I am not quite sure whether I have followed Lord
Baldwin's third principle and " steeled myself against the attribution of false motive." Lord Baldwin himself has suffered cruelly from such false attribution, and has in fact described it, in some other connexion, as one of the hardest trials which a politician has to bear. It may be that, not being a subscriber to any Press-cutting agency, I have not seen that I have been accused of harbouring motives which in fact had never nestled in my soul; it may also be that no man has ever accused me of having any purposes or motives at all: but the fact remains that I am not conscious of this particular arrow or of the necessity of steeling myself against its assaults. I have, however, observed with much interest that the public, especially in war-time, are more lavish with their credulity than with their credence, and that they actually prefer the improbab_e to the probable motive. There are, for instance, many admirably convincing reasons why we did not bomb the Rumanian oil fields when we were in Greece. Yet the average man gives no credence to these reasons and when one expounds them his eyes grow dim with bored disbelief ; yet he becomes a sparkling lake of credulity when assured that the real reason is because the Conservative Party had a wide interest in the installations at Ploesti.
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