A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
JUST as Mr. Runciman was leaving New York on his return to this country I received from Canada some reflections which seem to me on general grounds fully justified, whether they apply in this particular case or not. Canadians, it is pointed out, and the fact deserves considerable emphasis, are getting increasingly. irritated at the spectacle of British Ministers and other persons of eminence going in a steady flow to the United States, visiting Washington, talking to the President and the Secretary of State and Senators and Congressmen, and sailing off home after effusive interviews with American reporters, as though there were nothing to the north of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes except a moose or two and a few polar bears. Actually there are some ten or eleven million Canadians there, citizens of the senior Dominion of the Commonwealth, in danger of being thrown far too much under the influence of the United States largely because contacts between Canada and this country are fewer and less frequent and less intimate than they should be. It is a pity.
Lord Hugh Cecil having succeeded in accepting an office under the Crown—the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds—to which a salary of 20s. is attached, without accepting an office of profit under the Crown, his seat in Parliament is vacant and Oxford University will proceed to elect a burgess in his place. Sir Farquhar Buzzard, who is a Departmental Professor with real work to do as well as lectures to give, who has a con- siderable private practice as a physician and who is now primarily responsible for the administration of Lord Nuffield's munificent bequest to the Oxford Medical School, still considers he will have abundant leisure to do his duty to Oxford in Parliament—though it is fair to add that that conclusion was forced on him with some difficulty by his Conservative friends. Professor Lindemann, commanding apparently small support among residents, looks to non-resident electors to justify a candidature which splits the Conservative vote. Sir Arthur Salter, standing as an independent, with a committee of Conservatives, Liberals and Labour men behind him, ought, with any luck—which personally I wish him—to poll enough both in Oxford and in the country to ensure his election.
* * * Anything more hollow than the indignation worked up over the Archbishop of York's public support of Sir Arthur I find it hard to imagine. I am tempted, moreover, to speculate precisely how it has been worked up when I note that Our Own Correspondent of the Observer and Our Own Correspondent of the Sunday. Times send messages from Oxford in identical words (except for one sentence : the Sunday Times speaks only of "• strong comment " ; the Observer of " comment that it is a scandalous state of affairs ") recording horror at the idea that a distinguished Oxford voter who took orders and has gone rather a long way should so far plunge into politics as to support an independent non- party candidate. Both our Sabbath mentors, whose unanimity will be agreed to be wonderful, are satisfied on one vital point—" nor is it thought that the Arch- bishop's intervention will weigh against the chances of Professor F. A. Lindemann, who has the support of influential Conservatives up and down the country." The official Conservative candidate, it may be recalled, is Sir Farquhar Buzzard.
* * * * The Boy David has been taken off and we are left to wonder why the combination of Sir James Barrie and Miss Bergner should have ended not in record-breaking but in something like failure. The reason, I think, is pretty clear. If Barrie wanted to write a play for Miss Bergner—and no impulse could have been more laudable —he should let his whimsicalities range round an imaginary, not a historical, character, and preferably a feminine character. We have all had from our child- hood our own conceptions, rational or fantastic, of the boy David, and differ as they may, they at any rate concur in this, that he is conceived of as a boy, and a comparatively normal human boy. The Barrie-Bergner David was like no boy that ever lived—he was in fact all too like what he actually was, a boy played by a woman. Never for a moment while Miss Bergner is on the stage could you forget that, and while illusion necessarily plays a considerable part in the theatre there are some unrealities too palpable to swallow.
About a great many of the entries in the new Honours List, as in most Honours Lists, the most charitable comment is an eloquent silence. But there is one —Mr. H. A. L. Fisher's O.M.—that can evoke nothing but universal applause. The Warden of New College will live in history by two achievements at least, an Education Act to be. bracketed with Forster's, and a History of Europe unlikely to be superseded for generations as the classic authority in its vast field. It was for such men that the Order of Merit was instituted. In congratulating New College on the deserved honour that has come to it in the person of its Warden, I may note in passing the remarkable record of Trinity College, Cambridge, in possessing no fewer than five resident members of the Order of Merit—the Master (Sir J. J. Thomson), Lord Rutherford, Sir James Frazer, Prof. G. M. Trevelyan and Sir F. Gowland Hopkins. Seeing that the Order is confined. to 24 members, Trinity's record is astonishing.
* * Herr Hitler, declaring• that " peace is our dearest treasure," announces simultaneously that no German will ever again be allowed to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. So Herr Ossietzky, thanks to his Falser, achieves a unique distinction—that of being the last German Nobel
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