Mr. Wendell Willkie's Service It is impossible to compute the
value of Mr. Wendell Willkie's visit to this country—and to Eire. Its ultimate iroPortance will only be assessable when Mr. Willkie has got back and made his considered conclusions known in the United States, particularly before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate. He has enjoyed all the advantages of complete Personal independence. He is not even that ambiguous Character, an unofficial emissary—in which connexion it is right to emphasise the weight attaching to the simultaneous visit of one singularly acute and discreet unofficial emissary, Mr. Harry Hopkins. Mr. Willkie, thanks to the enjoyment of a physique apparently impervious to exhaustion or fatigue, has seen more of places and people in this country in ten days than most people would have seen in ten weeks, and as his pub- lished and unpublished comments show, he has not only seen but understood. The two dominant impressions he has put on record are of the unbroken and unbreakable unity of the British people in the face of the sternest ordeal in their history, and of the supreme quality of leadership exerted in that crisis by the Prime Minister. If that is the story he will tell to his countrymen, particularly his fellow-Republicans, particularly his isolationist fellow-Republicans, we could ask nothing better. Meanwhile the tonic effects here of Mr. Willkie's sympathy, his comradeship, his unaffected friendship, will not depart with his departure. Our debt to him cannot easily be repaid. In his own mind it certainly calls for no repayment.
