" YOURS INDIGNANTLY " [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—I had been too busy until this morning to look at the " specimen copy " of The Spectator sent me a day or two ago, and it filled me with amazement and anger at the attitude you have adopted at the visits of Mr. Chamberlain to Germany to avert a bloody war.
You appear not to have seen the announcement in The Times of April 5th, that Germany had just purchased 5o0,000 barrels of whale-oil from the Norwegians ! ! Perhaps if you did it did not occur to you that this was for the manufacture of high-explosives.
Germany was doing this in the early days of 1914, until the late Sir Henry Roscoe, the great chemist, wrote to the then Prime Minister insisting that this oil must be made contraband of war. No notice of this was taken till a few days later, for the matter was urgent, he wrote again that day that unless steps were taken to divert this oil to our ports he would write to The Times to tell the Country what was going on. Then the supply to Germany was stopped.
Mr. Chamberlain may very well have known of this recent huge purchase of whale-oil by Germany, which probably meant that Germany's supply of high-explosives vastly exceeded our own !
Profiting by the experience of 1914 one would have supposed that those responsible for making high-explosives would have seen to it that these 500,000 barrels of oil were purchased by us, at any price the Norwegians chose to ask, before April last when war clouds were already gathering ! If, after all, it was not needed it could have been sold to Lever Brotheri for soap-making • and glycerine, and thus, probably, the present late crisis would never have arisen if this had been done.
We are told that it is "not well to do evil that good may come." Yet you are willing to send probably another million of our countrymen to their graves to avert a possible war with Germany in the remote future !
If we had gone to war it must be plain to you that Czecho- slovakia could not be saved—if it is worth saving—and IF we had won the war and made the return of the mushroom country a part of our peace-terms, they would have been a festering sore to Germany, and yet another war to get it back again quite certain ! ! !
I could never have believed that one of my countrymen would, at a time like this, have emitted such poison-gas as you have done in your columns. Please do NOT send me another
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