A Spectator's Notebook T HE speeches, markedly different in tone, of
the present Foreign Secretary and Sir Austen Chamberlain, in the arms embargo debate on Monday, have been a good deal commented on, the significant fact being that Sir John Simon placed himself very distinctly to the Right of his predecessor. Cautious and conservative though he may be Sir Austen has always been a League man through and through, even if rather a different type of League man from some of his colleagues on the League of Nations Union Executive, which like Lord Lytton and Lord Eustace Percy he attends with conscientious assiduity. In particular he has always been fully con- scious of the obligations League membership entails and he would, as his speech showed, be quite incapable either of Sir John Simon's sloppy " friends-with-both-sides " talk, or of suggesting that this country could be neutral in a dispute in which one side has accepted the League Assembly's unanimous findings—for which the British Government voted—and the other has rejected them. Sir Austen, after all, did not hammer out the Locarno agreements for nothing.
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