For many reasons the British as a people are anxious to find formulas that will guide them out of international crises, to avoid the final arbitration of war. The appeasement of Neville Chamberlain and his associates in the late thirties was in keeping with this historically developed tendency. One has only to read what Pitt endured from Napoleon to preserve peace, or the sound, sensible reasons that Charles James Fox offered against the continuation of the war with the First Empire, to understand that this island people goes to war only with the utmost reluctance. One reason is that in 1800, in 1939, and in the middle of the twentieth century the British have lived by trade. Wars, large or small, hurt trade. Prolonged hostility toward a foreign nation--Franco's Spain, Lenin's Russia, or Mao's China--reduces Britain's share in a market or cuts off raw materials needed for production at home. In this respect we cannot judge Britain by the continental standards of China or Russia or the United States. This is an island power. Because they are polite, because they are easily moved to sentimental tears--Sir Winston Churchill and Hugh Gaitskell, who otherwise have few traits in common, both cry easily--because they are diffident, because they will twist and turn in their efforts to avoid war (although at times, for reasons of policy, they will present the impression of being very ready for war), the British have given the outside world a false idea of their character. Beneath all this is toughness of mind. I recall landing in England in April of 1939. It was then obvious to almost everyone in Europe that war was on the way. On the way to London I talked to a fellow passenger, a man in his late twenties who had three small children and who lived in London. "The next time Hitler goes for anyone, we'll go for him," he said casually, almost apologetically. He conceded that the war would be long, that Britain would take some hard knocks, that going into the Navy and leaving his wife and children would be tedious. But he had made up his mind that there was no other course. The thing had to be done. After the war--and, indeed, during it--many Americans ridiculed the British reaction to the war. They found exaggerated the stories of the cockney who said: "'arf a mo', Adolph" while he lit his pipe, the women who shouted "God bless you" to Winston Churchill when he visited the smoking ruins of their homes. This was a serious error. In those days, the most critical that had ever come upon them, the British acted in a manner which made one proud to be a member of the same species. But that was a decade and a half ago, and the circumstances were extraordinary. Nations change--compare the heroic France of Verdun with the indulgent, faithless France of 1940. Have war and sacrifice, austerity and prolonged crisis weakened Britain's mental toughness? I think not.