




The British people and the war

The British people have never been so united in accepting a challenge as they are to-day in determining to resist the tyranny with which all free peoples are threatened. Never indeed have safety and honour been so indissolubly linked together. It has at times been argued that the British Empire could stand aloof from the Continent of Europe, nursing its strength and pursuing its own special interests in the world. The hard facts have destroyed this illusion. While Great Britain was still an island her statesmen and strategists held that the preservation of the integrity and independence of the Low Countries was vital to her safety. It is true that at the Peace of Amiens Great Britain was obliged to leave France in possession of Belgium, but that very fact stamped the peace with the character of a truce. The great historian Sorel pointed out that the neutralisation of Belgium was really essential to peace in Western Europe. But once it was granted that Great Britain would be in danger if the Low Countries passed under the control of powerful and ambitious Governments, it became clear that Britain's interest in the state of the Continent went far beyond this. Any State that threatened to become the master of the Continent threatened Great Britain, for, on the narrowest view, it was of supreme importance to her what happened in the Low Countries. The isolation school was therefore on weak ground even in the days, those days to which we look wistfully back to-day, when we were still an island on the edge of a continent and not part of that continent itself. To-day we are no longer an island. It is easier for Germany's airmen to attack us than it is for our airmen to attack Germany.

The case for isolation thus breaks down if we are merely looking to our safety. But of course the question is much larger than this. The future of the world is at stake, and for one of the great leading Powers of Europe to leave the world to its fate would be an act of abdication deadly to its good name and to its spirit and its character. Particularly would this be true of Great Britain. For there is no nation that has gained so much in wealth, in power, in reputation, and in the experience on which political wisdom is nurtured from contact with other peoples and other continents. Can you say of a people that has spread its name and its institutions all over the globe, that has brought across every sea the treasures of distant lands, that has used its power in three continents to guide the destinies of strange peoples, that has built up its economic strength by riches gained in many cases by the lawless methods of the lawless centuries-can you say of such a people that it owes nothing to mankind and that its only duties are to itself? If we had accepted Hitler's invitation to share power with him and leave him to make Eastern Europe his vassal, we should have betrayed every moral principle in politics. (Very soon, too, we should have found ourselves the junior partner in that concern unless we were ready to concentrate our whole life, in the Nazi spirit, on developing our military strength.) Only a few months ago we were proclaiming that the defence of the League of Nations was our first principle in politics. If we had accepted Hitler's invitation we should have been guilty of one of the most cynical treasons in history.

Few people who have lived through the last two years can be in any doubt of the importance of the issue. Europe and the world cannot live and develop their ideas, their capacities, and their virtues in the strident and brutal anarchy into which they have been thrown by the gangster methods. What is to become of religion, of culture, of beauty and happiness, of the merest decencies, of the settled habits and purpose in daily life if men and women are to remain under the shadow of perpetual war, and war infinitely more barbarous than that of the ages we call savage? For the most ruthless warfare of all is the warfare that combines the unchecked violence of uncivilised man with the weapons and resources of the civilised. Timurlane, the fourteenth-century Mongol conqueror, boasted like Hitler that he had brought order into a world of confusion. Gibbons' comment is strangely apposite to the process we can watch to-day. "If some partial disorders, some local oppressions were healed by the sword of Timour, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their rapine, cruelty, and discord the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict their subjects, but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of the reformer." This is the process that we have to arrest. And of all the peoples of the world there is not one of whom it is more important that this attack on civilised custom should be overpowered. Democracy is the basis of our life and our society. In fighting the cause of the freedom of Europe we are fighting the cause of freedom in these islands and in all the societies that make up the British Commonwealth. War, it is said, will not solve our problems. That is true. They demand, as we have often said in these columns, constructive and imaginative statesmanship. But it is only by war, alas! at this hour that we can obtain for the world the opportunity for statesmanship. If Hitler overruns Europe, the constructive task will fall on him, and we have only to look at Germany, Austria, and Czecho-Slovakia to see what he will make of it. To-day we have to exert the whole strength of the British people to avert that catastrophe. Democracy, said Fox, gives a power of which no other form of government is capable. That power and the intense passion with which men love liberty are our chief hope and comfort as we enter on the night which begins to darken upon the world.