Peace by Mediation
The Prime Minister's declaration to the Japanese Ambassador in. London on Monday, that in a cause of the kind for which we are fighting, where no question of territorial acquisition, trade or material gains enters in, there can be no question of compromise or parley, has reference to a particular situation, created by the vague and comprehensive offer of the Japanese Foreign Minister to mediate on any dispute in any quarter of the globe. But now that the question has been raised it might be carried a little farther. There may, and must, never be compromise on anything but secondary detail, but there will have one day to be something in the nature of a parley. There can, indeed, be no end without that. It would be worth while making it entirely dear to the people of this country, of Germany and of all the world under what conditions the idea of a parley could be entertained. Whatever may be said of others, two are fundamental. Every country that Hitler has enslaved must be completely evacuated by his troops, and he and his accomplices in brigandage must be replaced by a Government of which it can at least be said that they are not proved and branded perjurers. Till those conditions are realised, as an indispensable preliminary to any negotiations at all, to talk of a negotiated peace means retreat from every resolution that took us into war. No one recognises that with deeper conviction than Mr. Roosevelt, who declared as lately as last Tuesday (in language refreshing in the head of a State non-belligerent and technically neutral) that the first war-aim was to win the war and that proposals for a European peace must await a military decision.
