A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE belief is apparently entertained quite seriously in Germany that Mr. Eden will cease to be Foreign Secre- tary soon after the Coronation. It rests on four assumptions —that Mr. Baldwin will resign after the Coronation ; that Mr. Eden is where he is mainly because of Mr. Baldwin's personal predilection for him ; that Mr. Baldwin, when he goes, will be succeeded by Mr. Neville Chamberlain ; and that Mr. Chamberlain will prefer someone else, perhaps Lord Halifax, to Mr. Eden. Of these the first and third may be regarded as well founded, the second and fourth baseless. Mr. Eden became Foreign Secretary when Sir Samuel Hoare resigned because he was the obvious man for the job ; Mr. Baldwin, of course, thought so, but so did most other people. As to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Eden, their relations are in fact particularly cordial, not only personally but officially, and the Foreign Office is about the last place where a change of Minister is to be looked for if and when Mr. Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister. It is not altogether without import- ance that Mr. Eden was trained in foreign affairs by Sir Austen Chamberlain, for Sir Austen's opinion in foreign affairs may be expected to weigh with his step-brother.
* * * * Sir Arthur Salter always gauged his electoral chances in the Oxford contest more accurately than some even of the more enthusiastic of his supporters, but I doubt whether he agrees with The Times that the result—though not the size of the majority—was always " almost inevitable." What is clear is that those of Sir Arthur's disappointed opponents who ascribe his success to a mobilisation of the forces of the Left are far wide of the mark. No one, of course, can tell precisely what the composition of his 7,530 votes was, but since the last Labour candidate to stand for Oxford secured 2,683 first choice votes, and the last Liberal candidate 3,277 first choices, the conclusion is that a normal Left Wing vote is little above 3,000. (The Left was repre- sented only by a Liberal in 1929 and only by a Labour candidate in 1935, these being the last two contested elections.) It would probably be going too far to conclude that half Sir Arthur Salter's votes were Conservative, but it seems pretty clear that something like a third of them were.
* * * * Messrs. Foyle are displaying a laudable spirit of enterprise in launching a Right Book Club as answer—or counterpart— to the Left Book Club, which has achieved such remarkable success. There are factors that will work both for and against them. The fact that as booksellers they can cover the whole range of new books, and not be confined to the output of a single publisher, is a strong point in their favour. A point against them is the fact, or legend, that the Left produces a far higher proportion of serious readers than the Right ; the new experiment may help to show whether this is actually legend or fact. There is the further point—not necessarily a difficulty—that a Left book is much easier to define than a Right book ; it may be regarded as something with at any rate a strong flavour of Socialism about it. Right books are presumably non-Socialist ; if the definition were narrowed down to anti-Socialist it would limit the appeal seriously. What is wanted, and what I hope the Right Book Club will give us, is a supply of the best new books in which history and social and economic questions and international affairs' and the like are treated objectively and fairly with no deliberate political slant at all. For that there ought to be a large and grateful public, including, I should suppose, quite a number of members of the Left Book Club.
* * * * A generation surfeited with turgid political biographies will welcome the relative brevity of Professor Trevelyan's new. :i 'fe of Lord Grey. But I am not sure he has not gone too far. His picture of Grey the man is to my mind as near perfection as such things can be ; but is some 30,000 words, a good deal of it occupied by letters and documents, really adequate for the political activities as distinct from the human side, of a man whom Sir Austen Chamberlain has just described as the greatest British Foreign Secretary since Castlereagh, and who held his office longer than any single predecessor ? Buckle and Moneypenny's Disraeli runs to 6 volumes, Lady Gwendolen Cecil's Salisbury to 4, Mr. Garvin's Chamberlain to 3 so far, with 2 more to come. Mr. Lloyd George has permitted himself 6,—so far. It is true, no doubt, that Lord Grey's own Twenty-five Years tells the story of his official career admirably, but Professor Trevelyan is, after all, purporting to present a full and rounded picture. He is, of course, a master of clear com- pression, and perhaps the criticism that everyone would have liked more of his book—more both of subject and of author—ought not to be counted criticism at all.
* * * * Most of the book's reviewers have naturally concentrated so largely on greater matters that none of them, I think, has noticed one passage which I take peculiar pleasure in repro- ducing. It is from a letter by Sir Edward Grey : " I hear there is a splendid misprint in Herbert Spencer's Auto- biography. He quotes the French proverb Pour connaltre l'amour it faut sortir de soi,' which is true and moral. But, it is printed 'Pour connaitre l'amour it faut sortir le soir,' which is less true and less moral."
* * * * The Protestant Alliance has been informed that there is to be no material change in the Coronation Oath, except that the pledge to " maintain the Protestant Reformed Church established by law " is now limited by the insertion of the qualifying words " in the United Kingdom " after " maintain," the Dominions being thus excluded from the pledge. And the new King, like every sovereign since Henry VIII, is still—rather oddly—to be Fidei Defensor. Rather oddly, because the title, as not everyone remembers, was conferred on its first holder as recognition of the vigour of his championship of the papacy against no less formidable an assailant than Luther. Whatever Fid. Def. means today it certainly does not mean what it was meant to mean.
* * * * Momentous Legislation " Mr. H. Graham White (Birkenhead, E., Lib.) moved an amendment to include `other suitable detergent' with soap in the sub-clause to Clause I relating to the periodical washing of workrooms which had a smooth, impervious surface. The amendment was agreed to."—The Times. '-
ANUS.
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