SIR,—Like your correspondent Mrs. W. R. Tarn, I admit to
the personal and emotional outlook of a woman—of the generation whose fathers fought in the last war, whose husbands and brothers are fighting in this, and who, if they are credulous enough to offer hostages to the future, will provide in their sons (and daughters— civilisation advances) the uniformed corpses of the next. I don't claim that any of the reasons for my own sense of frustration and disillusionment are typical ; I do feel with many of my fellows that complacency and duplicity and mental and moral stagnation are evidenced in high places to a horrifying degree.
As a member of the working-class, upon whom for generations necessity has imposed an austerity in living inconceivable to those who, in the third year of war, sustain the demand for eight-guinea hats and beans at sixteen shillings per lb., I am acutely conscious of the continued existence, side by. side, of the "two nations." The working-man whose inefficiency loses a customer is dismissed; the expert whose inefficiency loses a few thousand lives appears to he rewarded by promotion to a more exalted rank. Each unemployed man's child has twenty-five times as much money spent each week on its behalf for the purposes of destruction as it was allowed in peace- time for the purposes of its existence. Slums continue to exist in juxtaposition to streets of solidly built houses which have remained unoccupied for two decades.
As a pacifist, who recognised in the failure of the Disarmament Conference the turnabout to war, I am not impressed by our leaden' new-found sympathy with China, remembering that Englishmen, acting on their motto of "profit before principle" and with the approval of the Government, sold war materials to the invader, Japan. Finally, as an all-too-fallible human being, I know that if in the metamorphqsis of the spirit when the bombs are falling one feels the strength and dedication of a disciple of Christ, in the vanity of the heart when the bombs are a memory one realises that for oneself (and in oneself is mirrored the majority) the resolution dissolves and the vision fades with the danger. In the shameful knowledge of one's own want d integrity, one loses faith that the brave new world which the imagina- tion fashioned will ever be built on earth.—Yours faithfully, FRANCES MILES, 63 Doneraile House, Ebury Bridge Road, S.W. 1.
[This correspondence is now closed.—En., The Spectator:I
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