The Immortals

To fill his column on a dull day, bright Ian Mackay of the London News Chronicle listed ten men whom he thought people might still be talking about 100 years from now.* Last week his paper asked four prominent Britons which of his ten would get their votes. Bernard Shaw would vote only for Composer Jean Sibelius, so Sibelius was the only unanimous immortal. (The other three pickers agreed on both Shaw and Sibelius.) Wrote Shaw: "As for Churchill and the other political gentlemen--it would be rash to include them. . . ."

A man in the street had the last word. Unasked, one N. H. Partridge of Thornton Heath, Surrey, put three names in nomination: Henry Wallace, "the man who faced America"; Albert Einstein, "for trying"; and Anon., "a child born recently who will be the last survivor of Europe, which . . . will have become a vast, slightly radioactive wilderness, entirely devoid of human life. . . ."

*The ten: Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, Mohandas Gandhi, Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Dwight Eisenhower, Charles Chaplin, Jean Sibelius, Benedetto Croce, Augustus John.

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