Foreign News: Baldwin the Magnificent

"Not only did the Prime Minister show himself a great Minister of the Crown, but the whole British people displayed a moral force," said Le Temps of Paris last week. "This test, which was very perilous, has magnificently confirmed the value of British institutions!"

Even Stanley Baldwin's warmest enemy, sanctions-badgered Benito Mussolini, was enough of a Great Editor last week to agree that the Prime Minister had been great in handling the Empire crisis of Edward VIII. Il Duce dictates daily the tone of Italy's press and the following handsome admission in Giornale d'ltalia might have been tagged To Stanley from Benito: "Prime Minister Baldwin has served the interests of his country worthily by facing the painful but necessary battle to separate, even up to extreme consequences, Edward's private life from the duties that are his toward the Empire."

The way in which Squire Baldwin did this in the House of Commons was intensely moving, mellow and dramatic without melodrama, in fact it was magnificent.

Here was Mr. Baldwin, the massive Victorian figure of a John Bull who has not a nerve in his body, who reads the newspapers as little as a statesman can nowadays, who simply will not use the telephone in international crisis—because one never knows who is listening—and is, in short, a middle-class English company director who never went out to make a sale in his life. Here, on the other hand, was the "Empire Salesman," the ever-young and pepful crowned head. In him Britain had invested millions to build up Edward as Heaven's gift to the masses and to British trade— not to mention women of both hemispheres. Could this investment last week be saved?

If not, could the liquidation be accomplished without impairing the Royal Family's immense goodwill dating from Queen Victoria? Could humdrum Mr. Baldwin keep steady and do his awful duty while narrow Downing Street echoed to such cries as "God save the King—from Bald- win! FLOG BALDWIN! FLOG HIM!! WE—WANT—EDWARD!!!" The last man in the world whom such cries could disconcert is Mr. Baldwin, and the last woman is Mrs. Baldwin.

Mrs. Baldwin says she "knows that the inscrutable hand of Providence guides" her husband, and Mr. Baldwin is not alone in thinking she is right. He was last week the absolutely ideal Prime Minister to weather an English crisis by applying precisely those qualities of bulldog smugness which have strewn his career in foreign affairs with disaster after disaster and are today threatening to gum the works of British Rearmament and imperil the Empire (TIME, Nov. 23 et ante). Again & again Mr. Baldwin has told the House of Commons that "my lips are sealed" until this has become a 1936 British byword for hypocrisy. Came last week, however, the Supreme Crisis in which the curiosity of the world had to be kept unsatisfied day after agonizing day if good great Mr. Baldwin was to wear down and tame his passionate and obstinate King Emperor. In his own time, and it seemed an outrageously long time, Mr. Baldwin, who is 69, last week entirely tamed a Sovereign of 42, recalling him to that state of dignity (see p. 15) minus which a King Emperor is not worth to Great Britain the millions per year he costs, and securing his abdication.