech without a single note of any kind.'
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