Prize Day

Six feet of pure Nordic and no friend of Adolf Hitler is Shipping Tycoon Johan Ludwig Mowinckel, now for the third time Premier of Norway, the world's No. 4 nation in tramp shipping.

Tramp, tramp--the thick-soled, high-button shoes of Norwegian Deputies carried them into the Nobel Institute last week. Some of them wept large, mild Norwegian tears last year when Premier Mowinckel announced that Norway accepted the sentence of the World Court which took from her East Greenland, gave it to Denmark (TIME, April 17, 1933). For this act of Christian resignation, most Norwegians think, Premier Mowinckel ought to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead last week Johan Ludwig Mowinckel was charged with the chore of presenting the 1934 Peace Prize to a Briton who has done his best to earn it by being President of the League's Disarmament Conference. Nobody knows better than famed "Uncle Arthur" Henderson that his Conference has done little or nothing, got nowhere.

Said Prize-Presenter Mowinckel: "If faith in the Disarmament Conference is still alive it is due to Mr. Henderson. . . . The fair words and promises of the peace treaties and the Covenant of the League of Nations now hardly seem of greater importance than a scrap of paper. Desolation and disappointment increase while the rumor flies that Germany rearms. . . . We bring our thanks and our homage to such a man as Arthur Henderson, a man who stands firm!"

Endeavoring to stand firm, "Uncle Arthur" proposed that the do-nothing Con ference of which he is President be protracted without end. Accepting his prize of $41,595 in the broadest spirit, he concluded: "If we contemplate as our ultimate end a League controlling the world's economic life and its armed forces, then we must say frankly that our ultimate ideal is the creation of nothing less than a World Commonwealth."

Comparatively obscure Pacifist-Lecturer Sir Norman Angell, recipient of the 1933 Peace Prize last week, announced that he was "too busy"to come to Oslo for his $44,338, had it accepted for him by the British Minister to the Kingdom of Nor way, trusty Cecil F. J. Dormer. Nobel prizes other than Peace are awarded in Stockholm. Last week on the same day that Norway's Crown Prince Olaf watched Premier Mowinckel award Mr. Henderson in Oslo, King Gustaf V of Sweden awarded the other Nobel winners: Literature, scrubby-bearded Italian Dramatist Luigi Pirandello (TIME, Nov. 19); Medicine, split between three U. S. physicians, Drs. George Richards Minot, William Parry Murphy and George Hoyt Whipple who found that a liver diet helped pernicious anemia (TIME, Nov. 5) ; Chemistry, Professor Harold C. Urey of Columbia University for his discovery of "heavy hydrogen" (TIME, Nov. 26).

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