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DICTATED

7, AUDLEY SQUARE. W.1.

9th April 1936.

Dear John

Your letter of April 1st. reached me today, via New York.
This sounds pretty swift, and I contrast the promptitude of your news
with correspondence from Australasia. And yet you say that you begin
to feel as detached as the Northern Laird of 1793. Here the reverse
is so intensively true that we are actually beginning to feel detached
from important and even critical issues, taking place at our very doors.
It is only known, for instance, to the readers of the "Daily Mail" that
a huge Cabinet reconstruction is in progress, and I only learned about
it because a friend of mine, arriving from Paris, saw the French Edition
of the newspaper, and asked anxiously, on reaching Town, for the truth.
None of his immediate friends could tell him that they even knew the
matter was being discussed. So too with our Foreign Affairs. Not only
does each European country produce its weekly crisis, but that crisis
is varied according to the luck or the whim of the correspondent over-
seas.

All the same, we are conscious of great and dangerous impulses
with which Europe is throbbing, - for the moment Mussolini being
a greater source of danger than Hitler. The latter at least pauses to
take breath from time to time, whereas the Duce is in more desperate a
hurry every day, and his military successes of last month have natural-
ly whetted his appetite for a complete and final envelopment of Ethio-
pia. I think a good deal will depend upon the Geneva meeting now just