SIR,—In her letter published in The Spectator of July 28th
Miss Rathbone makes two general points. First, that all generalisations about national
characteristics are unsound if they go further than saying that the history of nation A shows it to contain a larger (or smaller) percentage of persons conspicuously endowed with quality than nations B, C or D, etc.
I Secondly, she suggests that each of us should ask himself or herself what he would have done during the last ten years if he had been a German hating Hitler and his aims.
May I deal with her second point first? Alas, I certainly am not confident that I would have "risked torture and death" to flout Hitler.
But I do know this : that had the impossible happened and this country had temporarily found itself governed by a Hitler, I would have been completely intractable. Because I should have known that such a large percentage of my fellow-countrymen would prove equally intractable, that no Government would have been able to control us.
This reflection brings me to Miss Rathbone's first point.
The Germans who detested Hitler knew they were exceptional Germans in not liking to be ruled with a rod of iron by a man holding doctrines of the Hitlerian variety. They would not agree with Miss Rathbone that "throughout the greater part of the corpus of any nation, at least any European white nation, differences in quality are rather individual than national." It is understandable if they thought "the time was not yet"
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