Hugh Gaitskell's sudden illness and death were fate's cruelest blow to a nation plagued by difficulties in economics, defense and diplomacy. His quiet, persistent reasonableness rescued the Labor party from the chaos of a unilateralist position on disarmament and a total commitment to nationalization. His stature made the possibility of a Labor government seem palatable to many conservatives who saw the Tories collapsing in muddled confusion.

Gaitskell's opposition to the Common Market was neither doctrinaire nor blind; it was, like the man, reasoned and vocal. Harvard men who remember his Godkin Lectures in 1957 will sense the depth of England's loss. The entire process of two-party government in that country has suddenly become immeasureably more difficult and the future even more clouded. The Western community is shakier and weaker this week.