Rebuke

The "ineptitude" of Sir Auckland Geddes (onetime [ 1920-24 ] British Ambassador at Washington), the "tender bosom" of Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer), the "ignorance, stupidity or arrogance" of the British Commonwealth of Nations--all were last week rebuked by a patriotic U. S. woman--Miss Sophy Stanton, moderately famed granddaughter of Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton.

Indignant because Sir Auckland had carped at the U. S. Chinese policy, Miss Stanton at great length cabled her retorts to the editor of the London Times. Her message consisted chiefly in references to Wartime intrigues by military men, who had tried, she said, to force General Pershing to put his troops under French and British commanders. Miss Stanton had read about these intrigues in War books by Generals James Guthrie Harbord and Robert Lee Bullard.

Did such intrigues, questioned Miss Stanton, proceed from "the arrogance of a race long accustomed to wage war, with modern military equipment, on backward people"? Miss Stanton clearly thought so, and spoke like a true Daughter of the American Revolution and granddaughter of the Civil War. "The descendants of the men who drove the British from this country do not relish this lack of respect toward the dignity of the American Nation." Literary, she paraphrased Shakespeare: "Time cannot wither nor custom stale the ineptitude of many British Ambassadors to the United States."