GREAT BRITAIN: Fight to the Finish?

A huntin', shootin' and fishin' aristocrat of old England is Esme Ivo Bligh, 9th Earl of Darnley, a product of Eton and King's College, Cambridge, a major in the R.A.F. right through World War I. Last week he startled the Empire by rising in the House of Lords to urge that Great Britain should try to make with Germany an immediate peace without victory.

Taking members of the British Cabinet to task for saying that Britain and France are fighting to produce a "change of heart" in Germany, Lord Darnley argued that: "A free offer [of peace] would more likely produce a change of heart and the security we require from Germany. The only satisfactory guarantee we ever will obtain is [German] good will." According to the noble Lord, Britain "in the years after Versailles [failed] to conciliate Germany," and Adolf Hitler has "aimed partly to make his country free and prosperous, but chiefly and mainly absolutely to free it from any danger in the future, and so every threat we made made him think aggression was necessary."

"Boomerangs." The Lords cheered when Baron Snell of Plumstead, a Labor peer, once a stable groom, scathingly denounced "this tribute to Hitler," but Lord Darnley's proposal was warmly seconded by Baron Arnold, who was Under Secretary for Colonies and later Paymaster General in the British Labor Governments of 1924 and 1929. "The policy of a fight to the finish is wrong," cried Lord Arnold, arguing that, if Britain and France continue fighting Germany until the Nazis are overthrown by revolution, the German people will then go Communist and join the Russians in spreading Communism over the whole of Eastern Europe.

The Bishop of Chichester joined with Lords Darnley and Arnold in plumping for peace-without-victory, observing that the Government had not "taken seriously" the efforts of neutrals to mediate. Outstanding in the stuffy Church of England as a progressive student of social and industrial problems, the Bishop sharply criticized Foreign Secretary Viscount Halifax for stipulating fortnight ago that Germany must offer "adequate guarantees" before peace negotiations can begin. Cried the Bishop: "Military, naval and economic guarantees which satisfy the most exacting critics have a way, after 20 years, of recoiling like boomerangs!"