Foreign News: Crisis of Confidence

British opinion voiced in and out of the House of Commons appeared last week to have reached a new estimate of Franklin Roosevelt. When the President at the opening of his first term gave vigorous encouragement to the World Economic Conference convened in London by Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, and then proceeded from Washington to withdraw his support and wreck that conference, British public opinion was incensed. Soon afterward, however, the British began little by little to be dazzled by the bursting glory of the New Deal. Their own Cabinet, under the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin and his budget-balancing Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain, began to seem a group of humdrum stick-in-the-muds compared to the spectacular humanism radiating from the White House. During much of the short reign of Edward VIII those British subjects who admired what they considered His Majesty's spectacular humanism saw in this spirit something their whole kingdom should copy from the United States. During 1937, with Britain's Constitutional Crisis irrevocably and popularly settled, the broad revulsion of Britons has carried them back to renewed esteem for the normal British methods of conducting affairs, and naturally they have come at the same time to see President Roosevelt in a fresh light.

Excerpts from recent, year-end British speeches and statements:

Robert John Graham Boothby is one of the British Conservative Party's ablest young men who entered the House of Commons 13 years ago. aged 24, and served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill (TIME, Nov. 27, 1924, et seq.). He told the House that President Roosevelt's policies "violate every economic principle," then issued a survey making his points in detail.

"At the end of last year [1936] the authorities in Washington came to the conclusion, for reasons best known to themselves, that there was danger of an inflationary boom. . . . They proceeded to administer a series of shocks to the markets of the world which by midsummer this year had succeeded in completely shattering confidence. . . .

"The President promised among other things to bring about a planned recovery, to reduce unemployment, to look after the interests of the small man, to stabilize commodity prices, and to prevent violent market fluctuations. Recovery has now been checked, the volume of unemployment is rising sharply, thousands of small investors have been impoverished, there has been a steep fall in the commodity-price level, and the fluctuations of the market during the past three months . . . have been more violent than at any time since 1929. . . .

"In Great Britain there is yet no sign of any real abatement or check of activity. Here the production of capital goods, based upon the combination of Cheap Money and Confidence, remains at a high level. . . . But in view of the serious recession which has unquestionably occurred in America, and the severe shocks to confidence which have been administered, it would be unwise to anticipate any sustained [world] recovery. . . ."