MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE Ministry of Information, with the ready assistance of the local authorities, is arranging this autumn for a series of lectures to be delivered in provincial centres. Many of these lectures will be devoted to external problems ; a dis- tinguished Pole, for instance, will speak about the place of Poland in the New Europe, and a Czech professor will explain the economic and territorial needs of Czechoslovakia. Special attention will be paid to American problems, and something will I trust be done to lighten the darkness in which the British public still live in regard to all United States affairs. It was my good fortune to be able to inaugurate last week a course of these lectures which has been arranged for the West Country. I spoke at Bristol, Exeter and Taunton. Although my first two -lectures took place at a time when the black-out was impending, my audiences were crowded and keen. I derived the heartening impression that men and women, at least in the West Country, have at last realised that Foreign Affairs are not affairs remote from their own lives and interests, but may at any moment develop into a typhoon by which their lives may be destroyed and their interests swept away to nothingness. It is useful that the men and women of this country should learn something about the conditions and problems of-other nations. But it is even more important that the Sovereign People of Great Britain should be educated to a sense of their responsi- bility for foreign policy, and should be freed from the many illusions, prejudices and fallacies with which . in this respect their minds are quite unnecessarily encumbered.
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