BRITAIN’S CAUSE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 July 1941, Page 7

BRITAIN’S CAUSE

LORD HALIFAX APPRAISED. It is significant of the quality of Lord Halifax’s eminence that the average man is still capable of forgetting who he is, writes Mr Basil de Selincourt. Indeed, how many of us realise that this Yorkshire M.F.H. and Chancellor of Oxford University has been a Minister of War as well as of Agriculture, and twice Minister of Education? How many remember that the Lord Irwin who made history in India was the Edward Wood, Fellow of All Souls’, who served in the Yorkshire Dragoons for the first three years of the Great War, and before the end of it had evolved with Lord Lloyd—Sir George Lloyd as he then was —his ideas for reconstruction at home, and published them under the title “The Great Opportunity”: an all-round man, if ever there was one. Whatever else Lord Halifax may be, he is intensely English. There is that blend in him of high principle and shrewd practice that no other country knows how to produce. Wherever he touches men his sincerity shines out, but for enemies and opponents he is a hypocrite. “Do you believe in guns or God?” a woman shouted in Southampton. His biographer himself admits that Lord Halifax let hope verge on credulity in his desire to believe good of the dictators; and perhaps he has believed more good of his own countrymen than history could at all points claim for them." But now in his great position in America his conviction that the British cause is the cause of Christianity will surely serve us in good stead. His dry humour, laconic utterances and enjoyment of good things will endear him wherever he goes; while even the Fundamentalist will find for once that he has something in common with a master of diplomacy.