2110-4-6-13

[RAMSAY MACDONALD]

December 9th, 1924.

My dear Buchan, I was indeed delighted to get your book from you with the letter that accompanied it. Our old Scotch songs have for long years enabled me to make time go with a happy face and a cheerful step and I think your selection is admirable. I had already seen it but to have a copy with your autograph is particularly pleasing to me.

I too am rather sorry that we have got out of office so soon but if we had stayed in another month we would have been hopelessly beset by party intrigue. If the proposed Campbell inquiry had had the least judicial aspect about it I should have accepted it without giving the matter a second thought, but the intention of the other parties was to obtain a condemention from a Select Committee which they could have controlled (I was all through the Marconi business and know only too well how that was worked) and then they would have turned us out either on the Russian Treaties as a whole or on some point of them and we would have had to go to the country with what would have appeared

a censure of the House of Commons hanging about our necks.

Quite candidly I am alarmed at the European situation. I get private information from time to time and find that the countries which tried to rush me into all sorts of escapades but which had begun to [strikethrough]possess[/strikethrough] face other methods have now gone back to where they where last January.

I am going away on the 22nd and shall not be back until the beginning of February. I should be very glad if it were my good fortune to meet you when I settle down again.

Yours very sincerely, Ramsay MacDonald

Col.John Buchan,