Lengthy as the New Year's Honours List is, nothing in
it seems to me to call for special notice except Dr. Gilbert Murray's 0.M., to which I made oblique reference last week, and the two C.H.s awarded to Mr. J. L. Garvin and Mr. Arthur Mann. No entry in the list, I imagine, will give so much pleasure to so many people as that relating to Dr. Murray. The Times comment, that he " might equally have earned it by his success in transmitting the light of Hellas to a generation that is forgetting the Greek tongue, or by the noble failure of his long work for peace," could not be bettered. There are those who half-grudged the time he gave from Greek to peace. I once heard Dr. H. A. L. Fisher, whose place Dr. Murray in a sense fills in the select list of O.M.s, and who like him was a member of the Executive of the League of Nations Union, say that in a sense it was a scandal that the first Greek scholar in Europe should be spending hours a week working through the agenda of a propagandist society's various committees. Of the two C.H.s Mr. Arthur Mann's is more striking than Mr. Garvin's. It is a pointed and well-deserved compliment to the provincial Press, and it recalls the circumstances in which Mr. Mann, a fearless critic of Mr. Chamberlain's foreign policy, relinquished the editorship of the Yorkshire Post. Mr. Mann then stood uncompromisingly for the Churchill-Eden policy, and it is fitting that he should get his recognition. Mr. Garvin has made himself an outstanding journalist by the vigour and picturesqueness of his language. How far he could be regarded as a stable political guide in the past decade a study. of the files of the Observer, particularly of its articles lauding Italy and her leader during the Abyssinian War, would help to deter- mine.
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