Hoare Crisis

Anyone delighted by the richness of British character could find it served up on a heaping platter in the House of Commons last week, steaming with honest emotion, thick with puzzlement, piquant with paradox and much like the late Diamond Jim Brady's favorite fish sauce which was so good that "if you poured some of it over a turkish towel, you could eat it all." Epicures for this sort of dish, Edward of Wales and the Soviet Ambassador sat down, elbow-to-elbow, just above the House of Commons' clock.

A stinking piece of fish indeed lay beneath the sauce. At home and overseas the nation was seized by a conviction that in the behavior of His Majesty's Government there were elements of treachery, cowardice and stupidity. This was an impression created by the building up of layer on layer of popular impressions.

Traditionally the Conservatives headed by Stanley Baldwin are the Party in the United Kingdom least sympathetic to the League of Nations. A nationwide peace ballot proved last summer that at least 11,000,000 British voters are highly sympathetic to the League. When as Prime Minister it became Stanley Baldwin's object to win the General Election, his outstanding campaign move was to convince the electorate that the Baldwin Cabinet and the Conservative Party had become highly sympathetic to the League. They had not only become highly sympathetic, but they also gave the further impression that if they won the election they would bend every effort to securing a major triumph for Geneva by contriving ''through the League of Nations" to main tain the independence and territorial integrity of Ethiopia. Strong was the popular impression that no solution which did not remove the last Italian soldier from Ethiopian soil would be countenanced by His Majesty's Government.

The election was won. Shortly afterward "The Deal" to make peace by dismembering Ethiopia was agreed to in Paris by British Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare (TIME, Dec. 16). It was approved by the entire Baldwin Cabinet. It was officially presented at Geneva by the British Minister for League of Nations Affairs, Anthony Eden. It was formally delivered to the Italian Government and to the Ethiopian Government by the chiefs of the French and British diplomatic missions, together with urgent advice that it be accepted by Haile Selassie and Benito Mussolini. It was published as a White Paper with the imprimatur of King George. Was this treachery to voters who believed His Majesty's Government had pledged themselves to act otherwise?

The Deal was concluded only after weeks of British resistance and only after Italian threats to attack British war boats in the Mediterranean were common knowledge. In consenting to the dismemberment of Ethiopia while being threatened by Mussolini, were His Majesty's Government cowards?

When the moral stench against them grew insupportable. His Majesty's Government accepted the resignation of Sir Samuel Hoare last week, although he had done nothing except on their prior instructions and with their subsequent approval. In sheltering themselves by means of a scapegoat were His Majesty's Government cowards?

Finally, did not all this add up to an astounding total of political, diplomatic, executive and moral stupidity, a stupidity damning His Majesty's Government in the broadest and fairest sense?

There was a popular answer to all these questions and last week it was a thundering "YES!" There was also an answer more aristocratic and better informed (see p. n), but it had little to do with the stinking fish sauced last week in the House of Commons. Although this fish was simultaneously sauced in the House of Lords, proceedings in the lower chamber exhaled an interest so much stronger, that Dukes, Marquesses, Earls, Viscounts and Barons left their own chamber and made strenuous efforts to squeeze into the tiny Peers' Gallery of the House of Commons.

Response from Depths. Proceedings opened with an uninspired indictment of His Majesty's Government by the leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Laborite Major Clement Attlee, who introduced a motion of censure. 'If it is right for Hoare to resign then it is right for the Government to resign." he syllogized in effect. "The issue at stake is the honor of Britain or the honor of Baldwin."

Amid loud Conservative cheers the Prime Minister entered and opened: "I know that, for reasons I am going to give, I shall have need of the sympathy of the men of this House."

The speech got under way with some 250 words of tribute to Sir Samuel Hoare, both as a personal friend and as a statesman. In 300 more words the Prime Minister unfolded the thought that if British Cabinet Ministers never left their Isles and if diplomacy was never practiced by "rapid" and "modern" methods but exclusively by mail or courier and exclusively by seasoned professionals, better results could be expected than have flowed from the visit to Paris of Sir Samuel Hoare and his subsequent ice-skating holiday in Switzerland.

The Deal was completed by Hoare and Laval in Paris on a Sunday. Mr. Baldwin did not tell the House last week that Hoare and Laval made every effort to discuss it with him at the time by telephone and that he was not to be reached by that hateful instrument. To the House last week the Prime Minister represented that suddenly "at breakfast" on Monday he received The Deal and that, because it simultaneously leaked into the Press of the entire world, the British Cabinet found themselves so flustered, hurried and startled on Monday evening that almost before they knew it they had approved The Deal.

Perfectly at ease as he made this explanation, Stanley Baldwin boomed: "I ask any member of the Opposition what, in similar conditions, he would have done. He would have obeyed his first instinct--and our first instinct was to stand by our colleague!"

The sheer character of Squire Baldwin had by this time covered the stinking piece of fish with a sauce rich and delightful and Made-In-England. Proceeding, the Prime Minister took his stand not upon what he and his Cabinet had done and not upon what they had said, but upon their feelings and intentions and the feelings of public opinion as, after approximately one week's interval, it finally crashed through the skulls of His Majesty's Government. In a fine, even a literary, passage Orator Baldwin cried: "I would like to make this quite clear. Never throughout that week had I or any one of my colleagues any idea in our own minds we were not being true to every pledge we had given in the election. I am telling the House exactly how we all felt about it. ... I was not expecting the deeper feeling which was manifested by many of my friends in many parts of the country on what I may call grounds of conscience and honor. The moment I am confronted with that, I know something has happened that has appealed to the deepest feelings of our countrymen; some note has been struck that brings back a response from the depths.

"I examined again all I had done, and I felt that with that feeling it was perfectly obvious there could not be in this country backing for these proposals even as terms of negotiation. . . .

"For our part we were always perfectly content to leave these proposals entirely for decision to the League, but it is perfectly obvious now that the proposals are absolutely and completely dead. . . .

''The question has been asked where the Government stands. I can answer that, I think, without, as far as I am concerned, very much difficulty.

''The Government stands where it always has stood."

Stark Reality. It was presently evident that, as often happens in the case of honest Stanley Baldwin, he did not mean his words in the sense conveyed by their sound to non-Britons. They implied that the Government, since it stands where it has always stood, had not upon that firm basis turned around. It had thus turned and the turning was the whole point of the Prime Minister's speech, but he had expressed himself like Humpty Dumpty.* A few minutes later, some 500 words further along, he told the House not to put too much trust in Sanctions to end "this melancholy affair" because "we have passed away from platitudes to an era of stark reality." This seemed to indicate another half turn of the Government on its firm pivot and the Prime Minister ended his speech with a clear conscience exactly where he and the Conservative Party had stood not only before the election but long before, namely in an attitude of handsome lip service to and handsome contempt for the League of Nations. In his closing sentence Party Leader Baldwin, with his party whips cracking smartly, begged: "I would say to this House: I ask at any rate that all those who call themselves supporters of mine give me their confidence tonight."

Hero Hoare. The vote was not to come until midnight and it was then midafternoon. Sharp at 3:40 p.m. Scapegoat Sir Samuel Hoare appeared. If treachery and cowardice had been shown, he was at least the No. 2 Traitor and the No. 2 Coward. What is known as British fair play won him upon his entry a veritable tumult of cheers from all parts of the House of Commons. His chief accuser, Nobel Peaceman Sir Austen Chamberlain, a pillar of official rectitude and a torch of moral indignation against The Deal, had been saving a place for Sam on the overcrowded third bench and as he squeezed into it. the pair cordially shook hands.

Much of the speech in which officially Mephistophelean Sam proceeded to defend himself was hard-hitting, fact-marshaling and perhaps gave the lead to the future Ethiopian policy of Britain (see p. 10). Its climax came in a passage which caused Orator Hoare to brush the tears from his eyes while additional tears welled in the eyes of Peaceman Chamberlain and many another M. P. The passage: "I ask myself, looking back, whether I have a guilty conscience or whether my conscience is clear. I say with all humility to the House that my conscience is clear."

Turning to leave the House immediately after he ended his speech, Sir Samuel, blinded by his tears, half missed his footing on the stair and reeled. Sympathetic M. P.s rushed to prop him up and out amid an ovation fit for the King.

Britannia: "Help!" In the weary hours of debate preceding midnight teary Sir Austen's tearless half-brother Neville Chamberlain, the hawk-nosed, hawk-minded Chancellor of the Exchequer, went a long way toward announcing what policy in the Ethiopian crisis is now to be followed by Britain. "If the League of Nations should decide that oil sanctions should be applied." said Mr. Chamberlain, "and that they can be effective--and should we be satisfied that all members of the League are not only ready to give us assurances but are also prepared to take their part in meeting an attack which might be sudden and unexpected, then we, too, are prepared to play our part and agree to the imposition of oil sanctions."

This was to say, if taken literally, that if Italy, which is still a member of the League, or Austria, which Italy controls, opposes oil sanctions, then oil sanctions will not be supported by Britain.

Doubtless the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not be held to this exact meaning of his words, but even in the loosest sense he clearly meant that the United Kingdom will not risk the Italian attack which oil sanctions might touch off unless a preponderance of other Great Powers pledge themselves to spring instantly to the armed aid of Britannia at her very first cry of "Help!"

Other Pronouncements of the debate:

P:Sir Archibald Sinclair: "The Prime Minister is for peace at any price, so long as it costs Britain and France nothing."

P:Earl Winterton: "Partly as a result of the denuding of the Far Eastern seas of our ships to mobilize them in the Mediterranean at great cost, Japan is making her great forward move in North China."

Confidence was voted 397 to 165 in His Majesty's Government just before midnight. Nothing contributed more powerfully to this than a firmly chiseled passage in which Sir Samuel Hoare had shown that the application of oil sanctions entails a supreme risk not only of world war in a few weeks or months but of an immediate, an almost instantaneous Italo-British war. Elsewhere in his speech "Flying Sam," personally a sportsman of courage, denied that Great Britain is afraid, but he won not a few votes for Squire Baldwin by chilling the marrow of the King-Emperor's subjects thus:

"Day in & day out I have been obsessed with the urgent necessity of doing everything in my power to prevent an isolated war between Great Britain and Italy. . . . Let the House remember the conditions of modern warfare. Let them remember that in modern warfare events move very quickly. The aggressor has a great advantage. The aggressor has his forces mobilized. He is ready to strike and in conditions of modern warfare he can strike with appalling speed."

After plumbing the mysterious depths of the Hoare Crisis further, the anti-Deal and pro-League New York Times anxiously headlined: "BALDWIN ANXIOUS TO QUIT AS PREMIER. Official Burdens Rest Heavily on Him, but He Is Not Likely to Act Precipitately. Hoare Aspires to Post His Stock Rising Since Speech of Defense."

* "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, '"whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master--that is all.''

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