Comment on the Hess affair has pretty much died down,
and until there are new facts to base it on that is just as well. But there is one point on which obscurity might be cleared up with advantage. It was freely asserted when Hess reached Scotland that he had written some time previously to the Duke of Hamilton. There were two possible reasons for his doing that. One he gave himself—the fact that he had seen the. Duke (then Lord Clydesdale) at the Olympic Games at Berlin in 1936. The other is ,that he may well have read a letter which Lord Clydesdale addressed . to The Times in October, 1939, and which expressed views very similar to those which Hess is reputed to hold. It was a perfectly proper letter, though the writer's views have probably undergone some change in the light of what the world has seen of Nazi brutality since then. Such sentences as: " I look forward to the day when a trusted Germany will again came into her own, and believe there is such a Germany," " We shall, I trust, live to see the day when such a healing peace is negotiated between honourable men, and the bitter memories of the 25 years of unhappy tension between Germany and the Western democracies are wiped away in their responsible co-operation for building a better Europe " indicate how Lord Clydesdale's thoughts were tending at the time. If Hess, months later, had the idea borne in on him that Britain and Germany ought to be able to live together without antagonism what could be more natural than that he should try to establish contact with the Scottish M.P. who had written thus to The Times?
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