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Last week Parliament behaved very much like the U. S. Congress, except that it did everything backwards. Congress wanted to go home (see p. 11). Parliament wanted to stay in session. In Washington "Government" whips had tried to keep rebellious Congressmen in session to pass the President's bills. In London Conservative Party whips threatened purges, Prime Minister Chamberlain lost his temper, disgruntled members of the Party in power spoke out in open revolt, Oppositionists cheered signs of a growing split, as the members drew back from the dread prospect of a two-month vacation. The two great organs of Anglo-Saxon democracy imitated each other in the same sense that a blotter carries a reverse image of the signature it blots.

Leader of the House of Commons rebels was no Jack Garner, but cherubic, rebellious Conservative Winston Churchill, who, when stirred, is the House's most effective speaker. Last week Mr. Churchill let himself go in the most savage speech he has made since the post-Munich debate. The occasion was a Government motion for adjournment. Labor, about as strong as the Republicans were in Congress in 1936, offered an amendment that the House reassemble in three weeks instead of two months. Last year, when Parliament adjourned (after a reassuring speech by Prime Minister Chamberlain), it reassembled to be faced by the Czecho-Slovak Crisis, and many a member among loyal pro-Chamberlain Conservatives felt uneasily that it might return to face a comparable crisis this autumn, that such a crisis would be hard to explain to the voters at home.

Laborite Arthur Greenwood made a dutiful, taken-for-granted, defense-of-democracy and fear-of-appeasement protest against adjournment that did not ruffle the Prime Minister any more than the Opposition's 195 votes scared him. But when Critic Churchill said: "I have the feeling that things are in a dead balance. . . . The situation in Europe is graver now than it was at this time last year. . . ." the House sat up to take notice.

He grew eloquent: 2,000,000 men under arms in Germany, with 500,000 to be added in August; heavy concentrations of German troops on the Polish frontier from Danzig to Cracow; five German divisions in motion near Breslau; schools in Bohemia transformed into hospitals; troops and supplies moving east through Ostmark*--all this convinced him that "it would be disastrous, it would be pathetic, it would be shameful for the House to write itself off as an effective and potent factor in the situation. . . ." If things were in dead balance, no move should be taken that might weaken resistance to aggression.

Then he grew sarcastic. Personally, he said, as the Prime Minister scowled, he trusted Mr. Chamberlain's good faith, but "it will be a very hard thing for the Government to say to the House of Commons, 'Be gone. Run off and play. Take your gas masks with you. Don't worry about public affairs. Leave them to the gifted and experienced Ministers, who, so far as our defenses are concerned, landed us where we were landed in September.' "

When Mr. Chamberlain rose to answer that evening, he was obviously angry and shaken. His thin face, seldom giving an impression of vitality, was ashen and his voice was husky and low. With heavy sarcasm he wondered that Mr. Churchill dared let Parliament adjourn for even two weeks.

With doubtful fairness, he asked: if the House could prevent aggression, why hadn't it stopped the occupation of Austria?

With outrage he rejected Liberal Leader Sinclair's suggestion that had Parliament been in session earlier, Czecho-Slovakia might have been saved. "I'm not going to comment on that suggestion. I'm just going to leave it in its full beauty."

This was too much for young, hardworking Conservative Ronald Cartland, member for King's Norton, part of Mr. Chamberlain's native Birmingham, who has defended the Prime Minister in many a speech. "Profoundly disturbed," he did what no young M. P. is supposed to do: criticized his Party's leader on the floor. Blurting out with evident sincerity but without much coherence against Mr. Chamberlain's "jeering pettifogging party speeches," he said all year he had had to dispel to his constituents the "absurd impression" that the Prime Minister had dictatorial ambitions, would find it more diffi. cult from now on. "I frankly say that I despair when I listen to speeches like that to which I've listened this afternoon." Then, despairing Member Cartland trooped off to the smoking room to abstain from voting on a measure of confidence, as did some 40 other Conservatives. The cloakrooms gossiped that party whips handed the names of abstainers to Mr. Chamberlain, were demanding Mr. Cartland's political hamstringing, that Mr. Chamberlain, like Mr. Roosevelt, faced a purge of his own party. The vote--245-to-129--gave the Government a comfortable majority, but because many a member was already on his way to vacation haunts, it fell 115 votes below average, looked bad on the record, made it plain that the Government had misjudged the anxiety of all voters, the misgivings of all parties.

Two days later Mr. Chamberlain made it clear that he now knew it. He began a long answer to Laborite Philip Noel Baker with an ironic, Alice-in-Wonderland account of his difficulties in debate, said he had trouble answering Mr. Noel Baker because "he is always trying to push the Government to go a little further in its statements than I think it ought to go, and it puts me in the position, in refusing to put my foot on unsound ground, that I seem to be willing to go less far than actually I am."

This droll picture at least made it clear that Mr. Chamberlain lacked any dictatorial belief in a holy mission. Reversing the tone of some recent speeches, he went to considerable pains in clarifying point after point of Government policy toward Japan. Sometimes, he said, members ask: "Why don't you do as the United States of America's Government does?" His reply was that the U. S. is isolated from Europe, and Great Britain is not; the Japanese fleet is superior to the British Far Eastern Fleet.* The British Home & Mediterranean Fleets, far bigger than Japan's entire Navy, are needed at home. But "in certain circumstances we may find it necessary to send that fleet out there," he observed, and added, "I hope no one will think it is absolutely out of the question for such circumstances to arise. ... I fully share the most violent feelings that anybody could have on the subject; it makes my blood boil to hear and read some things that have been happening there."

Summoning up the image of "all the lonely, unprotected, defenseless British people scattered about in ... China" to justify caution, the Prime Minister gravely defended the Tientsin negotiations; summoning up thoughts of the complexity of dominion trade with Japan he rejected suggestions that Great Britain follow the U. S. lead in denouncing her Japanese trade treaty.

Before the House adjourned, Labor Party members, like Republicans in 1936, were cheered to learn that Labor had won another by-election in a former Conservative stronghold, the 16th (out of 76) since 1935. But the Prime Minister's last speech suggested that he had learned from Mr. Roosevelt, could roll with the punches of critics in his own party.

* Wasted on a good part of the British public were Mr. Churchill's eloquent figures, as the London Times omitted this section of his speech.

* Not until 1941, under present plans, will Great Britain have a "two-hemisphere fleet," equal to Japan's in the East and superior to the combined fleets of possible European enemies.

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