Various assessments of Mr. Henry Wallace by his fellow-country- men
continue to reach me. They are hardly worth reproducing here, except one—and that as a specimen of American English rather than of American opinion. " The favoured topic for Washington dis- cussion right now," writes a columnist in the Daily News (not one of America's most elevated journals), " concerns the European antics of the capital's screwiest southpaw boomerang-tosser—the Hon. Henry Wallace, darling of the pinkos of the Roosevelt New Deal." I wish I could write like that ; though even if I could I doubt whether I should. More interesting is what I hear about the New Republic, of which Mr. Wallace has lately become editor. This left- wing weekly has, I believe, never paid its way in recent years, but under the Wallace regime the deficit has become formidable—largely, it is fair to say, as the result of an extensive campaign which may in due time bring its reward. Where does the money to 111 the hole come from? Curiously enough, from Totnes, in Devonshire. That may not be a precisely accurate statement, but it is no far out. The New Republic was founded by Mr. and Mrs. Willard Straight. After her husband's death Mrs. Straight married Mr. Leonard Elm- hirst, and with him conducts the interesting educational, and admir- able agricultural, enterprise at Dartington Hall, Totnes. The New Republic, I gather, is financed through a trust, but most of the money in the trust came from Mrs. Elmhirst.
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