Letters to the Editor

[In view of the length of many of the letters which we receive, we would remind correspondents that we often cannot give space for long letters and that short ones are generally Wad with more attention. The length which we consider most suitable is about that of one of our paragraphs on " News of the Week."—Ed. Seacr.vron.]

"LA SECURITE"

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,—In a recent article the Paris Temps* proclaimed the fact that France required two kinds of security—one furnished by an overwhelming superiority to Germany in national armaments, the other provided by a satisfactory system of international guarantees, by which was meant an arrangement by which the armaments of every nation in Europe should be at the disposal of France if any disturbance of the existing situation were threatened.

The French pride themselves upon a realistic outlook. In actual fact, where security is concerned, their outlook is quite fantastically naive in its simple and crude materialism : while it grossly exaggerates the value of all physical mechanism, it takes no account at all of the most elementary psychological realities.

The two varieties of security to which the Temps referred are, of course, both solely dependent upon physical factors— aircraft, tanks, barbed wire, and so forth ; they are, indeed, essentially one and the same, and they are based upon a one-sided and inadequate appreciation of historical science.

Quite recent happenings illustrate the fallacy. All the armaments of the Triple Alliance could not preserve for Germany the annexed provinces Alsace and Lorraine for even fifty years. There is no valid reason for supposing that mechanical force will prove more successful in preserving for France and her allies the far more serious annexations and confiscations effected in 1919.

Bismarck was enough of a realist to advise against the annexations of 1871. Clcmenceau, fantastic in his defiance of all sane thinking, cast down the gauntlet to the nationalism of Central Europe, and while his work remains this outraged nationalism will daily seek to find some effective answer to his challenge. Obviously the security afforded by arma- ments is of limited scope and transient efficacy ; otherwise the arrangements of 1871 would not so soon have been dis- turbed by force.

This reflection seems to have caused uneasiness in France ; as we so often hear, France is " afraid " for her security. Yet still her statesmen persist in limiting their horizon to the strictly material : If steel shall fail us, then in gold, maybe, the secret of our security will be found." To Hitlerism the reply has been not, as in 1923, an invasion of the Ruhr, but a withdrawal of credit, the exploitation of every expedient of financial and economic pressure, the threat of national bankruptcy and individual starvation. German nationalism has winced beneath the lash of the French bankers, but its will is but steeled still further against submission.

The psychical desire for a recourse to violence has grown in inverse proportion to the physical capacity for it.

Are these spiritual armaments of national indignation, accumulating daily in Central Europe, in truth no menace to the security of France ? This is the question one would put to French public opinion at this time. Can France afford to allow this process to continue ? Genuine security is determined not mechanically but morally and psycho- logically.

There is a degree of security to which a nation is morally entitled, and a degree to which this moral title is scarcely to be accorded.

Was Germany's moral right to Alsace-Lorraine such as to justify the security of these Alsatian frontiers ? French nationalists will answer in the negative.

The right of Poland and Czechoslovakia to independent national existence is not to be disputed ; but there are frontiers and territorial possessions of Poland and the Little

August 2nd.

Entente at the present time which have neither ethno- graphical nor geographical justification. They have no moral claim to any such security as we have seen fit to guarantee to the Franco-German frontier through the Pact of Locarno.

If France insists upon their inviolability, and resists all efforts at their revision by pacific means, she may well lose all her gains of recent years through this short-sighted policy of intransigence where her vital interests are not directly concerned. The Vistula Corridor, for example, is a perpetual menace to the security of Europe, and France is very ill- advised to dissociate her own interests from those of Europe as a whole, when she strives not only to preserve its existence but actually to increase its economic and strategical im- portance.

The Corridor represents both the inspiration and the justification of the German pocket-cruisers, and if France objects to them, this should prove an additional incentive to her to deal radically with their source.

We may search in vain in the French Nationalist Press for any recognition of the psychological basis to all true security.

The one-sided analysis of the problem indicated in the Temps may, perhaps, be correoted best through two quotations from another nationalistic organ, the StahUwim. These extracts supply so exactly the complement to the mechanical theory of security that they acquire significance.

The first extract is dated June 29th, 1931 :

• What may be called ' the German Danger ' lies in a sphere quite other than that of armaments. It consists in the fact that France has neither accredited nor responded to the German people's honest desire for a chivalrous settlement, but, under the veil of fair words, has continued to pursue a policy of annihilation, accompanie.l by the attempt to discredit and to humiliate Germany. This policy is the least suitable method conceivable for the attainment of France's security ; it constitutes for France the very real danger. It not only brings the other nations into opposition with Franco, but through its persistence it will finally produce in Germany, lath as we desire it, especially among the generation now growing up, a mood of hatred and despair that will have the result that if over France has to go to war against another nation, this nation will have at its disposal in Germany an army of volunteers numbering several million. This fact could prove for France's opponents a factor of immense importance.

Across the frontier a groat deal is being said about the spiritual disarmament expected of Germany. This spiritual disarmament occurred at the and of the War, when every German desired nothing more ardently than a permanent peace, a chivalrous settlement with France in particular. We wanted an end of the thousand. year-old epoch of wars, and a peaceful development of our respective cultures, which, arising from the same foundation, supplement each other essentially, and ought to form the kernel to a cultural com- munity of Europe. How bitterly we have been disappointed ! . . . . Not in the piling up of armaments, not in the policy of provoca- ation and exasperation lies France's Security, but in a real and honourable settlement with Germany, of which the essential pre- condition is the equitable revision of the Dictate of Versailles."

The second extract is dated July 5th, 1931 :

" It would have been very much in the interest of France and of her security if at Versailles her statesmen had vigorously opposed any restriction upon Germany's possibilities of development towards the East. The expansion of Germany's interests, in accordance with her geographical and economical position, might then have been completely diverted from the West towards the East. We should have lived without frontier friction in friendly relations with the Poles, whom we had freed with German blood from the oppression of Tsarist Russia, and for whom, as for Ili, the maxim applies : The future lies in the East.' As it is, the frontier definition has misled Poland into turning Westward instead of Eastward in her aspirations of expansion, and she is committing the same funda- mental error as the German nation has followed for the last thousand

The security of France, the idea which dominates every class and party in France, may only be achieved when the German nation is able to carry out the duty which its geographical position and its historical and economic development have imposed upon it."

To summarize these conclusions : if France desires genuine , . . security, it is certain that she must pay the price of treaty revision. Is it not the duty of this country to persuade her

of thii tact ?—I am, Sir, &c., R. G. WALMSLEY. Bronte, Moseley MU, Liverpool.