• hope you will allow someone to suggest in your
columns that there is a case for the internment of enemy aliens.
It is undeniable that there are enemy agents in this country, and one of the easiest disguises for a spy to -adopt is that of an exiled enemy of Nazi Germany. Such a one comes into the country with a blank slate and experiences the sympathy and understanding due to an innocent victim of persecution. He is an expert at his job and can satisfy a tribunal. He can be apprehended only after an exhaustive inquiry into his movements—an undertaking-which, for all the aliens
in the country, would be of prohibitive dimensions. Arrest on sus- picion would play into enemy hands, for to get a valuable pro-British alien out of the way an enemy agent would have only to plant enough evidence to arouse suspicion. Internment for all enemy- aliens is a solution of the difficulty, but with the following conditions: (i) Conditions in the internment camps should be as good as we can possibly make them and certainly good enough to allow of (2). (2) Friendly aliens should be encouraged to give Britain the benefit of the ability which many of them possess. This would require more intricate organisation than is usual with the British, but the inherent difficulties are not insuperable.
We can afford to take no risks: we must not say of aliens, "Surely the members of the Fifth Column cannot be found amongst them," just because we sympathise deeply with most of them. It is com- forting to explain the defeat of Belgium, Holland, France. by circum- stances which cannot obtain' in Britain, but we must not mislead ourselves in doing so.—Yours sincerely, ERIC R. WILICINSON. Bootham School, York.
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