Death of MacDonald

Three days out from Liverpool last week on the small British liner Reina del Pacifico, slowly plowing its way south toward Bermuda and a South American cruise, most of the passengers were just finishing a hearty dinner. In London at the same instant most of the political bigwigs of Britain were finishing an even heartier one, the annual Lord Mayor's banquet. Too ill to eat his own was the Reina's most distinguished passenger, James Ramsay MacDonald. At 8:45 he quietly died of heart failure at the age of 71.

Few men living have been more beloved by their friends or maligned by their acquaintances than Ramsay MacDonald. A sentimental Lowland Scot who loved to write sad verses for his friends,* he was a founder of the British Labor Party, the first person to bring it to a position of importance in British affairs, three times Prime Minister of Great Britain and an intimate personal friend of King George V. Yet "traitor" was a word hurled at him over & over throughout the last 20 years. Because he spoke out loudly against British entry in the World War in 1914 he was ostracized as a traitor to the nation for years. Because he felt it necessary to abandon the principles of the old Labor Party in forming his coalition cabinet or ''National Government" in 1931, Ramsay MacDonald was called a traitor by most of British organized labor.

Failing eyesight and mental depression broke his health. The Crown, anxious to honor him, offered him an earldom last May, but Scot MacDonald turned it down lest it crimp the political chances of his son Malcolm who. as Secretary of State for the Dominions, hustled back from the Brussels Conference last week to arrange his father's funeral. Because doctors worried greatly over Scot MacDonald's increasing melancholia, he was sent on the Reina del Pacifico cruise with his youngest daughter, Sheila, for companion. With his body still at sea. the British Government proffered him the honor of a Westminster Abbey burial. This the MacDonald family politely refused. For years Ramsay MacDonald had hoped to be buried in his beloved Lossiemouth, beside his still more beloved wife, Margaret Ethel, who died in 1911.

"In Lossiemouth are both my heart and my hearth," said he. "A Lossie loon [boy] was I born, and a Lossie loon shall I die."

*Example, dedicated to the Chicago-born late wife of Sir John Lavery, portraitist:

What is this evil spell

That so constrains us, making you wistful, holding me morose?

Will never more the quiet sunshine cheer us at the day's close?

Here let us sit and watch

The sunlit waters

Lapping the silver strand beneath our feet,

And know beneath the tranquil skies of evening

Life, once more sweet.

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