The charge that the approach to foreign affairs in the
United States tends, or tended till recently, to be academic finds a good deal of support in Senator Borah's record, for it is a strange anomaly that the Senate Foreign Affairs Com- mittee should be presided over for fifteen years by a man who had never set his foot outside the American continent. Whether he ever went south of Panama, I am not sure, but as regards Europe, though he had been intending for twenty years to visit that forcing-ground of strife, he never got as far as the liner's deck. Eighteen years ago I asked him in Washington when he was coming over to see us. " Next summer," he hoped, and I fancy he has hoped for several summers since. But he has never come. Outspoken though the Senator from Idaho invariably was about Great Britain's iniquities, I have never met an Englishman who did not instinctively take to him, largely no doubt because of his un- mistakable sincerity. All the same, sincerity is not enough. A chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee ought to have a far more intimate knowledge of foreign affairs than a man with Senator Borah's isolationist habits as well as isolationist outlook could have.
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