A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE Germans are prepared, not altogether without reason, to take the British seriously. To them the failure, dur- ing one month, of our Government and our people (for once almost completely united in their views) to impose upon some 50,000 unofficial strikers the ide4 that they ought, in their own and in the-nation's interest, to return to work probably appeared as a kind of folkway, a posture in some abstruse but respectable Morris Dance. Few Germans and (I suspect) fewer Britons will have drawn from this interlude its obvious lesson as far as Germany is concerned. The idea that we, with however many allies and however many legalistic aids, can prevent a numerous, resourceful, cunning and increasingly prosperous people with a strong military tradition from living up to that tradition by rearming is—to put it mildly—a fallacy.
Previous page
