Ramsay Sails

Curls of steam and greasy smells rose, one morning last week, around a locomotive which waited in London, ready to whisk a trainload of tourists off to Southampton and the Cunarder Aquitania. Pensive, the engineer spat from his cab upon the platform. "D'ye twig wha's aboord?" he said to the fireman, "Mon, I wud sooner drive Mac any day than the King himsel'!". . .

The Right Honorable James Ramsay Macdonald was indeed aboard, bound for Southampton and the U. S. A crowd of friends, most of them potent Laborites, stood tip-toe on the platform to shout Godspeed. Ramsay Macdonald's head-- a tousled mop of silver--bobbed in friendly fashion from the door of his compartment. Beside him, flushed and laughing, stood apple-cheeked Ishbel Macdonald, his wholesome daughter. "Ishbel," the onetime Premier had chuckled to newsgatherers, "Ishbel has always been keen to visit the United States. She wants to motor out to Mount Vernon when we get to Washington because she is greatly interested in the first American President, George Washington. I am sure she will not be disappointed, for Mount Vernon is a beautiful place. My late wife and I went there when we were in the States 30 years ago, so it will not be new.to me."

Many whose hearts were not particularly touched by Ishbel Macdonald's praiseworthy interest in George Washington, prepared to greet her father as one of the few Great Men of today. Not the least of his achievements was to build up the potent British Labor party out of thousands of unionized workers whom he taught to realize that what they could not win by strikes and violence they might gain in the halls of Parliament. . . .

A two-room shanty was the birthplace of Ramsay Macdonald, and night school was his college; but he won through toil and newspaper scrivening to become Britain's first and sole Labor Prime Minister (Jan.-Nov. 1924). At that time, though his term of office was short, he became the first statesman in Europe to chairman the drafting of a negotiated agreement with post-War Germany. This was the London Settlement of Aug. 14, 1924, on the basis of which the Dawes Plan went into effect and France abandoned her ruthless occupation of the Ruhr.

Locarno followed the Dawes Plan; and security in Europe has measurably followed Locarno. It was only when Premier Macdonald pushed his earnest desire for world concord to the length of furthering a rapprochement with Soviet Russia that he lost contact with British public opinion and was obliged to resign the premiership. He remains the strongest single figure in the British Labor party, and may well become premier again. In the U. S. he will spend merely a short Easter vacation, will call upon President Coolidge, will speak only once, before the Foreign Policy Association in Manhattan.