I wasn't old enough to fight in the last war, and I was a little too old to be caught up at once in this one. I am cne of a minority who for our lews have been called successively idealists, jingoes, warmongers and pessimists. We vere called idealists because we did not want to recognize as a German Government anything so retrograde and lawless as the Nazis: jingoes because we said that the best answer to the march of the German Army into the Rhineland in 1936 was force: warmongers because we maintained, rightly or wrongly, that Czechoslovakia could and should have been saved. We were called pessimists because we thought that the game had been thrown away at Munich and because we failed to understand how we could give any real support to Poland without first asking an alliance with Russia. I and my friends understood the horrible truth of the White Papers on German prison camps because we had known about them for years already and sometimes wondered how English people could spend pleasant holidays in a country where such things happened.
In September this country and our Allies under took, as we now see on very bad terms, a war which some of us thought should have been fought several years earlier, with the Allies that collective security might have brought us.
One made one's judgments then as one makes them now to the best of one's own ability and knowledge. But as a private person one has te admit, of course, to not being in possession of all the facts. In a democracy a change of policy has te wait on a change of public opinion, and up to Munich at any rate the influence of the Peace Pledge was very strong. I and my friends. however small a minority we were, were part of public opinion, and we have to ask ourselves now what we did to bring about the change of public opinion on which action had to depend. Whatever we did, wedidnotdo nearly enough. It, wasn't enough to write articles which one couldn't get published. One ought to have carried banners in the streets, held meetings, flooded Parliament with telegrams, and because one did not do these things, or do them enough, One must share the blame. It's no good putting it all on the Government. If democracy means anything it means that we are governed with cur consent and what the Government do or don't do is ultimately as much our responsibility as theirs.
There is no, time now te look back, but only forward, where surely the matter is plain. We must make it our war—we must all get into it, There must be hundreds of thousands of men in our streets who don't want to wait for conscription. No doubt it takes years to make a good soldier, but perhaps this will be a time when a citizen army—a people's army—can serve. Citizen armies have done great things in the past. in France, in Switzerland and in Spain. The British citizen will certainly do no less.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.