A Going Concern: Some Notes on Britain

VOLUME 172

NUMBER 4

OCTOBER, 1943

86 th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by EDWARD WEEKS

LONDON may be in the hands of an American Army of Occupation, as one wag put it, but the lions of Trafalgar still gaze upon a going concern. It was seven in the evening when I first reached the city, and thanks to Double Summer Time the streets were bathed in the sunny July haze.

The eye is immediately captured by the neverstill pattern of uniforms. Against the limestone facades you see the khaki with its bright shoulder tabs, the RAF slate blue, the bearded young naval officers (the Navy sports the beard as a badge of long cruises), the mulberry berets of the air-borne troops and the black of the Eighth Army. As you look closer, you begin to pick out the Poles with their angular hats, the Fighting French, the Norwegians, and to spot the American aviators, whose blue patches worn beneath the silver wings identify boys who have come straight from combat.

London traffic, which used to crawl, is now a fast thin stream into which an American steps, always looking the wrong way. The red buses, dispatch riders, the taxis and staff cars, bear down on you at an alarming speed. London has a quick pulse today. It is not only natural attraction which makes you look at the English women. It is the fact that they have taken over so large a part of this man-made civilization. The harbor launch which came out to meet our seaplane was manned by women in blue jerseys and slacks. From the boat train which rode us up to London I saw women working in the train sheds and platforms of every station: they were oiling and servicing engines, ihe broader of them were unloading baggage cars, and as porters they are ready to help you with your handbags. But I noticed that the women porters took care of the mothers and children: the men didn’t want them, and there is a matter of pride in that.

When we lined up in the taxi queue at Liverpool Street, it was a policewoman who sorted us into the proper cabs — for Waterloo, the Strand, or Westminster. Curiously enough, I saw no women driving t axis: perhaps that is one English club they can’t get into. But I did see them driving lorries, and as ticket takers they are in charge of all buses throughout the kingdom. The speediest of them are the women dispatch riders for the Admiralty in their crash helmets and blue uniforms, a sight for the eye as they slice through the London traffic at 50 m.p.h.

The night of our arrival in the after-dinner dusk we walked along the Embankment for a look at the captive balloons which rise like thousands of gray elephants above the gray city. Half of every crew are women. Women aim and service many of the ack-ack batteries, though it is still the masculine privilege to fire the gun. Women are the rank and file of the Land Army, they are nurses* ferry pilots, WVS, ATS, WRENS — and they compose from a third to nine tenths of the working population of the factories.

Copyright 19Jt3, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Britain has mastered a problem which still bewilders us — the problem of how to employ women on a part-time schedule. Some of them work on split schedules, four hours a day, four or five days a week. Women in the little villages are organized in groups of twenty to fifty fabricating a single gadget which when finished will be supplied to the larger assembly line. Such part-time work answers an age-old craving of women whose children have left the apron strings.

In the big munition and aircraft factories, women arc manning three shifts of eight hours each. In one munitions plant in the North, of 12,000 employees, 800 were men, and of that 800 most were crocks and old-timers who had been brought back to do the lower work the women were too skilled to handle. All of this in a country whose birth rate has shown a healthy though not always legitimate pickup.

In one particular factory I asked which age group was doing the most remarkable work. It was not, as I thought, the girls twenty to twenty-five whose husbands and fiances were in service; it was the group from forty to sixty, most of whom did not know one end of a wrench from another five years ago. The application of this woman power is not hit-or-miss. It is conscripted, graded, and regulated. The drafting of women from forty-five to fifty was brought before Parliament during my visit. While there were scattered complaints from women who did not want to leave their homes, {he majority were quietly making ready for the new job, should they be called.

Factory managers always refer to their “female workers.” One wonders how long it will be before female workers exert their proportionate and new-found influence in the shop committees and so reach up to the councils of the Labor Party. And one wonders how many of the women now employed — the women in youth or middle life — will be willing to relinquish at the war’s end the freedom and skill which they have earned. Said one married woman reflectively, “Oh, yes, I want to be with my husband and my children on Saturday and Sunday. And I know the housework will make its claim. But I shall never be really happy again without three or four days a week of this.” Labor leaders see how sizable is the problem coming up when the men return. Its solution will reach into the factories, into the community, into education, and into literature. It will be something to watch.

Meantime there is that natural attraction which I spoke about. Women are at their best under the nervous excitement of war. And every woman in Britain knows that the Americans are looking at her. It is no wonder that the American soldier feels more t han merely curious about these flaxen blondes with their lovely coloring. Every Englishwoman who can afford to wears bare legs, and the leg make-up — or liquid stockings — adds a tropical touch to the scene. The girls in uniform must be envious, for their regulation cotton hose are not, shall I say, seductive. Nor are the skirts and blouses of the English uniforms so smartly cut as ours.

Or am I really thinking of the figures whicli set them off? To American eyes Englishwomen seem singularly robin-breasted, the hips broader, the legs more downright. The contrast was brought home to me when two thousand of our own WACS marched into London. “Oh, those lovely long legs,” said my companion ruefully as she watched them swing by. Seriously, what does breed 1 lie difference between our rangy American figure and the English ruddy cheeks, robin breasts, and bigboned strength? Is it the weather? Or the limestone? Or Brussels sprouts?

2

RESTAURANT food in Britain is not without its dry humor. To begin with, you have to get. into the restaurant. The evening of our arrival it was 8.15 before we had bathed and unpacked, and after a disappointing Martini in the American Bar (so called because the alcoholic content is one-half of one per cent) we strolled casually into the regal dining room of the Savoy. An orchestra was playing and most of the tables were occupied. “Have you reservations, sir?” said the headwaiter. “So sorry. May we book you for tomorrow?”

Londoners dine in two shifts and we had been caught between. The first shift come straight in from the office; the second, the couples on leave, after the theaters close at 9.80, and they dine and dance until the midnight curfew—by which time the taxis have expended their gas allowance and electric torches are winking along the Strand and on Piccadilly for a ride home. As Private Breger says, “The young ones flash it on their faces; the old ones on their gams.”

But we were talking of food. Rough justice ordains that no diner-out shall have more than three courses, and the rule is inflexible from the tip of Scotland to Land’s End: soup or hors d’oeuvres; entree; sweet or savory. Of course with tea. (“Will you have China or India?”) Five shillings is the regulation price, but you pay an addition for the trifle or custard, something more for the fiddler, and most of all for the wine, of which England is very short.

Those who want the first (and only) slices of roast beef, which are still trundled under the gleaming covers at Simpson’s, must be at their table at 12.30 or at 6.45. Even if you are on time, your portion will not be that full, rubicund slice: it will be thin shavings — a bit of the fat, a bit of the lean, to give you the taste but not the surfeit of England.

Those who come later take pot luck, which may mean jugged hare (I think it sits rather high) or brill, a fish which tastes as it sounds. If you don’t like to pick the brills out of your mouth, you can try “rock salmon,” which on some menus is a description of dogfish. The English thick soups are superior to ours and particularly in the summer. Except for marinated herring, the hors d’oeuvres are vegetables which have been overcooked and allowed to cool. A good French dressing is as rare as the oil to make it. Fresh-run salmon stays in Scotland (since price control gives no inducement to the angler to send his catch to London).

On two occasions I had to fall back on chicken. Now I have had delicious fowl at the Ivy, but no such luck elsewhere. For these birds are grandmothers, they have laid their ultimate egg, their salad days are behind them, and whether in brown gravy or curry, they return the lean pickings on which they were fed.

A Necco wafer of butter is served with the English war bread. The bread is brown, chewy, and filling, with a crisp crust: it makes “proper toast,” and taken with the ever faithful marmalade, it gives the tea hour a real revival, Tea trolleys go through the offices as early as three o’clock and 1 he brew lasts until four-thirty. So braced, the staff can work until seven.

Since my visit coincided with the summer harvest, I had the relish of the fresh peas and beans, the lettuce which is such a rarity, and the wallgrown peaches and grapes sent to me by Nora Wain and her husband from their farm.

Home cooking, at least from the guest’s point of view, is infinitely preferable. For one thing, there are the eggs. Every householder keeps chickens: you will find hen coops in the Master’s Lodge at Oxford, on a balcony in Soho, or fenced away from the rosebushes in Kent. And the eggs are a treasure, gladly shared. In a home you will be given a taste of the kid or veal which so seldom strays to town. And the opportunity of avoiding the ubiquitous sprout. My feelings toward the sprout are those of the cartoonist in Yank. His illustration showed an American aviator being briefed for his next flight, and his C.O. was saying to him, “Now your mission is to bomb the hell out of these thousand acres of Brussels sprouts.”

3

YES, we are tired — deep down,” said the harbor master who had been showing me the London docks. “Don’t forgot you find us at a cheerful moment. For two years we have been living in a tunnel. Now we begin to see the light at the open end — and, my word, it makes a difference.”

In curious ways you notice tho effect of that long pull in the dark. I walked my way through five pairs of socks and a brand-new pair of shoes. What impressed me was not the desolate spaces from which the plaster and wreckage have been cleared; what impressed me was how London goes on about its business, with a calm acceptance of the ruins.

The railings have been stripped from the parks and squares; the famous turf is pitted with trenches and dug up for truck gardens. But there are still stretches where lovers lie and tiraders in Hyde Park still denounce the government and all its works. The fine houses in the West End have been gouged with HE; their blind windows ai*e covered with oiled cloth. One little shop in Mayfair had had its face freshened with primrose paint, but it stood out with almost dishonorable gayety against the shabby gray. For London has worn no make-up since 1340.

Over the Bank Holiday they held a track meet in front of St. Paul’s -three-legged and halfmile races run on the most expensive cinders in the world. I remember a blank wall in Berkeley Square with the fireplace and a flying tatter of drapery to suggest the coziness which once gathered three flights up. I remember the guttered little homes in Bethnal Green, and the west wing of Buckingham Palace where the bomb hit and where the fragments of carving and masonry now stand in the yard awaiting the day of restoration. Time waits. The clocks in the steeples have stopped at different times, and you wonder what the blitz was like at that particular minute. One had its face blown upside down, the hands gesticulating that in the old sense time doesn’t matter.

You do not measure fatigue by destruction but by the recuperative power that remains. Having made up their minds to gamble everything, these people are unashamed of their shabbiness and unsentimental about their ruins. They conduct no tours of the bombed areas, no sale of souvenirs. They do not romanticize the war in films as we do. The original sound effects are much too close.

Twenty German bombers swung in low over the Southeast one night during my visit; before breakfast two thousand people were looking for new homes. Farther north in Hull I watched t he children in the street playing blocks with bricks from the ruined houses; I saw double-decker buses on their nightly evacuation of some fourteen hundred mothers, children, and ancients. These people have two homes. I followed them from their bombed dockside area — where they spend their days — to the shelters miles out of town. Here school is taught, the old men work on their gardens, and the twelve-year-olds dance the Lambeth Walk and the Hokey-Pokey before going to their bunks.

On my walks I could not help staring at the little oases of life which continue to flourish in the midst of the ruined streets. The miracle of those houses which survive stops you in your tracks. I remember one house in Birmingham, with its little window box, lace curtains, and tiny garden plot — the only home still alive in a row of twenty. In front of it a nine-year-old was precariously balanced on his father’s bicycle; and as I passed, his mother came noisily to the door. “Albert, you bring that bicycle in. You’ll be smashing it first thing you know. — Kids do take watching!” she said to me briskly. Call it tenacity or call it lack of imagination — but remember that it does not break.

The British children are pink and full of bounce.

I could find no trace of the shock to which so many of them have been exposed. The farther I traveled, the more I wondered whether these city dwellers who have followed their factories into the country may not be better off for the sunlight and good food. Generally speaking, the British are thinner and healthier than they were five years ago. Instead of fish and chips, the fried stuff so dear to the Cockney, they have been living on soups, boiled foods — and health bread. The result is noticeable.

4

BRITISH patience is enough to drive an American crazy. I had to be taught how to behave in a queue. In London when you wait for a bus, you stand under a little roof in a queue which runs along the curb and then doubles back on itself. There you stand in pairs, like the animals for the Ark, waiting it may be for an hour or more until your t urn comes to step aboard. And when it comes, don’t crowd around the opening and shove, or you will be called back into line — as I was.

The queue for railroad tickets moves twice as fast as our line-up in America, chiefly because everyone is content with a Third Class ticket. The queues for food move faster than ours because there are fewer things to buy. Twenty-six theaters in London are packed, and for a lively number like The Merry Widow the queue for the balcony seats forms three hours before the curtain rises, the line being supplied with campstools to sit. on.

Britain takes this waiting philosophically: you hear the story of two men who join a prodigiously long line. The short one asks, “Do you know what this is for?” “Not I,” answers the stranger ahead, “but it must be something jolly good — see how long the line is!”

In the munitions towns I have seen workers — seventy to eighty pairs — at the end of a ten-hour day, mute in the rain, waiting not for the next bus, but for the one after the next —or the one after that.

Rubber will stretch just so far. What stranger can test the fiber of British resilience? Who can measure the feelings of the miners and sons of miners called back from shipyards and factories because more coal is needed? Above ground they have been earning an average of £7 a week; now they are being ordered underground where the pay might average £o. Four thousand such cases were reviewed in the Regional Labor Office at Edinburgh when I was there. Half of these miners had appealed, and wffien the appeals were overruled, had gone down to the pits. Only one man was obstreperous.

These are not docile people; if they submit to regulation with less exasperation than we do, it is because they five in the face of greater peril. I walked in the beech forests, past the ammunition dumps hidden under the great trees, saw the machine-gun nests commanding the sunken lane and crossroads, the iron stakes to fend the Luftwaffe off the village common and golf course, the signs, “KEEP OUT. THIS AREA IS MINED.” — the visible evidence of a nightmare that was almost true. Now the invasion points the other way, and if the Home Guard grumbles against the same punishing maneuvers on Sunday, well, you can’t blame human nature for wanting a holiday.

Naturally, there is more exasperation here than meets the eye. Absentees from the Sunday drill arc fined on the second offense. Absentees from factories arc fined up to £10 and their names and fines are published in the morning paper. No nerve center in the kingdom is more important than Liverpool, and when the Liverpool dock workers strike, it is serious. Strike they did — but the whole thing was settled in under forty hours. Human friction of this kind is inevitable when resilience wears thin.

The whole country took time off this August, and as I traveled through Scotland and along the Yorkshire coast, I talked with workers and their youngsters, bound for the beaches. “It is a bit of a scandal,” a Labor M.P. said to me, “our taking these ten days. Cut after all, it is the first vacation we have had since the summer of 1939.”

What amazes you is that they have kept going at such a pace for four years. At office, dockside, or factory, these men and women have been doing one full-time job of ten hours and then coming home to do a half-time job for the community. In a town as exposed as Hull, some seven thousand people in addition to the police are on call every night.

I asked my English friends how much sleep they were living on and the answer was usually six hours or less. With this ration on a seven-day week, do you wonder that factory managers and shop stewards, laboratory workers and government officials, — all men who carry the burden of detail, — are gray-faced. “Tired — deep down. ” The words point up the difference between their strain and ours, a difference that must be remembered as we work things out.

5

To KEEP her spirits up, Britain has had to whistle in the dark. If you have any talent whatever for whistling, you are called upon. In Coventry 1 met the vaudev ille team who were putting on a show at the lunch hour in t he cafeteria of a factory. Their humor was broad, and when the two thousand voices roared into the chorus, the singing was better. The National Gallery, having hidden its treasures, now devotes its largest hall to a noon concert free for all Londoners. So does the Royal Exchange. It was Myra Hess who organized the series in the National Gallery — take your lunch, sit on a mat, and don’t leave crumbs behind. I was one of the 2500 who heard her play at the thousandth concert this July.

London is full of exhibitions — exhibitions of Soviet art, pictures drawn by British prisoners of war, and in the Gallery itself a superb collection by the commissioned artists with the armed forces. But the biggest magnet in all London is the “fiftyyear plan” of the London County Council for the rebuilding of the city. I cannot tell you how many thousands pour across Westminster Bridge each day to see in the County Hall these thirty-foot wall maps and dramatic graphs of the London that might be. They came from every quarter of the city itself, and they were fascinated by the prospect. I was particularly touched by the ARPS in uniform who studied the maps as if calculating how much safer this new city would be to defend.

This urge to rebuild is blazoned on every city wall in Britain. Even Edinburgh, unbombed and by all odds the most beautiful single spot on the islands, has a huge sign, “REBUILDING EDINBURGH, ” to mark the new exhibition in its National Gallery. As a naval officer remarked, you can do any job you have to, as long as you have hope. The British pin their hope on the future. They pin their hope on the new Educational Bill, which will improve what we call the public schools, which advances the school age to sixteen, supplies at least one hot meal to the pupils, and argues for a certain instruction in religion, somewhat to the apprehension of Catholics and Nonconformists. These reforms sound pretty elementary in American ears, and to a man like Mr. Harold Laski they are simply catching up with what was promised but never fulfilled in the days of Ramsay MacDonald. But the people see in them a distinct advance and believe this time that they are going through.

I found a good many people who were chinning themselves on the Beveridge Report, nor were they all among that upper age bracket who might be the first to benefit. Some 275,000 copies of the Report in a penny pamphlet have been distributed to the armed forces; does it not argue for a security more sensible and far-reaching than any cash bonus? In the industrial Midlands I felt a good deal of apprehension lest the government pigeonhole the scheme. But members of the Labor Party assured me that the practical details (For instance, to whom shall the money be paid — to the husband or the wife? The Report doesn’t say.) were being worked out in committee and that the National Government would certainly accept the gist of it. “ Don’t let them tell you we can’t afford it,” they added. “ If we can afford to pay for this war, we certainly can afford the money necessary for Beveridge.”

These were the promises Britain lived by as it came through the tunnel of the dark years. Up in Scotland they have taken the TVA to heart. They see the possibilities of harnessing some of their own water power, and what it would mean to Scotch prowess. The Scotchman is like our Southerner in his fierce pride for his own country; likewise, in his distrust of the money power of the capital. Said a young Scotchman with a wry smile, “Even if we got our hydroelectric power, London would tap it and tell us where it was needed. ”

Hope is kindled in the British Army by the best educational device I have ever seen applied to troops. The need was apparent after Dunkirk, when Britain had on its hands a weaponless army, angry because they had not been able to fight back, morose in their wonder as to what would come next. The men needed talking to, they needed the opportunity of asking questions, regardless of rank, and it was a godsend for the War Office when it found a Welsh civilian, Mr. W. E. Williams, with a native genius for adult education. You can imagine the fears he had to overcome — fears that his line would be too political, fears that the talks would fail to interest the soldier. But by the summer of 1941 he had ABCA (Army Bureau of Current Affairs) in full sw ing.

What he did was to organize town meetings in every platoon in the British Army. He chose the second lieutenants as the natural moderators, and he gave then “refresher” courses to help them handle the open and often heated discussions. Each week he distributes bulletins which deal alternately with military subjects and with civilian problems. An edition of 750,000 copies goes to the forces in Britain, and there are editions for Cairo, India, North Africa.

Here, for instance, is the leaflet on the United States Army. The first article is by Major E. M. Llewellyn, editor of Stars and Stripes in Europe. Then comes a quiz map of the forty-eight states, then the story of an American recruit, and finally “The Epic of Bataan,” by Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Clear, reprinted from the Reader’s Digest. As fair and terse a presentation as you could ask for.

Or Lake this one, which Mr. Williams himself has written. It is entitled When the Lights Go On and it contains the raw material for at least four ABCA discussions on the problems of post-war Britain. With this priming, no officer would fail to keep the talk swinging on demobilization. Here are suggestions on rebuilding the export trade, restoring the luxury trades, maintaining agriculture. Here are clear thinking about “the woman-bogey” and an admirable summary of “A Fair Chance for Children.”

There are regular ABCA meetings once a week, and supplementary talks whenever a visiting speaker, or the Brain Trust, as they call it, is available. Americans like Geoffrey Parsons, Jr., Henry Steele Commager, and Herbert Agar have appeared in the Brain Trust and have stood up to the give-and-take. The moderator is always addressed as “Sir”: there is that concession to rank. But otherwise the gloves are off.

At Cambridge and Oxford I talked with dons who had pulled out of their academic absorption to match their wits in these ABCA sessions. “What are they like as an audience?” I asked. “They may not have much learning,” said the Fellow of Trinity, “but they have a native shrewdness and a hunger for facts.” “Do they heckle?” “Just like any English audience. When they break in, it is because you haven’t told them enough. You’ll find hardheaded chaps in every company, who have the strangest fixed ideas. It is no good contradicting them. You have got to come back at t he subject again and again until they are pulled down by their tent mates. Once when I was talking on the necessity of our helping Russia, a private stood up and asked,‘Sir, is it not true that one Englishman is the equal of five Russians?* *—* the inference of course being that we had better keep our weapons at home. I had to go back at him three times, working out the length of the Russian front, the number of German divisions, the tanks destroyed, before he sat down.”

“What recent subjects have you been speaking on?” I asked. “Well, after Pearl Harbor 1 talked about our relations with the United States and why it is important to know more about your people. Out of one row of ten soldiers, six had never heard of Pearl Harbor. Lately I have been talking about the British Empire. But the men don’t seem very interested. It may be my fault.” “Why not begin by talking about India?” I suggested with a grin.

ABCA meetings were held throughout the Eighth Army at every stage of its desert victory. They were being held in Sicily when I left. “Over the three months of this summer,” Air. Williams told me, “we have had 62,000 talks in addition to the regular weekly meetings. Our bulletins and maps will be going up to the troops the first week after invasion.” When I add that Mr. Williams’s entire staff consists of twenty-six people, I think you will feel the respect I do for this going concern.

6

ENGLAND’S attitude toward America has been greatly changed. Gone — well, almost gone - is that certain condescension which so infuriated James Russell Lowell when the Atlantic was a pup. I should be ingenuous were I persuaded that a threehundred-year tradition of superiority had been supplanted in twenty-two months by a guarantee of equality. But of this 1 am persuaded — that Britain is prepared to go further and to give more for the sake of reciprocity than we at present believe.

There are certain questions which a guest finds it. rather difficult to put to his host. Yet they persist in his mind, and if I ask them now and at a distance, it is not mere idle curiosity, f wonder about the rebuilding of London — I wonder if the light and air will be kept in, now that it has been let in by the bombs. I wonder if the Cockney will really be moved out of his old haunts on the Isle of Dogs, on Bethnal Green and Poplar. (“At least one eighth of our population hereabouts will have to be moved away,” said one of the leading spirits in Oxford House, “if the city is to be what it really should be.”) I wonder if the London worker can be persuaded to live in flats for the sake of sanitation.

1 wonder about the Wren churches which, in James Bone’s phrase, were being driven out of the city by the money-changers. Will money now be found for their restoration? I wonder about that magnificent prospect of St. Paul’s. “Can you imagine what it would be like if there were turf here, and trees?” I said innocently to the woman who was driving us. “Turf?” she said. “Turf! Why that land is worth a thousand pounds a foot!”

I repeat that these are not idle questions. For me they hint at the answer of whether or not England will continue to be a going concern after the war. It takes magnanimity of spirit to work for something outside of your own interests when you don’t have to.

What reassurance have we that reforms such as those in education and social security which have buoyed up the war worker in the dark years will be realized? As 1 see the Conservatives borrowing Labor’s thunder on the left, and Labor growing more Conservative as it feels the weight of authority, f wonder about His Majesty’s Opposition; if such objectives seem stubborn to obtain, will the Conservatives press them through or will the Labor Party have enough leadership and strength to avert unemployment and the economics of scarcity?

As I look questioningly at the political future of the British, so they look at ours. We do not appreciate how urgent is their desire for a nonpartisan relationship. So long as our American opposition continues to taunt the Administration with being pro-British, so long must the British wear the preference for the Democratic Party. For obviously they would rather have the open hand than the cold shoulder. But what they most want is an understanding above party politics.

W hen L try to estimate the broadest collaboration possible, I wonder if we realize how much we in the United States affect the British balance? (Said one of the most brilliant of the younger economists, “ I pray nightly for a prosperous America when the shooting stops. When you people are in production, we all do well.”) I wonder if wre know’ enough about the annual food bill for the United Kingdom. (A Conservative member of Parliament worked out the equation on the back of an envelope as we flew across the Atlantic. “Our food cost us roughly 400 million pounds before the war,” he said, “and to pay for it we could count on £50 millions from invisible exports, 150 millions from shipping, and £0 millions miscellaneous. But now we owe India money, and what do you think has happened to our shipping? Shall we have to export our people? ”)

I wonder if mutual confidence can take the place of the competitive suspicion which has so often ruined Anglo-American relations in the past. You bump into suspicion all over Britain. I met it on the Clyde where in the shipyards I heard a man say, “It troubles us a little to think of you people turning out your huge fleet of cargo ships while here we build almost nothing but warships. What will you do with all those freighters afterwards?” I remember the fleets of Liberty ships which rusted up the Hudson, in Puget Sound, and down on the Chesapeake in the 19£0’s — I know what I would do this time. And when you hear the airmen talk, you feel unspoken the apprehension about ihe transport planes and our new-found bases. Are we really out for the sovereignty of the skies?

It is a curious thing to know where reciprocity begins in human affairs and where it ends in business. An Englishman for whom 1 have great respect said to me frankly at the end of our luncheon, “There is one essential paradox you people don’t seem to realize. One minute you talk about the liquidation of (he Empire, the self-sufficiency of the Dominions, and the stud farm which England will become after the war. One minute you speak of us as if we were a poor relation, and then five minutes later you are counting us in as a strong ally. Well, we can’t be both.”

I make no apology for American aspiration within reason. But I hate with all my heart that selfish belief that by good luck or good management we are destined to be the hogs of all creation. I think the collaboration of England and the United States is not only possible but within reach. I think it will be maintained only if each country within its own limits is more of a going concern than it was before the war. And I think that without it the chances for twenty years of peace are almost too bleak to contemplate.