28 JUNE 1940, Page 5

For a year or two before last September a well-known

American business man (whose wife happens to be English) was settled very happily in a Home Counties village. When the war broke out he offered the village a field for the produc- tion of vegetables for local use, and gave valued help of many kinds to the local hostel for evacuated children. Then he went back to the United States, whence he writes or cables periodically messages of sympathy and goodwill. Now, having no doubt read of the formation of Local Defence Volunteer companies everywhere, he has cabled $5oo to help in " the defence of the village," or, if preferred, for Red Cross pur- poses. Such individual proofs of sympathy are worth dropping into the scale in which we periodically weigh America up.