PULLING THE STRINGS

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9621, 29 March 1917, Page 6

PULLING THE STRINGS

INFLUENCE OF WOMEN CASE OP MRS CORNWALLIS-WEST. The San Francisco “Argonaut" thinks that the discomfiture of Mrs CornwallisWest as the result of a reprimand by a British Court of Inquiry must be rather a shock to the traditions of a country that has taken the subterranean interferences of fashionable women with the Army almost as a matter of course. The lady in question did no more than privately express her wish for the promotion of a volunteer sergeant, and Lord French seems to have regarded it as equivalent to an order, since ho hastened to obey. So Lord French himself is included in the reprimand, and may now reflect ut leisure on the new oraer of things which prohibits women from playing favourites in Army discipline with which they should have nothing to do. That the interposition of Mrs Cornwallis-West involved a gross injustice to another soldier dves not seem to have weighed, with her at all. She now wishes it to be understood that she will have nothing more to do with public affairs, an act of renunciation that should not cost her much considering the part that she has played in them for the last twenty 'years. The official circles of Europe are full of women dike Mrs Cornwallis-West, women who play quite as real a part iu the government oi their countries as do secretaries of State and Cabinet officers. Lord Randolph Churchill owed a largo part or his political success to his clever American wife, this same lady who has now fallen under the ban of official censure. The British Prime Minister who is selecting his Cabinet pays nearly as much attention to the capacity of the wivefc of his nominees as to that of the nominees themselves. A Cabinet Minister is gravely handicapped without a wife who understands affairs of State and who is able to cooperate intelligently in the wiles of domestic and foreign displomacy. Russia is famed for her unofficial women diplomats, who take up their residence in foreign capitals and who are always ready to say the word in season, and to say it brilliantly, on behalf of their country’s interests. At the same lime we may wonder if the political women of England have given their loyalty to their parties or to their men folk. • Lady Randolph Churchill, for example, was a Tory of Tories, while her first husband was alive. There was no keener feminine mind in the Tory party than hers. She at the head of nianj- political organisations and a constant ornament, physical and menial, to the party platform? when speeches had to be uttered or picas made. But when Lord Randolph died, his widow instantly, and

with equal fervour, espoused the political cause of their son, Winston Church, ill, who had now become a Radical, and who bid fair to be as much of a firebrand in the cause of reform as his father had been in the cause of Conservatism. She made no explanation. No recantation seemed to her to bo necessary. She attached herself do the man of the family as a matter of course, and lent the whole of her peculiar powers to his political advancement.