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Private Laurier House, Ottawa
21-2-37.
My dear J.B.,
I am deeply grateful for the kind words of your letter received yesterday. It was more than good of you to have written me of the defence debate. I am glad it all went as well as it did, and I am most grateful to you for encouraging me to believe that what I said helped to meet the needs
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of the situation. I have been so dreadfully pressed with the many matters to which attention has had to [be] given from day to day, and am so frightfully fatigued, that it has become impossible either to prepare for what is necessary in debate as one should, or to be able to guage [sic] the adequacy or effect of ones words. Your reassurance is therefore a great relief to my mind.
I was immensely pleased at the way in which the party
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stood behind me to a man. It was not easy for many of them even to appear to be supporting increased expenditures on defence, and it has required a lot of persuasion in caucuses of the party, and by personal interviews to bring them all into line, but the effort quite clearly has been well worthwhile and I feel we have jumped the one big hurdle of the session.
I have missed very much not having had a chance
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to get down for a talk, and I have been even more concerned at not getting down off to Redfern before this "the Abdication cor respondence", I just haven't been able to open the box in which it has been locked since the event - so as to sort it properly. I didn't let any of it go to the office, or on to fyles. I shall get at it this week, and send it down in some shape. I shall be down, too, to see you before the week is out.
My warmest thanks meanwhile
Yours very sincerely, Rex
His Excellency Lord Tweedsmuir GCMG
P.S. What Chamberlain, Inskip and Baldwin said with respect to the expenditures by the Dominions on defence saved the day for us all. Hoare's remarks. innocent and correct enough in their intent, gave us a lot of trouble
W.L.M.K.
