10 AUGUST 1944, Page 12

SIR,—It was interesting, even amusing, to read Mr. Willis's description

of those who disagree with him as people who "let their thoughts be governed not by logic but by emotion," just after he has given free swing to his own emotions and prejudices. Calling other people names is an emotional impulse. Many, for example, if not most, of those who are opposed to capital punishment are so opposed not on emotional grounds but because they think that experience proves that murders are not more common in countries where the death penalty has been abolished than where it still remains, the last survivor of a time when eighteen people might be sentenced to death in one day—not one murderer among them. The most ardent support of such abolition known to me was a Professor of Medical Jurisprudence, and that as the conclusion to which he had been brought by a prolonged experience.

The evil effect, I think, of Lord Vansittart's policy, probably unin- tended, is that on a subject and at a time when above all we required deliberation, discrimination, and a regard for justice, we are invited to throw the reins on the neck of our quite natural desire for punishment and revenge. It.was just so that we felt after the Indian Mutiny, and against such a wave of feeling that Disraeli made his fine protest.

How difficult it is for a minority to protest against a popular war was very clearly seen in the Boer War (a war from which the mass of the British people hid nothing to gain), and yet protestors like Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Henry Campbell Bannerman had not, like their counterparts in Germany, to fear either elimination or concentration camps. It is easy to be vicariously courageous, to be sure that we should have been immune to threats of torture and death.

We have a dreadfully difficult task before us well stated by Professor Gilbert Murray: to take measures to see that there is no possibility of a renewal of the war ; in some way or other to reconcile Germany to the settlement of Europe. This will depend on what kind of a settlement we secure, and on some re-education of the German mind. It must include punishment of criminals, but anything like calculated revenge opens a dreadful prospect. The elimination of the threat of war must come from without, from the Allies. The re-education of the German people must come from within and with as little intrusion from outside as possible. But there are factors in the country which can, I believe, be trusted to fight on the side of justice and peace. Thce is the Catholic Church and, one hopes, at least a section of the Protestant Church such as Pastor Niemoller spoke for. It is not long since our papers reported the outspoken denunciation of Nazism by the Catholic Bishops and especially Archbishop Grober, who "left no doubt in a Pastoral that he looks on Nazism as a force which is bestialising and degrading German life. His arraignment of Nan doctrine culminates in a significant passage. . . . The man who in an unjust war has hounded hundreds of thousands to their death and has flooded the ss with misery upon misery then sleeps his eternal sleep . . . perhaps distinguished from his wretched victims by a statue which post has raised to him, and by fat, obsequious volumes which a pseudo-sci dedicates to him." That many others, neither Catholic nor Protes share these views seems to me certain while human nature is what it and is confirmed by Hitler's own recent admission that a perman resistance was directed against the governmental measures ever since Nazis gained power. If these influences are to gain the upper after the war it must be clear to Germans that they are not dictated from without.—Yours, etc., H. J. C. Ganasos.