15 DECEMBER 1944, Page 10

I believe that the British public will in the end

teturn to that sure instinct which has inspired the principles of our foreign policy from the days of Canning to the days of Grey and Arthur Henderson. Our departure from that principle in the unhappy period between the two wars has left behind it a damnable heritage of suspicion and distrust. The confused epoch through which we are now pass- ing may well tempt many sincere and ardent people unconsciously to subordinate national interests to interests which are not national at all. But whatever may have been the divergences of feeling and judgement disclosed in Friday's debate, there were certain funda- mental emotions which were shared in common: a deep distress at what has occurred ; a grave anxiety regarding the scope of its future development ; a common desire to elucidate and simplify the actual facts ; and a joint wish to examine, as Mr. Quintin Hogg well said, not so much the differences between Right and Left as the differences between right and wrong.