There is a significance in the title of the sovereign realm of His Majesty George VI which is indicative of the enormous moral strength of the British nation. The United Kingdom is united in more than the political sense; it is firmly knit by psychological tics which have been recognized and variously accounted for by students of many different schools of thought. These students disagree in their analysis of the reasons for this unity, but they-are unanimous that it exists. Even German psychologists admit it, though they call it by a variety of names, the most known of which is the "incredible tenacity" noted by their strategists. That the Germans have blundered sadly from their point of view in their estimates of the British character is not due to their theorists, who have made some extremely shrewd analyses, but seems to be more the fault of a lack of ce-ordination in the German system between the theorists and the practical men—the men who have to govern and conduct the present war. The students have told them what. they can expect, but they prefer to believe what is more agreeable to them, and to mistake a surface disunity for a symptom of deep-lying social disease. They are just now learning of their error.
Before the outbreak of the war, there were signs of strong differences of opinion among. the governing classes of Great Britain. There were those who favoured the so-called "appeasement policy" which is now derided but which was indisputably the wisest policy at the time. And there were those, principally supporters of Labour, who were eager for immediate action against what both sides recognized as the greatest menace to the ideals upon which the British people have been nourished for centuries. The result was apparently chasmal division in public opinion, which mey be supposed to have led ibentrop to assure his FUbrer so confidently that Britain would never fight. There were personal attacks of the utmost violence made on individual members of H. M.
Government, and, as in the case of Mr. Leslie Here-Belisha, the former Secretary of State for War, there were innuendoes of something. worse than incompetence. The innuendoes were, of course, unfounded. They are referred. to here simply as another example of the mis~ leading facade presented by political Britain to the outside world—a facade which was taken by those who wished It to be so, to indicate serious structural faults below.
The truth is that Britain, as a social organism, was, as usual, consciously unaware of what it wanted and why. There was a simmering dissatisfaction over conditions around the British people, and this dissatisfaction took expression in attacks upon the nation's leaders and in critheisms of policies which were perfectly sound in themselves, and well adapted to the existing conditions. If the speeches by members of His Majesty's Opposition—itselt a significant title when unity is considered—and lurid articles in the less responsible press are considered, it can be seen that the dissatisfaction was directed abroad, across the North Sea in the direction of Berlin and Berchtesgaden, Without over-labouring the analogy, it was a manifestation of a subconscious national tendency which, as it had to be suppressed, found its outlet in substitutes, but which, once the need for repression vanished, as it did on the declaration of war, became the nation's most powerful directing force.
In this lies one of the most significant con trests between the war effort of the British and that of the Nazis. The latter's energies have been consciously directed to one end, preparedness for battle, for years—some say generations. Everything at variance with that direction was cruelly suppressed, with a result—if reverting to the psychological analogy can again be pardoned—that the sub-conscious potentialities of the German. people were opposed to war. At the moment, then, the moral position of the two principal enemies in this war can be summed up briefly. The inestimable force which former= ly functioned beneath the surface of the Briton's life is now harnessed to consciously directed effort. That means a power which nothing can overcome, a unity which no blow, however heavy, can shatter. Whereas in. Germany there is no such force. The will to war, the will to die for the Fatherland and the cause, is all on the surface, consciously directed. While below, there is accumulating an unconscious hostility to war, slaughter, and the many barbarities of the German leaders. On the British side there fs the conscious guidance of a formerly subconscious influence; on the German side that influence is repressed, stamped down. If once it is brought to the surface, woe to the Nazi leaders, for there will be unloosed a force of which they can have no idea—a force which will sweep them and their' ideology away, perhaps with even greater brutality than that of which they have been' guilty themselves.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.