GREAT BRITAIN: Coalition

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There were more meetings at Downing Street. Slowly the new Government formed. Conservative Stanley Baldwin had said that he would take no part in a Coalition Cabinet. He changed his mind last week after he had been interviewed by King George. He entered the emergency Cabinet as a leader of the Government in the House of Commons. Liberal Lloyd George was still sick abed and Sir Herbert Samuel represented him in the new group. Meanwhile London soothsayers wagered that as soon as the emergency was passed Stanley Baldwin would become Prime Minister of Great Britain. Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Margaret Bondfield as Minister of Labor and Lord Sankey as Lord Chancellor were held over among the Laborites. A gaping vacancy was left by "Uncle Arthur" Henderson, the Foreign Minister, who could not bring himself to swallow the projected cut in the Dole.

Montagu Norman remained in quiet Quebec, kept himself from being seen or heard. If he was conferring with Wall Street bankers, if he was borrowing more money for Britain, no word of it leaked to the Press. In the midst of the excitement, Secretary Andrew W. Mellon of the U. S. Treasury reappeared on the international scene by disembarking from the Conte Biancamano at New York. A flashlight bulb exploded almost in his face.

The 76-year-old Secretary leaped back quickly, suffered only a slight glass cut on his right hand which Captain Cavallini of the Conte Biancamano swabbed with alcohol and iodine. Secretary Mellon immediately hurried downtown to confer with Governor George Leslie Harrison of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Newshawks watched and waited at New York, Washington, Quebec and London to see how Great Britain's great credit crisis would be passed, who was guiding the events, and how. For the moment Britain's destiny had been taken from the hands of her politicians and lay among the dictators of the international world of money.