POLITICAL ATHLETES

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 91, 19 April 1939, Page 11

POLITICAL ATHLETES

THE RECORD IN BRITAIN

Very few politicians at any time in any country could have lived up to the Fascist order in Italy which demands that for the higher ranks in the party it is essential to be a good athlete as well as a good Fascist and a good administrator, says the "Manchester Guardian." Palmerston who in his eighties was seen climbing over a high railing to demonstrate to himself his own fitness and was once "discovered" running up and down his library with chairs in order to make sure he understood the working of some cotton machinery might have qualified if he had not put himself on the index by lecturing the Fascist Government on the blessings of free institutions. Gladstone, 'of whom Dilke said, "He had been a sculler at Eton, took to riding when he took to politics, and, having been a regular horseman through a great portion of his life, became in old age a competent woodman and one of the most remarkable walkers who ever lived," was always in training. Disraeli, on the other hand, would have had no chance from the day. when he asked "a young rifleman,'excessively stiff." to return a racket ball at Valetta as "I really had. never thrown a ball in my life." JNTor would Harcourt, whose, last letter laid it down that "exercise deI stroys everybody." John Russell would have had little chance, and Bonar j Law's "I like a rubber of bridge," when Mr. Lloyd George was trying to interest him in . golf and other things, looks ominous. Balfour with his tennis and golf might have passed, though the Italian tests seem to be for more violent gymnastics. One does not see Asquith as a spring-board jumper!

burning of an ordinary wooden house and the conditions suggested some chemical, such as thermite, had been used. ; - • (Proceeding.) (The report of yesterday's proceedings appears on page 16.)