He found his sought-for refuge in England where he was given every consideration. The door of every home from Buckingham Palace down was open to him, but the British afforded him all the privacy he wanted. If it had been only privacy he sought, he could have led a restful secluded life in the country home of Harold Nicolson, his father-in-law’s biographer, and could have remained at peace until Hitler disturbed it. Lindbergh spent just enough time in England to convince him that England was soft, England couldn’t take it, England would lose if it ever went to war. It was bad luck that Lindbergh should have lived in England during a time when it _was_ soft, just as we are soft today. It was the England of pacifism, faith in the principle that if you want peace badly enough you can have it, just by refusing to fight. It was the England of the Oxford Union when the debating society boys voted not to fight “for King and Country.” It was the England which needed waking up, just as we need it today. It was an England that could get hard, if it had the time, just as we can get hard too, if we have the time. But Lindbergh formed his opinion of England then, and from his public speeches he seems too stubborn to allow even the epic heroism of England today in battle to change his judgment. Nicolson, long-standing family friend of the Morrows, mailed Lindbergh a postcard every week during the Battle of Britain, when the people of England were persevering under a hurricane of bombs and were calling it their “finest hour.” Each postcard had the one sentence: “Do you still think we are soft?” Perhaps he still thinks so, long after the Germans have stopped thinking so. At any rate, he left England for a tour of the continent, and thereupon came the second turning point in the development of his political views. When he left America he left it embittered by the tragedy of his child, and he left convinced that it would never have happened except in a corrupt, gang-ridden democracy. It was, indeed, one of the lowest periods in America’s public life, when kidnaping for ransom had become widespread for the first time in any modern civilized state, and the power of the gangs was a national humiliation. In a sense it was true that it was the fault of democracy, but the virtue of democracy is that slowly but almost always sooner or later we correct the faults and bring under control the license which ever threatens democratic liberty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, had not grown up when Lindbergh fled America.