Presidential Death

A great Scotsman lay dying in London Clinic Nursing Home last week while his doctors kept from him the fact that Britain has filled the Mediterranean with war boats. The shock of knowing that, they said, would surely kill Arthur Henderson. Wracked by jaundice and gallstones at 72, he was still president of the General Disarmament Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments.

As Death drew nearer, the permanent civil servants of Britain's Foreign Office spoke of "Uncle Arthur" last week as destined to rank in history with Lord Salisbury, Grey of Fallodon and Curzon. To these civil servants, who have seen his League policies of Peace and Disarmament broken one by one and Mr. Henderson himself treated as an interloper at Geneva by his British successors, he was a great Foreign Secretary. When Death came at 8 p. m. on the Sabbath, London's Times said on Monday: "He was the embodiment of the qualities and aspirations of the Labor Party."

In 1917 Prime Minister David Lloyd George thought highly enough of Arthur Henderson, onetime iron-molder, onetime Salvation Army soldier, to send him to Russia with amazing credentials which superseded for the duration of his stay the authority of King George's Ambassador. On the afternoon of "Uncle Arthur's" death last week, Mr. Lloyd George chanced to be making an election speech which might well serve as Mr. Henderson's ironic epitaph.

"Mussolini today is the God of War, breathing fire, slaughter and defiance," cried Orator Lloyd George, "but only a few years ago Mussolini issued a great State paper, one of the greatest ever penned by any nation's leader, in which he urged Disarmament." Instead of seizing upon this and other peaceful initiatives then current, Britain and other Great Powers made a mockery of President Henderson's Disarmament Conference.

Concluded the unconscious epitaph: "It is a sorry and a miserable tale, a tale of weakness, hesitation, indecision, delay, procrastination and of acting months too late. Economic sanctions if applied in time are effective, but if applied too late are worse than useless. They are a sham. They are a mockery."

Crowning mockery, as the sorrowing friends of Arthur Henderson pass his bier this week, is that Britain's National Government are confident that they can win a general election by acting belatedly at Geneva as he would have wished, and by simultaneously going to the country with a $1,000,000,000 British rearmament program. This week the World's hopes of Disarmament and the Disarmament Conference can be said to have died with President Henderson.

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