A certain number of persons with no sense of proportion
appealed to the Home Secretary to prohibit the landing in this country of Mrs. McPherson, the notorious American evangelist. It is true that scandalous charges were brought against her in America, but the prosecution failed. It is not justifiable to say that an alien should be excluded because his or her methods of publicity arc distasteful or grotesque. Sir William Joynson-Hicks did well to reject the representations made to him, but we should have thought he could have ignored them without issuing a public statement on the subject. It is difficult to imagine what Mr. Gladstone would have felt if one of his Ministers had rushed into a public announcement to rebut chatter and gossip. This sort of thing encourages the public to think, quite wrongly, that the Home Office finds importance in unimportant incidents.
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