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After thus dragging in and blaming the U. S. in part for The Deal, Mr. Baldwin closed his address by refusing to reveal The Deal's terms, though they came out three days later (see col. 1). Piously observed the Prime Minister, "I have seldom spoken with greater regret, for my lips are not yet unsealed, but were these troubles over I would make a case and I would guarantee that no man would go into the lobby against us."
This Olympian attitude reduced to the status of gutter-yappers against His Majesty's Government such newsorgans as London's Liberal Star, which railed against the Prime Minister next day: "The grand old woman of British politics, Stanley Baldwin, passed through an hour of humiliation in Commons debate which most Englishmen would give a Premiership to avoid."
It was true that bumbling Stanley Baldwin had bumbled, as he occasionally does, especially in foreign policy, but he remained the grand old sheep dog of the British electorate. A few thousand sheep wrote indignant letters to their M.P.'s last week, one M.P. receiving 400 denunciations of The Deal. But the most Prime Minister Baldwin actually suffered was a division on the King's Speech, which is usually adopted by the House of Commons without a vote as a courtesy to the Throne. When the division was taken there were 281 votes for His Majesty's Government and 139 against. In effect this was a House of Commons vote of confidence on dismembering Ethiopia.
Mr. Baldwin, an able politician, and Captain Eden, an able diplomat, cleverly left open avenues of retreat from The Deal. They professed that the League of Nations was to decide everything. Three days later at Geneva suave Eden, although the whole London Press was printing columns about the Government's "reversal of policy," had the British crust to say officially: "The policy of His Majesty's Government remains unchanged."
Throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas no reaction to what His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom had done was closer to the general consensus than the reaction of His Majesty's Government in the Dominion of Canada. Cried a Canadian Cabinet Minister close to Premier William Lyon Mackenzie King: "A shameless betrayal of the League! This will strengthen the hands of Canadian isolationists. After this, will anything seem important enough to take us out of our own continent?"
No matter what may now be done about The Deal, two facts seemed basic: 1) the dispatch of the British Home Fleet to patrol the waters between Italy and Ethiopia (TIME, Sept. 30) acted like a blood transfusion in reviving the League of Nations; 2) the British display of readiness last week to consider dismemberment of Ethiopia as a possible and perhaps desirable solution was to the League of Nations like the bloodsucking caress of a vampire.