A VITAL QUESTION
—"Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?" article by Irene Ward, M.P., in your March 27th issue sends one to a re-reading of Kipling's poem "The Islanders."
to first words are: "No doubt but ye are the People." On us lie responsibilities. It is no good trying to stage a sort of Riom trial s country. Under our arrangements, we are responsible for the h failure to establish their frontier on the River Rhine in 1919. can hold one opinion or another about our politicians, about our servantir,--- about our War Departments, and still know that we unwise in the nineteen-twenties to knock out two main props of well-being, whether for peace or war, by starving and wrecking our ural and shipbuilding industries. We knew then as well as we now that we must support both these industries, in spite of the ency of each in peace-time to draw trade away from the other. We :n as good a position as our representatives to measure the risk nineteen-thirties that the German people might again take a fit murderous and suicidal lunacy. And it did not need Intelligence S. nor people of any particular intelligence, to tell us that market- boards and restriction of production were not the best response to Or to any other environment. We appeased our marketing boards d of fighting them: and the cost of this and of other mistakes is m young lives. It is a heavy responsibility.
ainst all this there is, of course, something to be put on the credit
• and we are entitled to our share of the credit. But there can be sarPlus on the credit side until we have mastered the Germans and tackled our own problems afresh. The price of liberty is eternal : we must try to keep awake better in future. That is the only
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