What They Deserve!

The mood of the British people is one of patient determination to win the war. Underlying it are many other contributing moods held by varying classes and factions. The free people of the United Kingdom last week found significant spokesmen to express three of their varying moods as World War II entered its fourth month:

> At the opening of Parliament by George VI, famed and beloved old Field Marshal Lord Milne sounded off, after the Speech from the Throne, against mollycoddle notions that the German people are only dupes and victims of the Nazis. Stanch old Lord Milne, who proudly recalled that he fought under Queen Victoria, keynoted that he believes every nation gets the kind of Government its people want or deserve and that the Germans have that now. "There is a deep strain of brutality in the German nation!" he boomed, roundly begged to differ with the large school of intellectual-liberals who said during World War I or who say today, "We have no quarrel with the German people." As a veteran commander, the Field Marshal called it "dangerous" to keep on telling Tommy Atkins that the enemy is not the actual soldiers he will have to fight but vague "Hitlerism."

> The mood of idealistic British Laborites has been one of political funk ever since their beloved League of Nations collapsed, the Nazi menace reared its head, and they could think of nothing more popular to do than support the Conservative Government's program of swiftly rearming Britain. Last week Labor Party Leader Clement Attlee favored the House of Commons with one of his most turgid effusions of Marxist dialectic, argued that Britain ought to "begin now to plan" to adopt Socialist nationalizations of the means of production as an aid to winning the war, provoked the quip, "If that speech could be bottled, Attlee would make a fortune selling it to cure insomnia."

> Prosperous Britons were pelting the Treasury last week with a patriotic shower of valuables to help win the war. Voluntarily they sent silver heirlooms, wedding and engagement rings, gold coins and even historic strings of family pearls. This mood of sacrifice was die-hard Britain at her best, but Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon, while giving thanks, was obliged to announce that Britain can meet the mounting cost of World War II only if the whole population submits to "the most fearful sacrifices, some of which we have hardly begun to dream of."

Sir John implied that the already crushing British income tax, which long ago ceased to be purely a "soak-the-rich" proposition, will have to be extended downward from the white-collar to the soiled-collar class. Britain is spending half her national income on the war, the Chancellor warned, yet even with armament plants going full blast 1,400,000 workers are still unemployed. Sir John, with typical British forthrightness, declared that a war of this magnitude cannot be fought on any easy assumption that it will not depress the existing standard of living in Britain and elsewhere.

>In a drastic mood of political belt-tightening, the House of Commons voted 213-to-115 to prohibit the introduction of bills not sponsored by the Government, a curtailment of the rights of individual M.P.s to which they submitted cheerfully during World War I, submitted cheerfully again.

Meanwhile the Government was good and worried over the fact that the money-raising plans Sir John has already put into effect--small denominational bonds and national savings certificates--are not expected to net more than 20 million pounds before year's end, and all the while the Exchequer is borrowing two millions every day. Full-page advertisements appeared in papers last week headed: The Nation's War Savings Campaign. Slogan: "Lend to Defend the Right to be Free."

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