The revelations of what treachery did in opening Norway's doors to the Hun have started a general hunt after Hitler's Fifth Column. The "Daily Telegraph" has published a remarkable account of the number of Nazi key-men sent to London before the war. One was a German doctor of high repute, another a financier who owned an aeroplane and a yacht (it sounds like "The Thirty-Nine Steps") and another was a scoutmaster.
They were all spotted by our police, watched and arrested within 24 hours of the Outbreak of war. But it is by no means certain that they did not manage to get hold of agents who would be prepared to do mischief, The number of Germans in this country, 60,000, and the laxity of the first Alien Tribunals cannot but cause uneasiness.
One does not want the innocent to suffer with the guilty, but what are the facts? The Minister of Information put them with unanswerable force in a speech at Southampton. He complained that there were neutrals to be met in this country as well as in neutral countries, and he denounced the fallacy that we are merely fighting a minority in Germany and not Germany herself. To the extent that the German people support Hitler, and there is no evidence that they do not, the British people are fighting the German people. As Mr. J. A. Spender pointed out in the "Sunday Times" recently, there has never been a time for 70 years past when the European nations would not have lived peacefully together if it had not been for Germany. The British people are getting roused. Nothing has so much roused them as Hitler's monstrous invasion of Denmark and Norway. (Now Holland and Belgium—Ed.) And this, perhaps, is not the least of the mistakes he will make.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.