LONDON TOPICS

Evening Star, Issue 21073, 9 April 1932, Page 13

LONDON TOPICS

• ■ CABINET OF EMPIRE ? [From Our Correspondent.] February 25. Mr MacDonald and his Cabinet, mindful of the unique cachet conferred by their overwhelming election as a National Ministry, are boldly tackling manv big outstanding issues. It will not 'be their fault if the Ottawa Conference wastes its opportunity in humdrum discussion. Among other points considered is the feasibility of constituting an Imperial Cabinet, for which the Imperial War Cabinet set some precedent. There arc vastly' important questions of interest to the whole Empire, with which such an assembly might fittingly deal. Wo may be getting a step nearer to the much-debated idea of a Parliament of tbo Empire. But I gather that the best opinion favours another angle of approach. If oversea commissioners in Loudon arc, like Mr Bruce, of Australia, and Mr Ferguson, of Canada, given the status of Ministers, and equally sustain it by their personality, we shall have a permanent Cabinet of Empire in London.

OUR GALLANT POUND. Sir Montagu Norman, the former Boer War trooper, who has ruled Bank of England finance for a record reign, is popular again. Cheers from broker? of the Stock Exchange welcomed the news that the bank rate was down to 5 per cent once more. That such a step is regarded as safe, and that the reduction is a full point and not the usual half per cent., are facts that testify to a more confident feeling about business and trade, even in_ the most conservative quarter. Easier money thus synchronises with prospects of lighter taxation and fairer industrial competition. It is no secret that, when we went off gold, Ministers privately told Fleet street their bank advisers believed the pound at worst would go no lower than 12s 6d. It has done better than oven big financiers hoped. Continental critics are amazed, and just a little hurt, by the buoyancy of our gallant “ quid.” L.G.'s HEALTH. All manner of rumours have been current about Mr Lloyd George’s health since he got back to London from his Ceylon trip. These no doubt owo their origin to the usual lobb.v gossip, and comment on his abstentation from the House of Commons. It was whispered that L.G. had, by a strange coincidence of fate, experienced much the same trouble that overcame Mr Joseph Chamberlain after his hansom accident, when ho was for some days in Westminster Hospital, and never quite recovered his old form. But I hear these suggestions are entirely baseless, and that so soon as his little election oversight has been legally remedied wo may expect to see L.G. back in his old seat at Westminster. Only that, however, will confound and silence the gossips. “ ONE-ARMED SUTTON.” if the Japanese delays around Shanghai can be ascribed to any one cause, that cause may be expressed in the name Frank Sutton. Major Sutton, or “ One-armed Sutton ” as he is better known out' East, introduced the Stokes gun to the Chinese militarists With the plans of these engines of war in his possession he toured the Yangtze provinces in 1923 without finding a military potentate who appreciated the deadliness of the weapon. Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the late Manchurian war lord, had more vision. Ho wanted Stokes guns and plenty of them, and he promptly put his arsenal at Mukden at the service of Major Sutton, and told him to go ahead with the job. “ One-armed Sutton ” did. Stokes guns of all sizes, some of thorn much larger than those employed in oui trendies in the war, were turned out by the hundreds from Mukden, as were also other ordnance and machine guns. Those guns have now found their way to the Shanghai sector, to the evident embarrassment of tho Japenese. Clearly also Japan has under-esti-mated the morale of the Chinese troops. Tho stubborn resistance they have put up may astonish those who have heard of China’s comic opera civil wars. They cause no surprise, however, to foreigners who know something of the dogged endurance of the Chinese “ Tommy.” One rather marvels how it is Japan has put such little reckoning upon it. Provided ho is well led and that his pittance is duly paid up to date, tho Chinese soldier will keep smiling in tho face of Hell. In the present instance it is dear ho is being well led, though one would like to know whether the credit is more due to his German or Russian officers. For tho rest, a Chinese army is perhaps tho only one in the world which does not fight on its stomach. Given a half-pint bag of boiled beans and a pellet or two of opium, tlie Chinese soldier is independent of any commissariat for a stretch of at least forty-eight hours.

POINCARE’S POLITICAL ENEMY. Little has been heard recently of M. Caillaux, the French statesman who four years ago overthrew M. Poincare, his life-long political beto noir. After his own political eclipse M. Caillaux published a remarkable book on the war, but has not otherwise got into the limelight. He is coming to London next month, however, to talk on the present economic. and political crisis. Ho was Minister of Finance in the year before the war, and figured in a remarkable drama of the law courts. Flis wife, a very handsome lady, shot the editor of a Paris newspaper who threatened to publish letters written to her by M. Caillaux whileshe was the wife of another man. M. Caillaux resigned his official portfolio and defended his wife at the trial. Favoured by French juries’ well-known views about crimes of sex passion, ho was successful in his plea. VICTORIAN SQUIRE. Readers of Lady Victoria HicksBeach’s life of her father, Lord St. Aldwyn, may well marvel why postwar Neo-Georgians sneer at the Victorians. There is a strength, a simplicity, and a dignity about this shy, shrewd, quiet west country squire that was far more typical of his generation than of the present. These were the men who built up modern_ England and who nursed the Imperial idea of which Raleigh was founder, and post-war democracy is the custodian. We have had tragic need of a Hicks-Beach any time these last ten years. His daughter, who states her indebtedness to a mysterious E.C.M., admirably sketches Lord St. Aldwyn’s career and personality, and leaves us sighing for the men who arc no more._ There were no film symptoms about him. Ho was a real John Bull. But he realised the necessity for national economy and broadening the basis of taxation before Mr Churchill was breeched. As became one who founded the Eton Beagles, Lord St. Aldwyn’s first hobby' was hunting. He was the only rider in

at the death at a famous West Country record run. Fly-fishing was his only other diversion. He never smoked, and tolerated music as a noise pleasant enough when not too loud. But he had sound scholarship to back sagacious statesmanship, and was a _ relentless worker. Public service was his heritage and devotion. He was almost the last of the English country squire politicians. To-day trade unionists and business men have usurped their places in the Senate. The results speak for themselves. I like Lady Victoria’s account of her father’s attachment to old suits. There is a family legend that once he*'went to a village jumble sale to repurchase an old coat his wife had given to the promoters. As Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord St. Aldwyn ranked with a lost lineage of thirty giants. THE WATERLOO BRIDGE. The Waterloo Bridge controversy is ended at last. The existing bridge is to come down, and a new one, twice as wide, will be built to designs by Sir Gilbert Scott, 11. A., the architect of Liverpool Cathedral. It will cost. £1,295,000, which is very little more than trying to cobble up the present bridge would entail, and the Government will contribute 60 per cent, towards it. Frenzied opposition has been offered to this urgent project for ten years, which is twice as long as it will take to build the new bridge. _ It came mainly from sentimental high-brows who exaggerated alike the beauty and the museum interest of the existing bridge. It is only just over a century old, and was not designed to commemorate Katerloo. That was a bright afterthought by shrewd promoters out for toll revenue. We are indeed artistically bankrupt if we cannot build another Waterloo Bridge, more suitable to modern traffic conditions, at least as good as the old one. Its one real distinction, overlooked by most of its champions, is that it is the only flat bridge across London’s river. The rest are all arched I commend to the Waterloo Bridge die-hards Mr E. V. Lucas’s remarks in his book on London. He instances our narrow, awkward streets as perpetual reminder of the Englishman’s lack of vision. “London’s chance to become a civilised city,” he says, “ was probably lost for ever at Waterloo. Had Wellington been defeated carriages might now be running four abreast down Fleet street.” Now that the Wellingtonians have lost the second battle of Waterloo we have a chance to rectify some of London’s anachronism. GUNNER, R.A. I have seen no reference, amidst the comments on Mr Wilfred De Glehn’s election as a Royal Academician, to one interesting fact in his career. When the War broke out, this genial artist, who was Sargent’s intimate friend but never his pupil, joined up as a gunner with the R.G.A. He was then fortysix, and perhaps the oldest one-pip subaltern serving actively _ abroad. Perhaps with a fine sense of his artistic sympathies, the Army chiefs sent his battery to the Italian front. Mr De Glidin' has an American wife who fully shares his art hobby, and they spend much time at a they have on the G.W.R.’s Cornish Riviera. Unless I am much mistaken, Mr De Glehn was first of all in the Arts Corps, which drilled in Burlington House quadrangle as a preliminary to most of its juniors drifting into the real thing. NEW INDIAN JUDGE. Colonel J. G. Thom, ALP., who has been appointed to the High Court at Allahabad, is, I believe, the first member of the Scottish bar to join the Indian bench. His colleagues have been given judicial appointments in the colonies and Egypt, but not previously in India, although they have always been eligible. Colonel Thom will be greatly missed at the House of Commons. He has not spoken much there, but he has been active in the constituencies, where his good looks and his vigorous stylo Have made him a favourite. This is the second surprise lie has sprung on his friends during the last few weeks. Recently he announced his engagement, and he is taking his wife to India with him towards the end of next month. His friends hope that, when lie has completed his judicial service in India, he will still think himself young enough—he is only forty —to return to politics. FEMINISM IN PRACtiCE. Any intelligent ex-soldier, who became a hospital casualty during the war, could have told Lord Balcarres everything his commission has discovered about the nursing problem. The situation is that, under existing conditions, there will soon not be enough recruits to the nursing profession to man our hospital wards, the simple reason being that the nurse’s pay and conditions of life make the calling most unattractive. Of the two drawbacks the greater is the latter. Perhaps Charles Dickens is partly responsible by causing a fierce reaction against the Sarey Gamp type. But women in control, by their petty tyrannies, have rendered the rank-and-file hospital mirse’s existence a misery. When D.O.R.A. becomes the autocrat of her own sex subordinates she is intolerable. LONDON’S PARIAHS. Though exact accuracy is obviously out of the question, the L.C.C. officials take pride in an interesting census they have just been compiling as carefully as possible. This census is a tragic roll call of London’s down-and-outs—the dim shadows that haunt Embankment scats, office steps, and park chairs when the lights of the city burn towards Canopus. A fairly conservative estimate puts the total of these up-to-date Les Miserables at between ten and twelve thousand people. Many of these nigH loiterers, who lack even a roof to° cover them these winter frozen dawns, are people who have known far better days. Some have earned big salaries in their time. Now they flit like Dantesque shadows across the nocturne of London’s skylight advertisements. Vao victic is the motto now as in ancient Rome. Only it is the income tax collector who gives the “ thumbs down ” signal. I