TERMS FOR GERMANY SIR, — After reading much on the subjects of
"Destroying Germany " and "Humanising the Nazis," both in your columns and elsewhere, I should like to put forward the following two propositions as worthy of general acceptance. First, when the Peace Conference assembles, the " Idiocy of Idealism " will again become rampant. How can we ensure that this time it shall signify something? The record of most members of the present War Cabinet scarcely offers justifica- tion for the hope that any radical, imaginative or supremely wise settlement will be achieved, so what is needed and what
I suggest all posterity-conscious publicists should advocate is a sort of second-line or pis aller peace defence plan. While taking Floreat Utopia as our motto, we must make absolutely and physically certain of giving Germany's neigh- bours a fifty-year guarantee of peace and security. To the man in the street, or, rather, in the barracks, the real lesson of the last peace settlement and its sorry sequel is that the peace-makers attempted too much. Must we again " aiming at a million miss the unit? " After all, humanity's biggest benefactors to date and the most effective servants of peace have proved, not the well-intentioned statesmen with their high-minded plans and proposals, but the instigator and executors of the Maginot Line.
Secondly, there are those who adopt as criterion of the value of any terms which we may now formulate as a basis for ending hostilities that they be such as to offer the German people an alternative to loyal allegiance to Hitler. The best conceivable comment upon this familiar line of reasoning is not, perhaps, the fact that since the murder of Sleicher and his wife the German people have been content to be ruled by cold-blooded cut-throats, but the following extract (Daily Telegraph, February 19th) from the account of life on the Altmark ' by one of the rescued prisoners: " The Germans had amazing ideas about England. They had been told that if they were caught by the English their hands or feet would be cut off, and the astonishing thing is that they believed it,' the moral surely being that in dealing with a people so credu- lous as the Germans their own propagandists have much the best chance, and all they need to know about Allied peace terms is that they will not be Nazi terms.—Yours, &c.,
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