The whole House was deeply impressed, friend and fee alike.
Mr. Baldwin seemed to speak thus because he could not help doing it, though nobody had breathed a word about the possibility of war with Egypt, or about war as a remote reaction from the Egyptian question. One cannot help reflecting what devoted discipleship Mr. Baldwin would always command if he did not just lack that touch of insistence, or persistence, which makes a policy " go." As it is, the Unionists have not been doing well in Opposition. The forays of Lord Birkenhead and Mr. Churchill have not helped their party. Mr. Neville Chamberlain, too, seems to have kicked over the traces so far as to have gone dangerously near to advocat- ing the old policy which has twice sent the Unionists into the wilderness. Mr. Baldwin does not hold his followers together. And it seems likely that the credit for a naval agreement with the United States and a Treaty with Egypt—which might well have belonged to the Unionist Government if Sir Austen Chamberlain had had a little more imagination—will go to the Labour Party.
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