IN the last issue of The Economist we were able to carry the chronicle of great events up to the German 16-point "offer" broadcast to the world on Thursday night. It was suggested at the time that the "offer" was a piece of propaganda, since it had only been communicated to Poland two hours before it was declared by Berlin to have been rejected.* What could not be known when this comment was penned in the small hours of Friday morning was that even the British Government itself had had no knowledge of the "terms" save such as could be gathered by the Ambassador from a gabbled recital in German by the excited Ribbentrop. Nor was there then any possibility of knowing that Hitler had given his army and his air force orders to attack Poland at dawn, without further excuse or formal declaration of war.

For the first time in his career, we may feel grateful to Hitler. Since a war was quite inevitable (and knowing what we now do of his state of mind, we can clearly see that it was), we could hardly have hoped for a straighter moral issue on which to fight it. The major principles involved have, of course, been established for some time; they are wrapped up in the old antagonism to the doctrine that Might is Right. But the precise occasion of the outbreak might have been confusing; Hitler obliged by making it clear. The famous "offer" was so obviously a piece of clumsy propaganda that nobody outside the borders of Germany (and few, we may suspect, inside) was taken in for more than an hour or two. The Poles were not challenged to fire the first shot by a German coup d'etat in Danzig, for though there was such a coup, it came after the Germans had invaded Poland itself. The British White Paper, of which the salient features are summarised on page 480, makes it plain that until the very last Britain and France were urging, and Poland accepting, proposals for negotiations, provided only that they were on a basis of equality. It is difficult to see how the most finicky historian of the future will find the slightest reason for doubting that Hitler deliberately and wantonly provoked the new war.

After the first breach of the peace the rest followed automatically. There was a last-minute proposal by Signor Mussolini for a five-Power conference "for the purpose of revising the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles which are the actual cause of the trouble in the European situation." Throughout Friday and Saturday this proposal had the effect of delaying French and British action; but it also had the merit of demonstrating once again the democracies' desire not to neglect any possibility of a peaceful and honourable solution. But the Italian initiative broke down because Germany would not accept the Franco-British stipulation that the invading troops must be withdrawn. As it was, the House of Commons had shown in unmistakable fashion on Saturday afternoon that there was no shadow of desire to depart from Britain's obligations to Poland, which had been solemnly invoked. The collapse of the Italian initiative led immediately to the last diplomatic steps. The British and French Ambassadors in Berlin each delivered an ultimatum on Sunday and, satisfactory replies not being given, a state of war between Great Britain and Germany existed from 11 a.m. and between France and Germany from 5 p.m. on Sunday, September 3, 1939.

This was the beginning. What the end will be no man can tell. But if we cannot yet say where the road on which we have entered is leading us, we can at least record where we hope to go. What are the objects so essential to our national existence and well-being that we are prepared, as a nation and as individuals, to go through the valley of the shadow of death to reach them? What are we fighting for? The question can be answered, and truthfully answered, with abstractions, as it was admirably done by the Prime Minister on Sunday. "It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution." But the ordinary man does not easily think in abstractions. His grim determination is based on concrete realities. He wants to live free to hold his own opinions, free to indulge in the luxury of argument and disagreement, free to spend his leisure hours at his own fireside or at his own pursuits, free to devote his productive powers to meeting the material wants of himself and his fellows, free to build up a higher standard of living instead of a higher standard of aggressive power, free to bring up a family without the haunting menace of insecurity. In the last few years, even the most thoughtless man in the street has realised that Hitlerism makes all these elements of civilised living impossible. It suppresses opinion; it monopolises leisure for the countless drills and displays necessary to the generation of "spontaneous enthusiasm;" it drains off for military purposes all production above the minimum necessary to keep the people alive; it propagates the nauseous doctrine that children are born for the cannon. Hitlerism has done these things to Germany for more than six years, and it has built up on this fundamental iniquity a superstructure of added brutality and senseless racial persecution. But in the last three years it has started doing these things to us too. It has started compelling us to devote our energies to rearmament, our leisure to drilling, our income to taxes; it has cast over our lives the shadow of doom. Hitler has proved that we cannot be indifferent to the ways in which other people govern themselves. He has convinced the easy-going, tolerant British democracy that it must go through another bout of agony if ever again Englishmen are to live in peace and wealth and contentment.

To say that we are fighting to make the world safe for democracy would be to invite derisive comment. But we are fighting, in the most literal sense, to safeguard democracy in those countries of Western Europe and overseas where it has taken root. And democracy in Britain and France will not be safe if they are faced with brutal dictatorships in any Great Power. Democracy and dictatorship cannot long exist side by side; if they do, the bad will drive out the good, either through a military conquest of the democracies or by forcing them, in self-defence, as we have been forced in recent years, not indeed to abandon democracy, but to divert it to evil purposes of organising for strength instead of for wealth. Many people have asked in these past years of straits what good a war would do. The answer is, of course, that a war does no good; but it has become the only way of preventing infinitely greater harm.

And why has it become the only way? That is a question that only history can finally answer. But one moral can be drawn now which history will not upset. We have had many chances of strangling in their infancy the forces of aggression and brutality which have now engulfed the world in war. As each issue has arisen, we have refused to meet the risks attached to the suppression of brute force. And, as issue has followed issue, we have seen the price of security rise, in a steady Sibylline progress, until now it has reached the most awful height that a nation ever had to face. Before we plunge into war, this lesson must be drawn from twenty-one years of uneasy peace: security cannot be attained by avoiding risks; a policy of limited commitments leads inevitably to the unlimited commitment of war; safety cannot be found without courage. Let us never again make the mistake of being involved in the maintenance of peace without being committed to its enforcement.

These considerations provide two of the pillars of the eventual peace settlement: it must bring the end of armed dictatorship; and it must provide for a world-wide system of enforcing peace. A third pillar must, of course, be the restoration of their independence to those people who have lost it, primarily the Czechs. But these three aims achieved, the fourth must be an avoidance of any merely vengeful or repressive provisions against Germany, which would provide genuine grievances for a new Hitler. If she is democratic, if she cooperates in the new international order, if she restores her unjust conquests, it will be to our interests at the end of this war (as we can now see that it was to our interest in 1918) to help her to unity, equality, wealth and self-respect. The only alternative policy would be one of permanent partition and garrisoning of a defeated Germany, for which the democracies have neither the strength nor the moral mandate.

These, then, are the four principles of peace: Democracy, an International Order, Restitution and Generosity. Their translation into precise details is a matter which cannot now be undertaken. But there are certain points to which it is essential that we should all now commit ourselves as publicly as we can, while our visions are still unclouded. There must be no annexations of German territory and no indemnities. There must be disarmament, but no expectation that Germany will remain disarmed while other nations are armed. There must be a genuine sharing of colonial benefits and responsibilities through the widest extension of the mandatory principle. There must be a new League of Nations, with the hesitations and half-commitments of the old removed. There must be an end of the more senseless forms of economic nationalism.

In the madness and the agony that is to come, we must cling fast to these principles. Only so can we be quite sure that, in defending democracy, we shall not betray it, and that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built.





*For the sake of historical accuracy, a misprint in last week's issue should be corrected. As published, a sentence beginning in the 18th line of page 434 read “They [the 16 points] were not revealed to the Press until 8 p.m. on the 31st, two hours before the broadcast statement that, after waiting for two days for an answer, the German Government considered that the proposals had been rejected.” This should have read “They were not revealed to the Poles until 8 p.m. on the 31st...”