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The Crown Prince's second wife, whom he married three and a half years after Margaret died in 1920, is the former Lady Louise Mountbatten. elder sister of Britain's Chief of Combined Operations (see p. 98), Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Sweden's Democrats. The same qualities of stability and unruffled efficiency through which the Crown Prince typifies his people are present among the men who direct Sweden's destiny. The bicameral Parliament is dominated by the Social Democrat (Labor) Party. It has a majority in both houses, even under Sweden's proportional-representation system—which, unlike the U.S. winner-take-all system, guarantees minority groups participation in the Government in ratio to their voting strength. In a time of crisis the Government now operates under a coalition of the four major parties. The result has been to spread responsibility and to weld partisan groups into a solid front against the outside world.
Leading the coalition is respectable, onion-bald Per Albin Hansson, Premier and leader of the Social Democrats for more than ten years, onetime gooseherd, onetime militant pacifist. Swedes like him because of his homely habits of bowling and bridge playing, his droll wit, his foxy political maneuvers. But they squirm under the concessions his Government has made to Germany. They have become increasingly restive and more critical of Government policies which, in many cases, the Government cannot, or has not, openly justified.
> The most stinging critic of Nazi "appeasement," the voice of Sweden's conscience and the strongest friend of the Allies in Sweden is Dr. Torgny Segerstedt, editor of Göteborg's Handels och Sjöfartstidning. Tall, white-thatched Dr. Segerstedt trained for the Lutheran ministry, but was unfrocked 27 years ago on charges of modernism and heresy.
His editorials have made his paper the most frequently banned in Sweden—under a procedure whereby the ban does not usually go into effect until two or three days after the offending issue has been on sale. No quibbler, Dr. Segerstedt has laid about him with a mighty pen, ticking off the Fascist twinges of the Agrarian (land owners) Party, the smugness of the Conservatives, the bleatings of the mass-circulation newspapers of Torsten Kreuger, brother of the late Swedish match king. At Dunkirk, when virtually all Swedes expected the war would be over in two or three weeks, Segerstedt kept his faith. He has spoken his mind to the King, has weathered a Nazi advertising boycott that cut his newspaper's circulation from 50,000 to 30,000. During this period he lived alone, except for his servants, in a rambling old wooden house guarded by two black great Danes, Gard and Gorm. After Gard died mysteriously, an admirer sent him a bulldog named Winston.