I doubt whether the British public will be deluded by
any such stratagems. They remember that, at the time of Munich, they were similarly assured that self-determina- tion was the only principle which the Fiihrer desired to invoke. When extermination followed, they awoke to the fact that the Third Reich was out for conquest and that its rulers regarded conciliation as a bourgeois and unheroic virtue. The suspicion is rapidly gaining ground that for three years Herr Hitler and Herr von Ribbentrop have planned gently to encircle (in aller Ruhe) the British Empire ; and that Japan, Czecho-Slovakia, Spain, Memel and Albania have been moves in this campaign. I doubt therefore whether Dr. Goebbels will be able to persuade us that Danzig is an isolated problem; since we now know that, even as the rights of the Sudeten Germans were the pretext for the tremendous wrong done to Czecho-Slovakia, so also will the rights of the Danzigers be exploited as a pretext to throttle Polish independence and to open Herr Hitler's road to Rumania, the Ukraine and the overland route to India.
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