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Bald, well-nosed Lord McGowan, 69, has sometimes been called the dictator of British industry. An office boy who rose to chairman the gigantic Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., he is also Britain's most persuasive and outspoken champion of cartels. To touring U.S. bigwigs, Lord McGowan has deprecated the U.S. antitrust acts. Hopefully he has asked if and when they would be repealed. Last week, Lord McGowan got his answer.

He and his company were named in an anti-trust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice. Named with him were 1) I.C.I.'s deputy chairman, Lord Melchett; 2) E. I. du Pont de Nemours, Inc., Board Chairman Lammot du Pont and President Walter Samuel Carpenter Jr.; 3) Remington Arms Co. and its president, Charles Krum Davis.

Old Theme. The charges followed the pattern of six recent suits against the Du Pont Company, four of them involving I.C.I. The group is alleged to have elimi nated competition by splitting up world markets. Similar deals were supposedly made with Germany's I. G. Farben-industrie and Dynamit Aktiengesellschaft (D.A.G.), ending when World War II began. The complaint broke new ground only in naming I.C.I, as a defendant, in stead of a coconspirator, and by naming Lords McGowan and Melchett.

All this brought an indignant denial from Lord McGowan, a deep British rum ble about "iniquitous charges." From Du Font's President Carpenter came a statement which was wide-eyed with surprise: "The Du Pont Company has for years had an agreement with Imperial Chemical Industries ... to acquire patent licenses. . . . The existence of the agreements has never been concealed. . . . Copies have been in the possession of government agencies for approximately ten years. They have been before several committees of Congress. . . . The action of the Department of Justice at this particular time in our war effort is difficult to understand." New Reason. There was ample evidence that the suit had little to do with the war. As cartel charges go, these were picayune. Even the favorite Justice Department theme, that cartels slow down the war effort, was soft-pedaled. And the Department readily admitted that the case would not be tried for a year or two, well after the war will presumably be over. Only in the light of postwar trade did the suit make sense. Many a U.S. businessman, notably U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Eric Johnston (TIME, Nov. i), has told the British that the U.S. does not like cartels, now or in the postwar world. The suit was the Justice Department's way of driving this point home.

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