This was the beginning. What the end will be no man can tell. But if we cannot yet say where the road on which we have entered is leading us, we can at least record where we hope to go. What are the objects so essential to our national existence and well-being that we are prepared, as a nation and as individuals, to go through the valley of the shadow of death to reach them? What are we fighting for? The question can be answered, and truthfully answered, with abstractions, as it was admirably done by the Prime Minister on Sunday. "It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against—brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution." But the ordinary man does not easily think in abstractions. His grim determination is based on concrete realities. He wants to live free to hold his own opinions, free to indulge in the luxury of argument and disagreement, free to spend his leisure hours at his own fireside or at his own pursuits, free to devote his productive powers to meeting the material wants of himself and his fellows, free to build up a higher standard of living instead of a higher standard of aggressive power, free to bring up a family without the haunting menace of insecurity. In the last few years, even the most thoughtless man in the street has realised that Hitlerism makes all these elements of civilised living impossible. It suppresses opinion; it monopolises leisure for the countless drills and displays necessary to the generation of "spontaneous enthusiasm;" it drains off for military purposes all production above the minimum necessary to keep the people alive; it propagates the nauseous doctrine that children are born for the cannon. Hitlerism has done these things to Germany for more than six years, and it has built up on this fundamental iniquity a superstructure of added brutality and senseless racial persecution. But in the last three years it has started doing these things to us too. It has started compelling us to devote our energies to rearmament, our leisure to drilling, our income to taxes; it has cast over our lives the shadow of doom. Hitler has proved that we cannot be indifferent to the ways in which other people govern themselves. He has convinced the easy-going, tolerant British democracy that it must go through another bout of agony if ever again Englishmen are to live in peace and wealth and contentment.
To say that we are fighting to make the world safe for democracy would be to invite derisive comment. But we are fighting, in the most literal sense, to safeguard democracy in those countries of Western Europe and overseas where it has taken root. And democracy in Britain and France will not be safe if they are faced with brutal dictatorships in any Great Power. Democracy and dictatorship cannot long exist side by side; if they do, the bad will drive out the good, either through a military conquest of the democracies or by forcing them, in self-defence, as we have been forced in recent years, not indeed to abandon democracy, but to divert it to evil purposes of organising for strength instead of for wealth. Many people have asked in these past years of straits what good a war would do. The answer is, of course, that a war does no good; but it has become the only way of preventing infinitely greater harm.
Just stunning in its clarity of struggles past and present:
In the madness and the agony that is to come, we must cling fast to these principles. Only so can we be quite sure that, in defending democracy, we shall not betray it, and that the freedom for which we fight is that freedom for all men on which alone permanent peace can be built.
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