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Slipping "Bashan" Brown in as Minister of Labor was possibly Prime Minister Baldwin's smartest election-wise move last week. His oddest was to plunge a knobby-fingered bourgeois hand into the bluest-blooded vitals of British aristocracy and pull out a Percy—Lord Eustace Percy who was made Minister Without Portfolio without further explanation.
Lord Eustace, to be sure, has a brain ever teeming with busy welfare ideas and elaborate social schemes. It was said that this blue-blooded Percy is to study Oldster Lloyd George's famed New Deal proposals (TIME, Dec. 24) and advise the Cabinet what to do about them, most of the Cabinet being anything but New Dealers and sure that a Percy can be trusted to have the sound reactions of an English Gentleman.
100 Year Program. Skipper Stanley Baldwin of the new British Ship of State, knowing that on June 15 Britain will once again default of her War Debt to the U. S., shrewdly looked ahead 100 years to the time when such trifles will surely have been forgotten. Addressing 10,000 women in Albert Hall shortly before he became Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin said: "I look forward to the future. . . . The greatest security against war in any part of the world . . . would be a close collaboration between the British Empire and the United States. ... It may be a hundred years before that end may be attained. It may never come to pass, but, sometimes, we may have our dreams."
Neat, this Baldwin pronouncement put President Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull on a spot from which, on the eve of War Debt payday, they had to burble friendly rejoinders to defaulter Britain.
As Prime Minister, successful Burbler Stanley Baldwin's first act of Empire consequence was to go out to Himley Hall* and address to cheering constituents the revamped National Government's informal program speech.
Program. "If we look around the world," said Mr. Baldwin, "we see three great countries—Italy. Russia and Germany ruled by dictators, and we see the United States a great democracy, struggling. . . . Changes of the most radical nature are taking place in America. . . . Amongst these nations there is one great democratic country enjoying stability—our own.
"We are trustees," continued the Prime Minister, and as such His Majesty's Government are now rapidly increasing their armaments, for "we do not believe our defenses are in a position yet that will enable us to seek with the voice we should that collective security which is gradually recommending itself to the people of this country."