Abbe Kothen
IWAS privileged last week to have a long -Italk with the Abbe Kothen, whose speeches were so prominent a' feature of the Liverpool Congress. The Abbe, who is in early middle-age, is the administrative brain behind the Belgian Young Workers, and is a man of the greatest charm who has the rare power of making himself a friend for life in the shortest conversation. He knows England and English conditions well, for he was a Belgian refugee during the war, who worked for some time in a Manchester factory. Like so many of the more prominent clergy of our day, his religious vocation was a late one. Canon Cardigu, Fr. Kothen's "Chief," thought the whole J.O.C. movement out while a prisoner in Germany.
Authors Take Sides— LAST week the Editor wrote heatedly about the British intelligentsia's rea sons for siding against Franco. Some readers have suggested that he has taken what is, after all, only a minority, too seriously, and others have asked for names for, against, and neutral. Here is a representative list : Against Franco : Abercrombie, Auden, Beresford, Calder-Marshall, Havelock Ellis, Liam O'Flaherty, David Garnett, Louis Golding, Robert Herring, Laurence Housman. Aldous Huxley, Storm Jameson, Joad, Linklater, Rose Macaulay, Macdonell, Mannin, Mitchison, Middleton Murry, Nevinson, O'Casey, L. Powys, H. Read, Tomlinson, H. Waddell, R. West, Leonard Woolf. For Franco: E. Blnden, E. Waugh. Neutral: Wells, Shaw, Norman Douglas, Eliot, Morgan, O'Faolain, Pound, V. Sackville West. Unnamed: Walpole, Priestley, Frankau, etc., C. Mackenzie, and all Catholics except O'Faolain and E. Waugh. Perhaps Wells has given the sharpest blow to the majority : " The real enemy of mankind is not the Fascist but the Ignorant Fool."