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Cowards, Poltroons, Jellyfish! Next, with Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the whole of His Majesty's Government looking flushed and uncomfortable—ex-cepting Sir Samuel Hoare — the Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George bounded to his feet, shook his fist deliberately at Eden, then at Baldwin and led members of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition in calling the British Cabinet "cowards . . . poltroons . . . jellyfish . . . skulkers . . . flying fleas!"
Thundered the hoary little Welshman who in his day spunkily steered the Empire to its greatest victory: "The Foreign Secretary is going to Geneva to smash the League of Nations. There is nothing but international anarchy as an alternative!
. . . For nearly half a century I have sat in Parliament and never before have I heard a British Foreign Secretary confess that Britain had been defeated. This is British surrender to Italy without the firing of a shot! Surrender in fear of the Italian air force."
Finally Britain's Wartime Prime Minis ter beat his chest with doubled fist and roared: "A few months ago 50 nations trusted Britain. The nations now will never trust this crowd! [gesturing at the Cabinet]. Tonight we have listened to a cowardly surrender and there on the Brit ish Government front bench are the cow ards!"
Trustees of the People. During this scathing arraignment, the Rt. Hon. Stanley Baldwin had turned as red as Captain Eden, but when he rose to reply the Prime Minister was white with controlled fury. "People may say we are acting from cowardice," he growled. "We, as trustees of the people, ought to remember that if there be war in this country—I mean nearer than the Mediterranean—they will pay for it on the first night with their lives! . . . The first blow may come on the day that Sanctions are applied against an aggressor."
Having thus made a clean breast of the fact that caution was indeed the mainspring of wisdom last week for Great Britain, the Prime Minister added with further candor that so far as he could see the people of Italy and the people of Germany are now just about the only ones in Europe who do have stomach to fight. "I feel convinced," added Mr. Baldwin, "that in many countries, including our own and France, there is such loathing of war . . . that I sometimes wonder if they would march [i.e., fight] on any other occasion than if they believed their own frontiers were in danger. I do not know the answer to the question, but I often ask myself the question, and I wonder—and when you begin to wonder on these points your wonderings may travel a long way."
The wonderings of the House of Commons did not travel last week far beyond the point at which Stanley Baldwin had stopped with intuitive wisdom. Mourned disgusted Arthur Greenwood for the Labor Party: "During the whole of this debate there has been not a single word of sympathy for a broken nation [Ethiopia], no word of condemnation for the Power [Italy] which deliberately organized the use of poison gas!"