886 SPECTATOR, DECEMBER 30, 1955 so today. Even if we
disregard the incurable nostalgia of some elements of the Left (as represented by L'Observweur for instance), for a new Front Populaire including the Communists, there is resentment of a political system that will almost certainly give a Right majority in a country that is moving steadily Left.
It is fairly safe to say that there isn't going to be, there can't be, a landslide, that the new Assembly will not differ much, or for the better, from the present. Only one thing has changed. The news from Algeria, from the Saar, from Geneva, has given a new sense of urgency to French policy.
`Time's winged chariot hurrying near' is heard more and more clearly. And if the new Assembly bogs down, there may be another dissolution. There is already talk of it.
The Mystery of a Diary-11
By T. D. WILLIAMS* • DMIRAL SIR WILLIAM JAMES'S biography of Sir Reginald Hall has once more revived the bitter con- troversy over the authenticity of the diary of Sir Roger Casement—controversy prolonged over thirty years, yet the mystery is no nearer solution. Admiral James's recent article in the Spectator does not add very much to what had appeared in his The Eyes, of the Navy. In the book, he seems to take for granted both the genuineness of the diary and the attribu- tion of authorship to Casement. He does not even mention the fact that the charge of forgery had been raised • by a number of serious contemporary writers, including Professor Denis Gwynn and Henry Nevinson. In the Spectator article Ile has mended his hand in so far as he concedes there is a mystery about the diary; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he has been brought to do this by somb of the criticisms passed in reviews and in correspondence arising out of the book. •
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