Foreign News: Angry Preview

The Prime Minister was half through his pedestrian, almost defensive report to Britain and the U.S. last week. Suddenly, into an uninspired voice, crept the thrust and crackle of the fighting Churchill. In one by-election after another, ungrateful Britons had turned down Churchill candidates, criticized Churchill politics. He was angry. His anger burst, red-hot, out of thousands of British and U.S. loudspeakers :

“… There is a large number of respectable and even eminent people who are not at all burdened with responsibility, who have a lot of leisure on their hands and who think most sincerely that the best work they can do at this present time of hard effort and anxiety is to belabor the Government. . . . This National Government which has led the nation and empire and, as I hold, a large part of the world out of mortal danger, through the dark valleys into which they had wandered, largely through their own folly, back onto the broad uplands where the stars of peace and freedom shine, is reviled as a set of dawdlers and muddlers unable to frame a policy or take a decision or make a plan. … I know you will not forget that this Administration, formed in an hour of disaster by the leaders of the Conservative, Labor and Liberal parties in good faith and good will, has brought Britain out of the jaws of death, back from the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered. I know you will not forget that.”

Thus Britons got a foretaste of what they are likely to hear when general election time returns.