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Only last month this setting of pomp spelled nothing much in London, socially or politically, but, with the new First Lord Sir Samuel and his Lady Maud sailing in, Admiralty House became another thing entirely than what it had been when occupied recently by vague Viscount Monsell. To be definite and final on the gravest issues is Sir Samuel Hoare's major characteristic. He is slender, soft-voiced and a considerate host, but the pale blue of his eyes is that of ice. When he was Secretary of State for India he used to be driven daily to St. James's Palace in a minute Baby Austin, while the rajas and tnaharajas arrived in mammoth Daimler limousines in imitation of the King — but Sam Hoare soon showed who was master. At his first encounter with Mahatma Gandhi, then virtually a saint with tremendous kudos which had carried him straight from jail to Bucking ham Palace, Sir Samuel declared bluntly that he would give India just so much additional freedom and no more. "If this displeases you. Mr. Gandhi," said the Secretary of State for India. "I shall not take it in the least amiss if you prefer that we do not meet again."
Result was a queer, behind-the-scenes friendship struck up between the Mahatma, whose prestige was to ebb slowly away thereafter, and Sir Samuel Hoare, who was to give the 350,000,000 souls of India a new Constitution, the longest measure ever enacted by the Mother of Parliaments (TIME, Aug. 12). In putting through this immensely complicated charter against bitter opposition led by brilliant Winston Churchill and grim Lloyd George, the aim of sagacious Sir Samuel was to make a vast number of decisions as wisely as possible and get them fastened irrevocably upon India, rather than to mull over the Indian Question idealistically ad infinitum. Today the great fact in India is that the Indians have accepted their new Constitution as poets accept the structure of a sonnet. It is utterly a thing imposed by London, but within its frame a talented people of wanglers and weaselers can perform all sorts of feats of freedom: within the Empire, and not with "dominion status" as St. Gandhi had demanded of the statesman in the Baby Austin.
Recently, when Sir Samuel's policy of making peace between Italy and Ethiopia crashed and he resigned as Foreign Secretary (TIME, Dec. 30), Mr. Gandhi was prompt with a letter of personal sympathy posted to No. 18 Cadogan Gardens. Sir Samuel's prompt decision to resign then was, last week in British eyes, a symbol of the qualities of firmness which should make him a great First Lord. In contrast to this, his successor as Foreign Secretary, young Anthony Eden, cut a sorry figure in the House of Commons as his Sanctionist policy crashed and he did not resign. Nowadays there is an almost frightened apology in young "Tony" Eden's eyes as he goes about with the Foreign Office's astute Permanent Undersecretary Sir Robert Gilbert Vansittart, coauthor with Sir Samuel of the realistic policy which has proved "right."
Ominous Pirow. In rigging an alternative Lifeline of Empire around Africa which may soon become in British minds the Lifeline of Empire, Sir Samuel Hoare had on his hands last week an exceedingly tough subject of His Majesty with whom to deal, Union of South Africa's dynamic Defense Minister Oswald Pirow.