(See front cover)
Gentleman kneels at the foot of his bed
Strokes his much advertised leonine head.
Hlush! hush!—whisper who dares—
Ramsay MacDonald is saying his prayers*
To whisper while George V is saying his prayers, or while Stanley Baldwin is saying his, would be equally unthinkable. These three men—the vaguely born Prime Minister, the ermined & empurpled King-Emperor and the arch-bourgeois Leader of Britain's Conservative (majority) Party —form today an impeccable Imperial Triumvirate. Last week they managed to wash their hands of a political crisis nasty enough to have wrecked almost any other government.
"Disastrous Policy." Scabrous French weeklies called Philip Snowden a "nasty little gnome" and worse when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he held out for a few more millions at The Hague Reparations Conference and returned to Great Britain as a national hero (TIME. Sept. 9, 1929). Last week it was this same Philip Snowden, now Viscount Snowden of Ickornshaw, who precipitated the nasty crisis, caused London's Laborite Daily Herald to headline prematurely LORD SNOWDEN WRECKS THE CABINET!
The things Lord Snowden actually did were1) to denounce the Ottawa Conference and all its tariff works "which will lead to the disruption of the Empire and' [are] fraught with great danger to our international relations"; 2) to declare with the immense financial authority of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer that Great Britain now faces an economic crisis more disastrous than last year (when the pound slipped off gold); 3) to resign as Lord Privy Seal, denouncing Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald as a traitor to the traditional Labor Party tenet of Free Trade.
"I need not say that I regret to be compelled to take this action," wrote Lord Snowden to Mr. MacDonald in his letter of resignation, "for it severs our 40 years of close political association and cooperation. . . . But I cannot longer without loss of self-respect remain a member of a Government which is pursuing a policy that I believe is disastrous."
Wrong, All Wrong! Because people never take very seriously a man who is frankly fuming with rage, Viscount Snowden's charges and resignation might have been ignored last week, had not the Cabinet's orthodox Liberal pontiff, Sir Herbert Samuel, simultaneously resigned as Home Secretary, together with nine other Government Liberals. These ranged from stuffy Sir Archibald Sinclair who resigned as Secretary of State for Scotland, to brilliant Lord Lothian (the onetime Philip Kerr) who as Under-Secretary of State for India has been the Cabinet's brains in that quarter. (So indispensable was Lord Lothian found to be at the India Office last week that he was persuaded to continue his work informally, though resigned.)
Presently resigned Sir Herbert Samuel and his orthodox Liberal Party of 32 M. P.s*, announced that they will wage no warfare against the Cabinet in the House of Commons "for the time being." but will quietly await developments.