THE Government's intentions regarding the prevention -I- of what are technically described as Abnormal Imports are to be known immediately, for the powers conferred by the Bill...

Table Conference have been suffering strange vicissitudes. The joint manifesto issued by all the minorities, other than the Sikhs, is an important hew factor in the situation,...

to the SPECTATOR casts Thirty Shillings per annum, including postage, to any part of the world. The SpEc-rsTon -is registered as a Newspaper. The Postage on this issue is :...

ago would have had to be referred to as an armaments truce can now be called the armaments truce, for with some forty - five nations accepting (out of fifty-five in the League...

Conference at the eleventh hour are small. The Prime Minister's offer to arbitrate on the communal question was the touchstone. If that had been accepted —Mr. MacDonald was only...

the House of Commons that the constitution of Cyprus is to be suspended and responsibility for legislation left in the hands of the Governor. That course may be allowed to pass...

developments in Paris, where the League Council is discussing the Manchurian question, far from reassuring. Japanese troops, after a battle on a considerable scale, have...

Whatever M. Laval may do it is going to be next to im- possible to reach a satisfactory reparation settlement unless war debts are brought full into the discussion. Some action...

about a million Japanese subjects, most of them Koreans. Nothing but an agreed settlement will ever form a basis for peace in Manchuria under those conditions, and China is...

John Simon assisting in person and Mr. Baldwin supplying a broad public hint from Westminster that Germany's commercial creditors must not be sacrificed to her reparation...

a witness before the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance last week, made it clear that she had no liking for the grandiose and fantastic scheme put forward by the Trades...

way of rehousing slum dwellers is reflected in a dispute between the London County Council and its tenants on a housing estate at Peckham. The tenants say that their weekly...

this country is being urged by every adviser who deserves a- hearing to lay out what money it has with a special sense of responsi- bility, and in particular to buy British...

from 41 per cent. on September 21st, 1931. War Loan (5 per cent.) was on Wednesday 97 ; on Wednesday week, 961 ; a year ago, 1021. Funding Loan (4 per cent.) was on Wednesday...

vast airships has been sold by the Air Ministry and is to be broken up. ' It 100,' launched two years ago, made a successful trip to Canada and back in June, 1930. But since her...

generous response to the appeal of the Society of Friends for £30,000 to carry on the allotments on which many thousands of unem- ployed men have found congenial work for...

mechanization of the land were never more precisely and professionally put than at - a meeting of Hampshire farmers, held last week at Winchester. Lord Lymington, whose recent...

F OR several years it has been our practice to include in the " Better World " Christmas issue of the Spectator an article which seeks to direct attention to some of the more...

the Mandate T HE Government has taken the first step towards execUting the mandate that the electors gave it. Mr. Runciman on Monday sought, and is at present in process of...

The disinclination of the House to make trouble is no doubt a conscious or unconscious reflection of the fact, hinted at by both the Prime Minister and Mr. Baldwin during the...

The indications are that the House will adjourn at latest during the first week in December. The point of Mr. Baldwin's speech, for all its welcome insistence_ upon the...

But other awkward questions have also loomed up, notably our relations with Russia and the progress of Mr. Snowden's scheme of Land Taxes. On both these points the Government is...

/ 1HE Parliamentary week has seen the satisfactory surmounting of at least one very awkward tariff hurdle, and ends with the supporters of the Government being much better...

does the Government's action mean that harmony is established in the Cabinet for all time. A section of opinion, as yet more vocal outside the House than inside it, has made,...

By VISCOUNT CECIL. r IHE angelic announcement of Christ's nativity. arouses year by year an acute question of conscience for all Christian peoples. 'Whether or not the promise...

BY VERNON BARTLETT. E VERYONE will admit that the last two months have been the most critical of the many difficult periods we have known since the summer day in 1914 when an...

[We publish here the seventh article of a new Theological Series which we hope will throw light on some of Om most disputed questions of conduct. Canon. Green, Rector of St....

BY LORD HOWARD OF PENRITII. " Now of these waterfrogs, if you intend to fish with a frog for a Pike, you are to choose the yellowest that you can get—and thus use your frog...

THE Editor of the Spectator offers a first prize of km iris. and a second prize of L5 5s. for a short story of not more than r,5oo words, written in English. Entries should be...

BY HAROLD NICOLSON. T HE author of the Ars Poetica lived some nineteen hundred years before the invention of wireless. He was thus not enabled, on summer evenings, to hear the...

BY SIR W. BEACH THOMAS. T HE . English village has, beyond measure, increased the vivacity of its social life since the War. It could always claim, so to say, a social...

ON OUTLINES. By J. B. Morton. NERVE CONTROL IN EAST AND WEST. By F. Yeats Brown. THAT'S ENGLAND, THAT WAS. By Clough Williams- Ellis. THE IMPERIAL IDEA AND ITS ALTERNATIVE....

BY E. M. FORsTER. Now in the past St. Blaise was haunted by an appalling apparition. What forms it took, what havoc it wrought, I have not been able to discover, but it made...

By V. SACK VILLE-WEST. ELIZABETH HIGGINBOTTOM attained the age of 1J forty before romance entered her life. Outivardly a severe and serious person, engrossed in an office from...

'

Our Fathers 1870 - 1900. By Alan Bott. (Heinemann. 8s. 6d.) Jr is a long time now since the English dining-room made a tactful setting for underdone beef. The red wall-paper,...

John Wesley. By C. E. Vulliamy. (Bles. 108. 6d.) FROM his published writings and his Journal we already know Wesley more fully than it is possible to know most men. But with...

The Emergence of Man. By Gerald Heard. (Cape. l0.. fkl.) As his large B.B.C. audiences know, there is an arresting vivacity about Mr. Heard's utterances. He presents his '...

Why the Crisis ? By Lord Melchett, with a preface by Lord Weir. (Victor Collancz. 38. 6d.) LORD MELenerr is not only the son of his father but worked intimately with him in...

By Rainer Maria Rake. Translated by V. Sackville-West and Edward Sackville-West. (Printed by the Cranach Press for the Hogarth Press. £3 3s.) RAINER MARIA RILKE, one of the...

The Franciscan Adventure : a Study of the First Hundred Years of the Order of St. Francis of Assisi. By Vida D. Scudder, MA., L.H.D. (Dent and Sons. 15s.) To add another book to...

The Flame : A Play in One Act. By Austin Clarke. (Allen and Unwin. 3s. lid.) Mn. CLARKE is an Irish poet so distinctly individual both in thought and technique that critics...

Return to Yesterday. By Ford 11ladox Ford. (it :ollancz. 113.s.) Tins book should not be impatiently put down by the reader because of its inaccuracies and misstatements. It...

The Soul of Malaya. By Henri Fauconnier, translated by Erie Sutton. (Elkin Matthews. 9s.) MANY Englishmen know and love Malaya, but their know- ledge of it, from the nature of...

:411. SLOCOMBE has written a book which is perhaps better reading than it is history. Still, it is very good reading indeed, and not such had history either ; so we have a good...

Wrru the words " they stand like giants immersed in Time," Proust brings Time Regained to an end, and with it that Comedic Ilumaine, Remembrance of Things Past, which for the...

Songs and Slang of the British Soldier : an Anthology and Glossary. Compiled by John Brophy and Eric Partridge. (Scholartis Press. 9s.) THIS anthology reappears in its third...

Voiceless India. By Gertrude Emerson. With an Introduction The Indian Peasant Uprooted. By Margaret Read. (Longmans. es. ) A History of Indian Literature. By Professor Herbert...

Modern Glass. By Guillaume Janneau. (The Studio. 30s.) This publication coincides happily with the Exhibition of Modem Technical and Artistic Glasses which is open until the end...

A LIVELY kettle of fish, these Dolphins I Mr. McGreevy's latest contribution is, in fact, almost too sprightly. How one does wish that he could a little oftener-forget to be so...

Russian Waters. By Nicholas Polunin. (Arnold. 10s. &I.) Fon some reason, it does not seem possible to write a dull book about Russia. M. -Korostovetz' style, at any rate in...

Nations and Novels Gollancz. 7s. 6d.) IT is a perpetual problem to know how much the novel can contain. In England the tendency is to cram as much as possible into it, and to...

6d.)—A sensitive and unusual love story, set in Switzerland, between an innkeeper's son and the daughter of an English novelist. The book has charm and depth of feeling, but...

7s. 6d.)— In most of these stories the author allows us to fo low our own false trails and then, in the last paragr ph, switches us back to the right one. He has 0. Henry's...

A BOOK WITH SEVEN SEALS. With a preface by . Hugh Walpole. (Seeker. 8s. 6d.)—Here we have a book that will enchant readers who like to glance back down the long lane of years...

3s. 6d.)—Tells how the Earl of Droitwich is betrothed to Violet, daughter of Waddington of Waddington's Ninety-Seven Soups, and how a photographer and family nurse impede the...

(Cassell. 7s. 6d.). Although one obvious bit of evidence connected with the murder of a publisher in this detective story is never considered and the plot is poor, one's...

6d.)—It is the story of a murderer's flight and escape from punishment, told from his point of view, just well enough to escape dismissal as a mere thriller.

We were all just being " inflated," and we didn't know it. The merry banker who shoved a hundred sovereigns across the counter, in that pleasant way he had, why he was just...

little bits. Soniebody staggered home from a lobster luncheon and lay down flat and murmured, " I'm depressed." People on tip-toe moved about him. " He's depressed," they...

; but a new cry had gone out for " sunlight in every cell," and so the gaols were big, and bright with jazz music pouring out of every window, and with burglars telling the...

and the merriment of the present ; the fond hopes for the future ; the fortunes that seemed assured ; the old age so comfortably provided for : so that was all it was, just...

BY STEPHEN LEACOCIU A LITTLE while ago—just after the War ended, wasn't it ?—everybody was absorbed in the idea of making things •"'bigger and • brighter." Thera was a...

go on, let's get at it and deflate in earnest and with good will. I'll confess, if you will, that I wasn't brought up to drive in a taxi ; I'll confess, if you will, that till...

remedy— Deflation. We have got to deflate. In fact, that is what we are doing now ; we are being deflated. People look about them in this saddening world and wonder what is...

can talk of at dinner now is of the fall in copper, and the crash in rubber and the smash in wheat. Bright eyes grow dim with tears about the whispered rumour that bullock hides...

BY DAVID GARNETT. F OR the last ten years the Woodhouses have been living on the French coast of the Mediterranean, for only in a dry climate is Marcella safe from rheumatism....

Winter-in-Gordano ' MorE.—Gordan is a valley Somerset lying between a lino of hills and the Severn Sea. All its villages have hyphenated namtt4, " Walton-in-Gordano," "...

BY ROSE MACAULAY. On reading through this essay, I perceive that it bears a somewhat old-fashioned, mouldered, antic air ; a look as if it were definitely out of date ; and...

A LETTER FROM CAMBRIDGE [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—A Cambridge poet once described October as the " dawn of the year." The description is apt—from a Cambridge...

The year has given notable evidence of the cumulative effect of sanctuaries in attracting birds and of keeping them. Not only have a number of rarities been recorded, but some...

EARLY FOODS. Discussion on the imports of food into Britain has brought out some queer fashions in food, especially the overmastering desire for earliness among British'...

COUNTRY COTTAGES. We may expect with some confidence to see real practical results from this week's Roads and Transport Congress, organized by the energetic secretary of the...

A CHRISTMAS CAROL. Many readers of the Spectator have shown a practical interest in Alderfen, that altogether adorable Broad like no other, which was secured last year by the...

Perhaps the English grower has at last found a potent ally or two potent allies. No business connected with food has gone ahead with quite such speed as the canning of fruit and...

producer that earlier countries should send in their goods. Beyond all question, as Mr. Seabrook and other specialists have insisted, the steady continuous supply of fruit all...

Valley pattern, is in some regards very much superior to the frame and cloche and hotbed of the French and Dutch maraichers, which succeed (as Prince Kropotkin, that great...

many of the letters which we receive, we would remind correspondents that we often cannot . give space for long letters and that short ones are generally read with more...

only now seen the review of Colonel Wilkinson's Life of Lord Nelson by Mr. M. C. J. Meiklejohn, and I am venturing to write and protest against both the manner and the matter of...

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] ' SIR,—With very much of what Messrs. Woolley and Clayton say in regard to War and Peace most Christian people, and indeed most decent...

of many of your readers who have found themselves forced to challenge the attitude adopted - by your contributors in the sixth article of the "Problems - of the Christian...

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Six,—With no claim to step in where, with high courage and great ability, Mr. Hamilton Fyfe has dared to tread, I yet presume upon your...

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Perhaps Mr. M. L. Chute was wearing soles made of rubber or other insulating material when he found that his " divining-power " had gone....

SIR,—Mr. M. L. Chute's experience is easily explained. On the first occasion at the " water tanks " they were Water was running. On the second occasion the tanks were...

[To the 'Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sin,—I hope that " Traveller " will forgive me for saying that his letter published in your issue of November 14th is not a very helpful...

Sni,—The answer to this problem of the Christian conscience by the Revs. G. H. Woolley and P. B. Clayton is, in my humble judgement, most disappointing and unconvincing. The...

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—At the meeting of the Minorities Committee of the' Round Table Conference on Friday last Mrs. Naidu voiced the views expressed in a joint...

should like to make a passing comment on some lines from the article entitled " Health of the Child " from your publication of November 14th. The writer of the article regrets...

. . [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sol,—You - published some statements in 'June last from a correspondent, Mr. E. W. Harliy, criticizing -this • Society's Report on the...

Sia,—I am surprised to read in the Spectator that the excellent results 'obtained by Dr. Brun with the teeth of the school children of Oslo are due to the Oslo Breakfast, for I...

As an illustration of the stringency with which quarantine was observed eighty years ago I think that it may be interesting to quote a passage from my father's letter written to...

month. The Greeks are punishing, like barbarians, the barbarous assassin& Lion of their late political chief. Pietre.Bey's son has been con. demned to lose his right hand, and...

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR, —In your " News of the Week " in your last issue, in commenting upon the Post Office you compare the Telephone Department in a favourable...

Our society is of too mixed a kind to permit any very essential distinctions to exist between the Peer and the Commoner ; and latterly it has been a mark of breeding to merge...

Can some reader of the Spectator explain why it is that the grey squirrel is so unpopular in Great Britain, where everyone's hand seems to be against him, while in North America...

children in elementary schools on a whole is slightly better than it was a few years ago. Improved environment is bound to result in improved appearances—for a time. The...

[To the Editor of the Si-nes-axon.] Snt,—We are now in the midst of the " Buy British " week. No nation can deny our right to adopt this expedient for the improvement of our...

As the period of Parliament's assembling approaches, the publics as usual, are entertained with various rumours, new hatched at the time, of alterations in the Cabinet. The...

Can any of your readers tell me where I eau find a short poem, of which every verse ends with There's something in the English after all?—A. M. B.

the SPECTATOR.] submit that it is perfectly legitimate to write of an abominable piece of bad English or bad manners or bad reasoning. There is no tautology ; " abominable"...

RULES AND CONDITIONS Entries must be typed or very clearly written on one aide of the paper only. The name and address, or pseudonym, of the competitor must be on each entry...

THE Editor of the Spectator offers a first prize of toe. and a second prize of kl 5s: for a short story of not more than 1,5oo words, written in English. Entries should be...

We shall be pleased to reply to any e3quiries arising from the articles we publish on the Modern Home page. Inquiries should 'be addressed to the Editor, The SFECTATOR, 99...

of Don Alfonso XIII, by Princess Filar, the King's cousin, and Major Chapman-Huston (Murray, 21s.) personal details of interest are overweighted by political argument adverse to...

Now that France is predominant in Europe, it is mare desirable than ever that . we should try to understand 'her way of regarding the. course of affairs. A . good deal of help,...

The title of Mr. John Stirling's .Fisking for Troia and Sea- front with Worm and Wet Fly (Philip Allan, 7s. 6d.) sufficiently explains the contents of the little volume, which...

Wild Beasts To-Day (Sampson Low, 12s. 6d.) is a book to Interest very many grown up people and all boys. The beasts in the European zoos and in the great American and Colonial "...

Mr. Falconer Madan, as' sub-librarian and then as librarian, was for many years a familiar figure to 'workers inthe Bodleian, and there can have been few who did not resort to...

Uniformity in 1662, but they contrived none the less to maintain a learned ministry. How it was done is explained in detail by Dr. H. McLachlan in English Education ander the...

doubtless include some of the fascinating miniatures by Foucquet (1420-81), who worked for Charles VII and Louis Xi and who painted Pope - Eugenius IV. It is fortunate, them...

is the story of a man who came to London at the age of twenty-one With the motto : "h propose to write," dallied for -a time with the stage, and eventually was inspired to take...

Gardener's Chap Book, edited by G. H. M. Cox (Chatto and Windus, 7s. 6d.). It . contains an anthology of poetry and prose, " bits and pieces " . which have struck- the editor's...

own than a whole library full of scientific monographs. It is a pleasure therefore to see yet another volume of Mr. A. M. Duggan-Cronin's photographic studies of The Bantu...

In spite of Kellogg Pacts and hard spade work done by the League of Nations, in spite of the arduous efforts made by this country and the United States to give aid to Germany...

Mr. Beresford Chancellor has added to his numerous books about London a pleasant volume on The Romance of Soho (Country Life, 12s. 6d.), abounding in the minute details of...

Shipping Notes WITH reference to the Blue Star Line advertisement, which appeared in our issues of October 31st and November 14th, we are asked to state that the duration of...

not to travel abroad at the present time will be glad to know that the railway companies concerned intend shortly to make an announcement with reference to the development of...

How far these conditions have been aggravated by actual social and political unrest it would be rather difficult to say, but I think there can be no doubt whatever that in...

King of the Belgians in the Great War (Putnam. 25s.). His book makes direct appeal to soldiers rather than to the ordinary public. Military readers will not like it the less for...

the special rates available for their "Round Voyages" to China, Japan and Australia during the winter months. Among the vessels which may be used for these tours are the T.S.S....

s.s. ' Cap Areona,' will in future call at Southampton en route for Buenos Aires, via Vigo, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Santos and Montevideo. This service will be of particular...

Durin g this year we have had record figures of an unf avourable character, record figures of un- employment, record declines in public securities, a record blow to financial...

There were, however, other circumstances directly responsible for the withdrawals of gold from .this market, and for the lack of confidence abroad which prompted them, and that...

I would, therefore, prefer to describe the conspicuous feature of the year so far as domestic affairs are concerned as the recognition at the 'eleventh hour by all political...

Nevertheless, it is just because of this awakening of statesmen and people in the autumn of this year that I am inclined to view the prospects for the coming year With more...

Amidst such disturbing conditions, it is scarcely surprising that depression should have ruled in the world's markets during the past year, and that prices of commodities should...

IDLE MARKETS. NOTWITHSTANDING the fact that the Committee of the Stock Exchange have now restored the facilities for- dealing for the new account instead of strictly for cash,...

- - AusTitAmAis - BANKING. __That the English, Scottish - .and Australian Bank should have been compelled by the situation in Australia to reduce its divi- dend is no matter...

Needless to say, the Australian banks have been hit at the present time not merely by condititnis in - Australia, which huN !reduced earning power, but also by the -...