Polygmany?

For the wife of one of His Majesty's ministers to write a news article flaying the Prime Minister of a friendly power is something new. But strong-minded Mrs. Philip Snowden has always written and said whatever she liked about whom she pleased.* Last week the publicist spouse of the Chancellor of the Exchequer swelled her family exchequer by typing off for London's sensational Sunday Dispatch a scathing reply to an earlier article on "Women" by no less an expert than Signor Benito Mussolini.

"How does Mussolini know that women legislators change their minds half a dozen times during the debate upon a bill?" began trenchant Mrs. Snowden. "He knows nothing about it! His assumption is an ignorant one, born of prejudice." To clinch her argument she added, "And what if women do change their minds? If they do it proves that they have minds to change! And that is more than can be said of every member of the sex which Mussolini . . . endows with a monopoly of political wisdom."

Against the rule laid down by Il Duce that "women must stay at home, attend to our children and give us the womanly and spiritual guidance of which men have need," Spouse Snowden protested with the potent exclamation: "So!--men are to rely for their spiritual guidance upon a sex which Mussolini elsewhere describes as 'amusing, romantic, credulous little animals, quite happy if a man says, "I love you!" ' "

Finally the temperance-working wife of a straight-laced Yorkshireman let her temper snap at the wine and music loving Latin who has openly boasted in his authorized biography of his onetime mistresses--has even admitted that in common with some other males he once supported and resided at the house of a female who was complaisant toward them all.

"I should like to ask Mussolini how he would keep all the women at home tending children in a country like England, where there are two million more women than men!" snapped Mrs. Snowden. "Does he suggest the institution of polygamy?"

*Lecturing at Montreal five years ago she severely criticized by implication James Ramsay MacDonald, whose first Cabinet had just fallen (TIME, Nov. 17, 1924). She also praised the Royal Family. In London next day Miss "Wee Ellen" Wilkinson, then as now Labor's most vocal female M. P., indignantly cried: "I felt pretty sick when I read the nonsense talked by Ethel Snowden in America. . . . I should like to apply to her the epithet: 'The Woman Who Wants Slapping'. . . . If she has lost her head because the King happened to have said 'How do you do?' to her [when Mr. Snowden was Chancellor in the first MacDonald cabinet], there is still a mass of devoted women in this country determined that the Labor Party shall stand for the end of all that show."

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