Winston Churchill.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18220, 3 November 1924, Page 8

Winston Churchill.

Not the least interesting of the election results in Britain is the return of Mr Winston Churchill—for the first time in his life by an overwhelming majority; and it requires no great effort of the imagination to see that among secondary issues it is not the least important. To come at once to the essential fact, it may easily mean that Mr Churchill will one day he Prime Minister. Whoever considers his past record, proved ability and boundless energy and ambition, must realise that there is no prize beyond his reach if he is permitted a reasonably long stay in the place where prizes are to bo found. Ho is still, as politicians go, quite young (50). and in the present temper of the nation has no obstacles in his path but the claims of men with longer and more faithful service. It is not going too far to say that if wc may regard him now as a Unionist pure and simple there is not a single man of first-class capacity among his party superiors. Lord Birkenhead, of course, has the same intellectual brilliance, and in some directions a great deal more knowledge, but while Mr Churchill is a politician and nothing else, Lord Birkenhead's is a divided ambition, and ha* been an even more irregular preparation. And the other rivals urc merely the Holid and honest, but only moderately able, men like Mr Baldwin, Mr Chamberlain, .Sir Robert Home, and, a considerable distance away, Mr Amcry. Jt has fjlwajH been rceognised by contemporaries of all shades of opinion that if Mr Churchill could keep the public behind him for, say, two Parliurrfont*, ho might end any. wberc; for if he has always, or almoKt always, had something to Jive down, he has never been without the capacity to obliterate blunders that duller men

could never retrieve. When he was announced in September as the anti Socialist champion, if and when he should be wanted, for the electorate that has now returned him, the Radical newspapers made sport of his past. But the intelligent ones made no attempt to belittle his future. The "New Statesman," for example, congratulated the Conservative Party on having "hooked its fish," or the fish on having "caught the Tory anglers," but it went on: "Mr Churchill comes "by the safe road of Epping into his '"new spiritual home —or rather returns "to his old home. There he will "have his opportunity of exercising "his talents and ultimately, no doubt, "if his temperament allows him to "stay long enough, of gratifying his "highest ambitions."' And the difference between the "New Statesman" and its Radical contemporaries is that it never turns away from facts. If it made a sad blunder in writing on Septembr 27th that "the electoral "prospects of the Conservative Party "can hardly be considered very rosy" but not a ridiculous blunder, since that was the general opinion—it made no error in saying that the Conservatives were greatly in need of Mr Churchill intellectually, and that if they came into power again, as some day they would, his presence would be a safeguard against their chief danger, viz.. the "absence of a certain kind "of idea from the Tory mind, and not J "the absence of a certain kind of "person from the Tory benches." A3 long as Mr Churchill is on those benches they will not lack ideas, and it is much safer for the State that he should have under- instead of overreckless associates. i == | A striking picture of French prosperity is contained in a report on economic conditions by the commercial adviser attached to the British Embassy in Paris. A year ago the same official described France as busily engaged in re-equipping her factories, extending her transport system, and pushing on with schemes for the development of electric power on a scale that would not have been thought of before 1914. Across the Channel was Britain, with a million unemployed and her factories running on short time, bowed down by the burden of her debt and the weight of her taxation. And it is the sad truth that tht picture is much the same to-day as it was twelve months ago. In France there arc no unemployed and her factories arc working full time. Britain still has over a million out of work, and will soon be faced with keener competition from a reorganised Germany — that is, unless Nationalist recklessness endangers the agreement arrived at in London. It has been argued that French prosperity has been artificially created by unsound finance —by currency inflation and borrowing instead of taxing. But the financial reforms inaugurated since the elections have, not checked the course of French industry, though they may have steadied it to France's benefit. Its prosperous condition to-day would have bee*n impossible without the foresight and courage which re-equipped factories and developed power and transport resources, making France "a stronger nation than she has ever been, with more permanent avenues to expanding wealth." Nor, should we forget the vast resources of coal and iron which France won in the war with her Allies' help.' While she retains control over them Germany is never likely to attack her, and we need not be frightened unduly by the reappearance, now and again, of those old stories of secret war preparations going on over the Rhine bridgeheads. The experience of wireless amateurs in the recent tests between New Zealand and England revives an old mystery; why communication should be so much easier by night than by day. Not only that, but wireless waves seem to select tha dark hemisphere of the earth in their journey round the world, though this increases the distance which they have to travel. In recent experiments Marconi found that free wireless waves, sent from England in the morning, travelled to Australia via the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a distance of 22,000 kilometres. When sent out at night they travelled over Europe and Asia, the distance by this route being only 17,000 kilometres. An interesting theory in explanation of this phenomenon is advanced by Captain See, United States Navy Astronomer. He argues that the magnetic and gravitational waves from the sun are strongest in the illuminated hemisphere, because in that half of the earth where it is night they are damped and enfeebled by bending round and passing through the solid globe. Hence the night hemisphere offers the best track for the wireless waves, just as a ripple will radiate over a still pond but will be lost in turbulent water.