Evening Post. FRIDAY, MAY 26, 1933. FROZEN TO ICE

Evening Post, Issue 122, 26 May 1933, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY, MAY 26, 1933.

FROZEN TO ICE

♦ — Those who know Lord Snowden'' best have always credited him with a warm heart which is often concealed by a sharp tongue, but, oddly enough, it is in the treatment of his friends that this concealment is most complete. "The falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love," says an Elizabethan poet, but Lord Snowden's attitude to the faithful friends with whom from time to time he has fallen out is suggestive rather of that "desperate" saying of Cosmo de Medici for which Bacon finds a place in his essay not "Of Friendship" but "Of Revenge." Yota shall read© (saith he) that we are commanded to forgive our Enemies; But you never lead, that wee are commanded to forgive our Friends.. ■ The relentless ferocity with which Mr; Showden,, as he then was, scourged his.old friends An the [Labour .Party from,whom he and Mr. Mac Donald had been compelled to differ was one of the most striking and most ,effective; features of the memorable election campaign of 1931. Today the two men who on that occasion agreed to risk their political lives in order to save the State are differing from one another, and Lord Snowden now turns upon Mr. Mac Donald with the same ferqeity which he had previously directed against the party that they had both abandoned. / But the .general resemblance between the two cases is qualified by an important distinction. The cam? paign which was precipitated by the great crisis of August,. 1931, was embittered by a sense of betrayal on both sides. The Labour Ministers who broke up Mr. Mac Donald's Cabinet rather than follow his lead were regarded by him and the only two colleagues who supported him— Mr. Snowden and Mr. Thomas—as having deserted their posts. These three were in turn accused of the equally heinous offence of deserting their party. Under such conditions an intense bitterness on either side was inevitable, and to a large extent excusable. But the issue now presented by the National Government's attitude to the World Economic Conference is free, from any provocation, of the kind, and the sharp differences of opinion which it had produced had not hitherto exceeded the bounds of the normal interchanges of party warfare. By the scathing attack on the Prime Minister whichl was reported yesterday, Lord Snowden has gone beyond this limit and he has delivered it in a vein of unmeasured contempt which suggests personal animus rather than a strong dissent based on grounds of principle from an opponent whom he can respect. ■ ' In support of his request for a statement of the Government's programme for the Economic Conference Lord Snowden opens in a promising fashion by describing , the Prime Minister's reply to a similar request in the House of Commons as "absolutely staggering." I know not, he continues, whether this is due to tho Government's having no policy or to Mr. MaeDonald'a. constitutional inability' to make a clear statement. I.suggest that Cabinet look into the case of tho Prime Minister. It is a positive danger to the country that its affairs should be in the hands of a man who every time he speaks exposes his ignorance or incapacity. Many who were profoundly dissatisfied by the vagueness of the Prime Minister's reply may well have been "absolutely staggered" by the bitterness with which Lord Snowden expressed his own dissatisfaction. He has of course a clearer head and an exacter, more incisive utterance than Mr. Mac Donald, and in the field of finance apd economics which Lord Snowden has made peculiarly his own Mr; Mac Donald himself would be the last man to ., challenge a comparison, In intellect as in character there are wide differences between the. two rrlen. Before they had quarrelled with one another or with their party, Dr! Wertheimer in his "Portrait of the Labour Party," indicated some of. those differences as follows:—^ -..,■'. ' ~lt is the very contrast between the natures and temperaments of Ramsay Mac Donald and Philip Snowden that makes Snowden's personality a focus of energy for the Labour movement. Philip Snowden is the greatest intellect in the British Labour Party—not from tho point of view of pure theory but of applied theory. Mentally he stands a head higher than the party leader. He is a political thinker of a crystal clearness, though he may be without MacDpiiald's adaptability. In spite of

his sarcasm, that biting irony which he holds like a shield between himself and the world, he is a man to whom a human sympathy can be turned without its freezing to ice. But in this speech Mr. Snowden shows himself so completely devoid of, any human• sympathy for his! former comrade and colleague that his normally cool blood seems indeed to have frdzen to ice. It is distressing that instead of forcibly but coolly stating his dissent from the attitude of the Government to the Economic Conference Lord Sno^vden should have expressed it in terms which suggest profound contempt for an intellectual inferior. This inferiority, at any rate in the sphere of economics, is, as we have said, admitted, but it was not for him to refer .to it, still less to-do so in scornful and arrpgant fashion. The breach of good manners and good taste is carried much further when Lord Snowden adds to this general contempt the specific suggestion "that Cabinet look into the case of the Prime Minister." What can these words ; Wean but that Mr. Mac Donald's normal lack of intelligence has been aggravated by the weakness of an invalid, -and that the case is one for medical advice? It is, of course, perfectly clear that after the appalling strain which represents the price paid by Mr. Mac Donald for his magnificent services to his country during the last two years anything might happen to a man whose health had already been severely shaken. But he has doubtless had plenty of advice by this time, and doubtless it has.all told Kirn to stop. It may be that more is needed, but surely that is not a matter to be shouted from the housetops. It was a matter for private and friendly suggestion. But therp is not a spark of friendliness or sympathy in Lord Snowden's speech. The infirmity that he attributes to his old comrade is simply used to strengthen the sledge-hammer blows of his fierce invective.