12 APRIL 1940, Page 15

I find also that there exists a strain of defeatism

regarding the capacity of the back-benchers upon the Government side. This apparent dearth of rising statesmen is attributed to two separate causes, neither of which seems to me to be wholly valid. There are those who bemoan the fact that the last war destroyed a whole generation, and that those who should now be coming forward to shape our destinies were lost to us at Gallipoli or on the Somme. There is, of course, some truth in this, and among my own contem- poraries I can recall several inheritors of unfulfilled renown. Yet many of those who were at Oxford during that most legendary period from 1905-1914 survived the war ; some of these survivors were regarded at the time as possessing ability even greater than that which distinguished those who died ; yet only a small minority of these have since risen to positions of power.