GREAT BRITAIN: Reverse

Last week Parliament behaved very much like the U. S. Congress, except that it did everything backwards. Congress wanted to go home (see p. 11). Parliament wanted to stay in session. In Washington "Government" whips had tried to keep rebellious Congressmen in session to pass the President's bills. In London Conservative Party whips threatened purges, Prime Minister Chamberlain lost his temper, disgruntled members of the Party in power spoke out in open revolt, Oppositionists cheered signs of a growing split, as the members drew back from the dread prospect of a two-month vacation. The two great organs of Anglo-Saxon democracy imitated each other in the same sense that a blotter carries a reverse image of the signature it blots.

Leader of the House of Commons rebels was no Jack Garner, but cherubic, rebellious Conservative Winston Churchill, who, when stirred, is the House's most effective speaker. Last week Mr. Churchill let himself go in the most savage speech he has made since the post-Munich debate. The occasion was a Government motion for adjournment. Labor, about as strong as the Republicans were in Congress in 1936, offered an amendment that the House reassemble in three weeks instead of two months. Last year, when Parliament adjourned (after a reassuring speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain), it reassembled to be faced by the Czecho-Slovak Crisis, and many a member among loyal pro-Chamberlain Conservatives felt uneasily that it might return to face a comparable crisis this autumn, that such a crisis would be hard to explain to the voters at home.

Laborite Arthur Greenwood made a dutiful, taken-for-granted, defense-of-democracy and fear-of-appeasement protest against adjournment that did not ruffle the Prime Minister any more than the Opposition's 195 votes scared him. But when Critic Churchill said: "I have the feeling that things are in a dead balance. . . . The situation in Europe is graver now than it was at this time last year. . . ." the House sat up to take notice.

He grew eloquent: 2,000,000 men under arms in Germany, with 500,000 to be added in August; heavy concentrations of German troops on the Polish frontier from Danzig to Cracow; five German divisions in motion near Breslau; schools in Bohemia transformed into hospitals; troops and supplies moving east through Ostmark*—all this convinced him that "it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House to write itself off as an effective and potent factor in the situation. . . ." If things were in dead balance, no move should be taken that might weaken resistance to aggression.

Then he grew sarcastic. Personally, he said, as the Prime Minister scowled, he trusted Mr. Chamberlain's good faith, but "it will be a very hard thing for the Government to say to the House of Commons, 'Be gone. Run off and play. Take your gas masks with you. Don't worry about public affairs. Leave them to the gifted and experienced Ministers, who, so far as our defenses are concerned, landed us where we were landed in September.' "