MARRIAGE OPPOSED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 9, 9 December 1936, Page 9

MARRIAGE OPPOSED.

OUTSPOKEN PRESS COMMENT. MINISTERS’ VIEWS. LONDON, Den. 8. The announcement from Cannes of Mrs Simpson’s willingness to erase herself came so late that most of the national dailies had not altered their earlier editorials. ’The Times ran two, the first tievoted to morganatic marriage and the second to “Confused Controversialists,” in which (so unusual for the Times) it took to task hy name two contemporaries and roundly rated Lord Rothermere, head of the Northcliff Press, including the Daily Mail. Dealing with morganatic marriage, the Times said: “In law, apart from the fact that she is not yet legally free to marry, there is nothing to bar Mrs Simpson from becoming consort and Queen in the full sense. The disqualification here is not as it is on the Continent, one of law, but of fact. What is demanded is statutory recognition that she is not fitted to lie Queen. The Prime Ministers and the Empire are to he asked to accept and their Parliaments to accept and ratify a permanent statutory apology for the status of a lady whom vie King desires to marry. The'Constitution is to be amended in order that she may carry in solitary prominence the brand of unfitness for a Queen’s throne. Can anyone in possession of bis faculties imagine any Prime Minister moving or Parliament supporting a proposition so invidious and distressing?” A STRONG OPINION. The Daily Telegraph says: “If there bad been a touch of the romantic in the Royal marriage, public happiness would have been intensified, Imt there are circumstances in the present proposal which freeze the very pulse ol romance and gravely offend the deepest susceptibilities of men and women whose loyalty to the King and Crown is one of the strongest fibres of their being. Moreover, they shrink from exchanges of political inischiet which are unavoidable once the Crown is thrust into the political arena. “This view was strongly expressed by Mr M. <J. Savage, while Mr J. A Lyons is saying that all his colleagues arc behind him in supporting Mr llaldwin’s action. The King is a strict constitutionalist, and these arc his Prime Ministers at the Antipodes. Liyo His Majesty’s Ministers here, and like all classes of his subjects, they ask for no other King but himself.”