But the outstanding failures of the Government have been, after all, not Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Baldwin, but Mr. MacDonald and it John Simon. They have indeed made an unexpectedly bad com! clarity of the one have only served to bring out the narrow formalism and lack of principle of the other. The days of Mr. Henderson at the Foreign Office and at Geneva seem golden age, though unenter-
squalid record of addled enterprises, us Hesomeness, the enough, compared with the
the unnecessary under Mr. MacDonald and Sir John. Simon. The constant peregrinating about the world, te ostentatious ascents and descents by aeroplane, have made them figures of ridicule in all the papers of Europe, One cannot con-duet the foreign policy of @ great country by globe-trotting.
Sir John Simon began badly with the crisis in the Far Enst. Dificult og the situation was, there is no doubt but that. if he had firmly aligned himself along with the United States on the question of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and ihe attack, on Shanghai, the Japan ese would never have dared to out the whole of world opinion in the way they were ultimately led on to do. Nor would the prestige of the suffered $0 irremedinot he 0 far, might not even have had to leave the League. The conduct of our foreign affairs in this period was abject in the extreme; it has prejudiced from the first the foreign policy of this Government, in a way that can never be remedied now—of Government, in fact; and it has east a shadow over the whole career of the present occupants of the Foreign Office. Everybody has commented on the way which" for months the Engl Foreign Secretary behaved as if he were the briefed advocate of Japan at Geneva. Nobody knows how much Amveriean good-will was sacrificed in the process: but at Toast, from the point of view of the most element tary considerations of self-interest, we ought never to have put ourselves forward as the defenders of Tapanese conduct in the Far East, Japan ig our. greatest commercial rival in the East: it is Japan that is undersell scTapan that ie ruining us in all our cotton As the result of the disaster the Far Bast, the Japanese occupa tion of Manchuria—an objective which they never gained even in the critical days of the war, and which fed, will alter the whole development of affairs in the Far East—and of the ignominious part played in the retreat of Western civilisation and the humiliation of the League, the development of progressive' and successful foreign policy under the present leaders has been. prejudiced from, the outset! so much s0 that even when Sir John Simon took a step which has proved to be justified, and despatched a warning Note to Germany last autumn on the subject of rearmament. itwas much more widely disapproved of in this country than it need have been. But in foreign affairs, as domestic and economic affairs, there has been no sign that this Government is following a consistent, oF ven considered, much less a deter-i "it seems always. to improvising a. policy ad hoc, wavering undecided as to its line of ction, staggering from conference to conference, each of them more ill-prepared than the last, in. the hope that something may turn up was apparently in this hope that the Prime Minister and the Fo Secretary, being then at Geneva and having heard that Mussolini plan, flew at, once post-haste to Rome; though apparently Mus~ solini's own estimation of the plan was not such os to warrant his make Ing the journey from Rome. to Geneva, or even to some pleasant watering-place in North Ttaly, for the sake of imparting it to the head of the English Government. It seems great descent. from the days of Ganning or Palmerston, or even from those of Sir Edward Grey. Nor was the result of the visit such the present policy. The Ministers "came back—as if' there were no such thing as an English policy capable of being thought out converts to a fantastic scheme of a European directory of the four Great Powers, ready to consider the sion of the Treaty. And this—belated Liberalism which might have been all very well ten or five or even three years ago—at a time when the triumph of militant nationalism in Germany has, become a challenge to the whole European order, As things stand, the attitude of English policy hag very much stiffened towards: Germany—and Fightly; but, after the ignominious record of the past two yours, it is impossible to entertain any' confidence that the policy of the Gov. ernment in foreign affairs will hold fo any definite line for any length of time, or will not wobble and chop fand change with sentiment and the exigencies of a vain desire for publicity and popularity.
With this record of failure and gathering mistrust, it is not to be wondered at that the cohesion of its support both in, the House of Commons and in the country is early giving way to restiveness and di Satisfaction, Tt is evident that the opposition the Government most fears in Parliament is that strong body of Conservative opinion, voiced by Mr. Churchill, which dislikes the Policy of responsible government in India; and if-and when at any time this purely die-hard section is. reintorced by a revolt of the protectionists, the unity of the Conservative Party. must undergo serious strain and the existence of the 'Ni tional' Government will be
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.