Empire Notes

What would the editor of the patrician London Times say to blatant "Big Bill" Thompson, should they meet face to face? Last week onetime Times Editor Henry Wickham Steed vowed, at London, that he spoke as follows when recently in Chicago:

"I said to Mayor Thompson, 'it is a great grief to me to find Chicago, which I had expected to see a go-ahead, up-to-date, forward, driving city, such a miserable, stick-in-the-mud, backwater town. Here you are with your noses stuck in the end of the eighteenth century, smelling about a miserable old quarrel between an old German king on one hand and George Washington on the other, and not thinking for a moment that you are 150 years behind the times.' "

The House of Commons passed through second reading, last week, a bill proposing as the legal date of Easter "the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April." At present Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox (on or about the 21st of March). The dates of all other "movable feasts" depend on that of Easter. If the British bill passes third reading, a world conference will be called by British Home Secretary Sir William ("Jix") Joynson-Hicks "to consider joint action."

A charming flippancy is one of the attributes of Edward of Wales. Addressing the Birmingham Jewelers' and Silversmiths' Association, he recently said: "I would not like to say positively whether the idea of a pair of earrings actually sprang from the human brain before the idea of a pair of trousers . . . [but] your industry may claim to be one of the oldest if not the oldest of human handicrafts."

At Oxford, Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, one of the principal collaborators in the invention of the "tank," lectured last week. Lectured he: "When the next great struggle comes, the belligerent nations will not have any scruples regarding treaties. They will consider them mere scraps of paper and enter the war without even a formal declaration of hostilities."

Gossip spiced, last week, the appointment of Sir William George Tyrrell to become British Ambassador at Paris. He has been for 15 years the most influential bureaucrat at the Foreign Office, and since 1925 its permanent Under-Secretary. But he and Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain have never "clicked." Because the Foreign Office must smoothly "go on forever," a comfortable post has been found for Sir William in France.

The-new Ambassador will replace the Earl of Crew'e, who has just turned three-score-and-ten. At the Foreign Office the new permanent Under-Secretary will be Sir Ronald Lindsay, now Ambassador at Berlin, widower of one U. S. wife, and husband of another, the onetime Miss Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt of Manhattan.

At a recent banquet of the corporation of the City of London, Edward of Wales held out his hand for shaking to a lean, sad, elderly person of impeccable and impressive mien.

"B-but, Your Royal Highness," stuttered the person, "I am only a w-w-w-waiter." Undismayed, Edward of Wales grasped the person's hand and shook it warmly, remarking, "I don't see that your profession makes any difference."

At London, Sir Maurice Hill, famed Judge of the High Court of Justice, severely reprimanded, last week, one Mrs. Blanchard who had refused to grant her husband a divorce in order that he might marry his mistress. Pungently the Hon. Mr. Justice declared that there are times when such refusal by a wife appears to result from pure malignancy and spleen.