No doubt Lord Vansittart's new pamphlet, Roots of the Trouble
(Hutchinson, 3d.), will have a large sale, perhaps as large as its predecessor, Black Record. But I doubt whether it will be altogether effective. The average Englishman has no great love for clever writing as such, and Lord Vansittart seems to be thinking about writing cleverly from start to finish. Such a sentiment, for example, " The proof of the peace-pudding will be in the eating. Germany and her handmaidens will do their best to make a hash, for which you would pay. Those who let them- selves be led by the nose pay through the nose," is not in reality very impressive, and there are a great many sentences like that. From Lord Vansittart's main thesis, that Germany is and always has been a militaristic nation, and that Hitlerism is only a manifestation of traits deep-rooted in the German character for centuries, there will be little dissent, but even the best case loses by over-statement, and there is exaggeration in the content, as well as over-emphasis in the form, of this indictment. The foul and hideous brutalities Hitler's armies are committing from one end of Europe to another today are more than enough to steel any Englishman against tenderness to Germans generally ; there is little enough need to involve past history as basis for an
arraignment.
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