Thanks largely to good fortune, and slightly I hope to
good management, I have never myself been actually adjudicated bank- rupt, but I can still feel a lively, and sympathetic, interest in people who are. Facts-contained in an article on the subject in Tuesday's Times might well form the subject of a question from the Conserva- tive benches when Parliament reassembles. It used to be a favourite diversion among Labour Members to ask for statistics of bankruptcies among farmers in, say, 1948 as compared with 1938, farmers being one class of the community which has run to bank- ruptcy less frequently in recent years than earlier. But statistics show that since 1946 (under a Labour Government, and Labour can't complain if the Conservatives say because of that) bankruptcies in other professions and trades have steadily increased. Builders, painters, decorators and the like seem specially unfortunate in their financial affairs ; so do garage proprietors. Nothing is said about the clergy, though with the miserable pittances some of them have to subsist on avoidance of the bankruptcy court seems something of a miracle. I should like to see the figures for actors, too. With employ- ment precarious and various temptations to a manner of life out of all relation to their means, many of them exist on the edge, or well over the edge, of perpetual debt. About journalists professional pride forbids me to say anything.
Solemnity in escapades is a depressing thing.' In this week's papers I read of three youthful achievements. Some young gentlemen at Oxford have climbed the Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford and done £195 worth of damage. Some young gentlemen at Cambridge have hoisted a four-seater canoe to the summit of a pinnacle in St. John's College. There is a certain light-hearted pointlessness about both exploits which makes them mildly amusing. But when a party of young persons of both sexes (some, I regret to see, British) go armed with various implements and a concerted plan of action to destroy a few boundary marks on the Franco-German frontier in the belief that this symbolic action makes some difference to some- thing somewhere in the international order there is displayed a mentality which can only cause distress. And if, as rumour has it, they project similar action on the Franco-Belgian frontier they will be turning themselves into public nuisances. Even American States and British counties and French departments have frontier marks ; are they all to go too ? " Cursed be he that removeth his neigh- bour's landmark," according to the law of Moses. I should be sorry to see these ebullient adolescents cursed, but not very sorry to see them spanked.
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