Old Statesman, New View

One of the well-known characters in international politics showed himself in a new and more popular light last week. The new Lord Templewood (the old Sir Samuel Hoare), long considered an appeaser and compromiser with Fascism, came back from almost five years as British Ambassador to Franco to speak his mind about totalitarianism. Either he had changed or he had been much misunderstood.

Always regarded as a conscientious man with a decisive mind and considerable initiative, Sir Samuel had once thoroughly misjudged democratic feeling in Britain and the dangers of Fascism in Europe.

He had associated with an organization which called Franco "a good Christian gentleman." In 1935, as Stanley Baldwin's Foreign Secretary, he went to Paris and made an abortive deal with slippery Pierre Laval which sabotaged all efforts to stop Mussolini's rape of Ethiopia (by dismembering the Negus' country and putting the quietus on League oil sanctions).

Last week, making his maiden speech in the House of Lords, the new Lord Templewood was apparently a wiser man. He called Franco Spain "practically a semioccupied country," pervaded by German influence over press and radio, hagridden by the Gestapo. His long-silent Lordship testified: "I had the Gestapo living in the next house looking over a wall watching every movement I made and constantly trying to suborn my domestic staff. . . . I saw what was more sinister--how the Gestapo would seize some man or woman in Spanish territory and take them over the frontier to death or torture in Germany or one of the occupied countries." The German poison had succeeded in corrupting moral standards, was leaving behind "corruption, bitter hatreds and vendettas."

Prim, cautious Lord Templewood--whom the late, great Lord Curzon once characterized as "descended from a long line of maiden aunts"--did not go so far as to suggest that Franco, the Falange, the Army, the Church, the big landowners, or the aristocracy might have had something to do with Spain's plight. He found the villainy of Germany corrupting not only Spain but all Europe: "Posterity will say that the worst German crime is the studied destruction of all moral values of Europe."

Then the man who had co-authored the Hoare-Laval deal, who had served Appeasers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain 1) praised the British-Soviet and Franco-Soviet 20-year treaties; 2) suggested that they be supplemented by air defense agreements; 3) proposed that the United Nations should agree to a bill of rights providing for religious freedom and forbidding imprisonment without trial.

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