A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IT is long since so brilliant and impressive a speech has been heard in either House of Parliament as that delivered by Lord Keynes in the House of Lords on Tuesday. One of the most experienced of the listeners present described it as actually the most brilliant speech he had e-'er heard. There may have been some small excess of enthusiasm in that, but it would be hard to praise the chief British negotiator's defence of the Washington Loan too highly. Lord Keynes began his speaking young. He was the first undergraduate of his year to be President of the Cambridge Union, and even then the even warmth of his voice, the lucidity of his arguments and the force of his reasoning put him in a class apart. On Tuesday he spoke with a fuller knowledge of his subject than any other man in the Chamber possessed, with a natural zest in the_ defence of his own handiwork and with a breadth of vision which saw the agreement he had engineered, not in isolated naked- ness, but in its setting in a world turning resolutely from antagon- isms to the widest co-operation. Speeches in Parliament do not often actually turn voles. Lord Keynes pretty certainly did turn some—though perhaps he did more in checking hesitant opponents than in stimulating hesitant supporters.
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