Daughter Reject

Apple-cheeked and exemplary though she is, Miss Ishbel MacDonald, daughter of the Prime Minister, found herself rejected by the Labor Party when the time came last week for her to seek re-election as a member of London's charity-supervising County Council.

As Daughter Ishbel well knows, Father Ramsay became "the Judas of the Labor Party" when King George induced him to act as the figurehead Prime Minister of the present National Government. Laborites in his own home constituency of Seaham jeered Scot MacDonald fortnight ago and police reserves had to be called out to protect him.

"You sold out to the Tories!" cried a heckler. "Will you be high in the sky when you die?"

Crushingly the silver-haired Scot retorted: "Many thousands who have sacrificed their lives that others might live were inspired by that at which you have sneered."

At such feats of homely expression the Prime Minister excels but when he tries to talk in figures he shows himself a figurehead indeed. Seemingly unconscious that Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain--the real power in the British Cabinet today--is violently opposed to pound-dollar stabilization at the present $5 figure and is holding out for a $4 pound, Mr. MacDonald launched at Leeds last week into an astonishing monetary speech.

Hecklers were so numerous that Orator MacDonald had to use a megaphone to shout them down. "I am impatient with the slowness of nations to stabilize currency!" he bellowed, purple-faced. "The mills of the Gods grind slowly . . . We are never going to have full, free trade unless we know what the relation is between the dollar and sterling and the franc. Let us build up the machinery of a cooperative world! And one of the first bits of machinery will deal with the question of how the various coinages are going to be exchanged."

Tartly at the British Treasury next day a spokesman for Chancellor Chamberlain spiked the MacDonald plea for prompt stabilization, suggested that the Prime Minister had been talking through his hat.

"International tinkering with exchange in the present state of uncertainty concerning American finance," snapped the spokesman, "would be useless -- worse than useless! We must have a more substantial foundation than we have now on which to build any permanent relationship between American and British currencies. Otherwise we would risk entering into an unsound agreement which might be worse for both countries than the present situation."

In the eyes of sympathetic but impartial observers Scot MacDonald has sunk in his own Cabinet until he has about the stature of a Cordell Hull, pleading vainly for such anciently good things as free trade and international concord while men of the Roosevelt and Chamberlain stamp lead their countries on to nationalism.

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