Sta,—" Even a War Cabinet, even at such a crisis,
could hardly commit us to so revolutionary and incalculable an arrangement for all time "—so you refer with a disdainful shudder to the proposal of an immediate Anglo-French Union. For some time The Spectator has built up a reputation for august impartiality, but perhaps now, beneath that careful ambiguity of a diluted Times leader style which are your comments on the political scene, can be discerned the real meaning of the supposed impartiality ; for that sentence implies, as do all the peace aims of the Elder Statesmen, that we are not fighting for a new world order, or even for French civilisation, but for the main- tenance of Britain as a leading Power, not as it ought to he, an enlightened socialistic democracy, but as it is, a vaguely democratic plutocracy. In other words, it is a repetition of all that selfishness and short- sightedness which was the root of the failure of British foreign policy and which culminated in this war, and which, if we win, will ensure that the same process will begin over again ; and it is exceedingly depressing that an offer, which was perhaps the most enlightened, generous and foresighted gesture that a British Government has ever made, should be stigmatised as something rash, hasty, and—in the eyes of The Spectator undoubtedly the most discreditable of all appellations—revolutionary. Finally, in reply to it, one can only point out that if such an accord had been reached in the first few weeks of the war and a joint Anglo-French Government had been formed, the control of France would not now have fallen into the hands of the French Right, who have more sympathy with what we are fighting against than what we are fighting for, and who, there can be little doubt, have brought about the present capitulation of France.—Yours faithfully,
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