GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—Lord Tavistock's indictment of British policy towards Germany is both unreasonable and unjust.
We have tried to disarm and we are the only nation who did try. We disarmed until our Fleet, to use a German phrase, was " a collection of old barges," until our Air Force was a mockery, and until our Army was insufficient to quell a minor revolt in Palestine without calling upon reserves. Mere comparisons of expenditure before and after 1914 are highly misleading for several reasons, one of the most obvious of which is that money now buys not much more than half the services and material it did before 1914.
We have tried appeasement until our friends were in despair and our—" not friends," shall we say?—were convinced we were a degenerate breed. When the Prime Minister returned from Munich he brought an agreement which was, no doubt, the best he could get, but which was one almost universally recognised as unfair and unjust to Czecho-Slovakia. But even that agreement was carried out unfairly and unjustly by Germany and is now repudiated. Mr. Chamberlain wisely resolved not again to go to the conference table armed with a muzzle-loader while the other party flaunted a tommy-gun!
The comparison between the Abyssinian aggression and our action in restoring order in Palestine is most surprising. Italy callously broke three treaties when she invaded Ethiopia and, in addition, ignored the Geneva Gas Protocol of 1925. Palestine was given to us as a trust in the form of a mandate to be administered in the interests of the people, both Arabs and Jews, and one of our duties was to see the peace was kept and to suppress disorder. Moreover, we have offered a most generous settlement, fair to both parties. We broke no treaty and committed no aggression.
Lord Tavistock's jibe at President Roosevelt's timely and disinterested intervention is most ungenerous. Possibly it would have been more " tactful " to allow a dangerous situa- tion to drift, or to have been less forthright, but in dealing with dictators who flaunt the niceties of diplomacy, plain words constitute the only language of which they have a dictionary. Surely, too, the President's heroic efforts to ameliorate the lot of the under-dog in his great country deserve a better reward
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