Correlli Barnett Quotes

There are of course the neo-Puginites or neo-Morrisites who like to think of Britain as leading the world into a post-industrial phase where this form of capability will be obsolete, and who despise so material a matter as GNP as unethical or—the trendy version—unecological. Yet these high-minded escapists are among the first to howl about the need for more resources to be invested in hospitals, schools, good works, prison improvement, subsidies for the arts and what not. A country of static or declining GNP will not be an 'Erewhon' but a pinched and increasingly bitter place. Poverty may be noble as a concept; it is rarely so in in the flesh.

Yet although Bonaparte could not perceive it, those atoms were held together by a principle – love of liberty; the right to arrange your own affairs in association with your fellows without being told what to do by a government and its bureaucrats. He could not begin to comprehend that through such free association and debate Englishmen might arrive at a union far more resilient than the brittle artificial unanimity he had imposed on France; at a truly national purpose in contrast to the mere acquiescence of the French people in his own designs. He failed as well to note the dynamism of a country where initiative and decision flourished everywhere in the soil of liberty instead of being the monopoly of one man at the top like himself. And despite his fulminations about English gold buying allies to fight against France, he no less underestimated the strategic importance of England's resources as the world's most powerful industrial and trading nation.

In provoking even the peace-loving and feeble Addington Cabinet into a unanimous decision for war Bonaparte had committed the most catastrophic blunder of his entire career. It sprang in the first place from a failure to understand the English character and English institutions, or comprehend England's strength. Since his youthful studies he had regarded her as the modern Carthage, a mere nation of traders doomed to destruction at the hands of a martial state like France. And certainly there was little about English society that accorded with Bonaparte's own ideas as to what constituted a powerful and well-governed state. Vacillating cabinets precariously depended on the hazardous outcome of parliamentary votes. Instead of the central government directing the national life, the national life arranged itself by some mysterious organic process. The nobility and gentry governed the English shires virtually without reference to London, even controlling the militia, that important part of the English military system. The new volunteer movement had sprung up spontaneously as private and independent associations of citizens. The legal profession and the universities jealously guarded their independence. The City of London, the world's greatest financial centre, formed yet another self-governing republic. The Industrial Revolution, already well under way in England but not yet to begin in Europe, owed everything to personal initiative and nothing to State direction or encouragement. All in all, English society consisted of innumerable co-existing private clubs. The apparent anarchy of the English scene found supreme expression in a free press which hounded politicians, the nobility and even the royal family with cruel lampoons. How could such a cloud of human atoms, such a nation of usurers lacking even a great army, contended against Bonaparte's own logical, efficient military state directed by a single mind of genius?

[I]t was the shortage of resources – economic and financial – which posed by far the gravest question of all for the British Government after the fall of France in 1940. For whether or not England escaped defeat at the hands of the enemy, the mere continuance of the war would itself inevitably, inexorably, bring independent British power to an end through national bankruptcy and economic ruin. It was a situation which no British Government had had to face since England first emerged as a great power in the wars against Louis XIV.

It was the grimmest legacy ever inherited by an English Prime Minister; a situation probably beyond remedy even by statesmanship of the most far-sighted and cool-headed genius. The first and urgent question, the question which filled the minds of War Cabinet and nation alike, was whether the United Kingdom itself could for long survive in the face of the immensely powerful forces, elated with victory, which were gathering just across the narrow seas; or whether the swastika would fly above the Houses of Parliament and on the church towers of the English countryside, and the boots of a foreign conqueror stand on the soil of England for the first time since the Middle Ages.
It was a time for former moralising internationalists either to repent, or skulk behind the armed forces they had sought so devotedly to dismantle. For this was the hour, an hour too long delayed, when England returned to herself; when English policy once again spoke in broadsides instead of sermons. To the world's astonishment, the nation which had allowed itself to be represented by – which had even seen itself mirrored in – men like Baldwin, MacDonald, Henderson, Simon, Chamberlain, reverted of a sudden to its eighteenth-century character, hard as a cannon.

The British complained at the time, and were long to complain afterwards, that the French had let them down; that the French army had not fought well enough; that France, by capitulating, had left them to carry on the war alone against overwhelming odds. These were complaints which the British, who had been hardly more than spectators of the battle, were singularly ill-qualified to make. For it was, after all, only the logical, if not the inevitable, consequences of the entire course of British policy towards France in the previous twenty years, and of the whole pattern of British grand strategy and re-armament in the 1930s, that France should virtually alone have to fight the decisive land battle against Germany, a nation twice her size; and that she should therefore lose that battle.
Now the British were face to face with the doom which, step by step, illusion by illusion, they had brought down on themselves – a war without an ally against two great powers, possibly three; their own island in danger; an ill-defended and immensely vulnerable empire; and an inadequate industrial machine; and insufficient and fast-dwindling national wealth.

[T]he Cabinet...continued to put their faith in bringing about the "appeasement" of Europe by negotiation; in other words, in reaching a general settlement of all outstanding European problems with the co-operation and consent of Nazi Germany... The Cabinet thus elected to follow a course of action which stood in flat contradiction to their own expressed convictions about the nature and aims of the Nazi régime, and about the worth of the Nazi signature.
Nothing could be more in the romantic tradition than so to reject what was dictated by knowledge and commonsense, and instead pursue the impossible but ideal. But this was a Cabinet refulgent with high ideals – high Victorian ideals. By the mid-1930s the direction of English policy had fallen even more completely into the hands of clergymen manqués than during the 1920s and for the most part clergymen manqués now well advanced in middle-age or even into elderliness. In Baldwin's Cabinet in 1936, MacDonald, Runciman, Kingsley Wood, Neville Chamberlain and Simon represented the nonconformist conscience; Halifax and Hoare the High Church; and Inskip the evangelicals. Their approach to world affairs owed no less to Victorian liberalism, for they were deeply imbued with its abhorrence of struggle and its optimistic faith in human reason and goodwill... The political and moral equipment of the English cabinet ministers of 1936–7, being thus designed for an historical situation which had long since disappeared, was useless in the present international environment.

Meeting Simon could only impress Hitler the more vividly with English feebleness. Here, in Simon, Hitler met for the first time a Foreign Secretary of England, the greatest of all imperial powers, the nation which had thwarted the ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II – this sanctimonious and deferential old gentleman of mild and episcopal appearance. In a situation which called for a breezy, brutal arrogance of a Palmerston, the chilling dignity of a Castlereagh, or the blunt, plain-speaking and dominant will of a Wellington, Simon could only make a sorry attempt at ingratiation.

Between the prejudices and the facts therefore the Cabinet could only follow a tortuous course of evasion. England's German policy became one of inherently futile expedients. Underlying these expedients was the illusion, extraordinary in view of Rumbold's and Phipps's reports, that the Nazi leaders would be accessible to reasoned argument and responsive to proofs of goodwill; a failure, per contra, to realise that English policy would carry no weight at all with the Nazis unless backed by English – and French – power and by an evident willingness to use that power.

There was yet another powerful element in British public opinion in 1933 which made a return to the balance of power and the line-up of 1918 wholly out of the question. Despite the failure of the League of Nations over the Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the faith of internationalists in the future of the new world order remained undiminished. That the general situation in the world had so much worsened since the happy days of 1929, with the rise of Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan, only stimulated the internationalists into even greater activity; the more disquieting the facts, the more faith must conquer them. The rather smug optimism evinced by internationalists in the 1920s, when they thought war and aggression had been banished for ever, gave way to a somewhat hysterical eagerness to explain away the inherent impotence and fallaciousness of the League and its Covenant so brutally exposed by the Manchurian affair, and prove how the League nevertheless could and would prevail.

From 30 January 1933 onwards the English had had to deal with a German government whose leader poured public scorn of the utmost brutality on the fundamental beliefs by which the English had come to live. In Nazi Germany and post-evangelical England the utterly incompatible products of two different strains of romanticism now confronted one another – the German, with its mystical and atavistic outlook on race and nationhood, its obsession with power and domination, its neurotic love of violence; and the English, with its faith in the moral law, its vision of the brotherhood of man, its trust in the essential goodness of human nature, its pacific gentleness and compassion. Such a confrontation could only end in a tragedy of misunderstanding.

[A]fter all the arguments and lobbyings of 1934–5, the proposal to make friends with Japan in order to free English resources to meet the German menace petered out.
It had indeed really been foredoomed from the start, for while its proponents had been shrewd enough in their object, they had been unrealistic to the point of naïveté in thinking that it might be possible to win Japan's friendship without coming to a deal over China. In any case, even if the Government itself had been willing to conclude such a deal, it would have been vetoed by public opinion. For in 1934–5 the National Government was not in the position of an eighteenth-century administration, looking to a body of opinion composed of solid country squires, with the hardness and realism born of life on the land, and a relish for a shrewd and profitable deal. Instead there was a volatile mass electorate; an urban, rootless and emotional middle class, always ready to get in the fidgets of moral indignation.

The French, in their attitude to making peace, were...preoccupied with the question of Germany's power in the future; a future which they saw as one of continued rivalry between nations.
The British and the Americans, on the other hand, had no such hard, clear-cut policy; felt no such overriding concern with German power. In the first place they shared the liberal assumption that the normal human condition was what they called "peace"; a natural harmony in which "war" was simply a meaningless and regrettable breakdown. They did not agree with the Clausewitzian view that "peace" and "war" were alternating aspects of a perpetual conflict of interest between organised human groups, a conflict which can express itself in mere economic and diplomatic rivalry; in threats of force; in covert violence or open pressure; in local use of force; in limited war; or finally, in total war. The notion that the Allied victory in the Great War was just one episode in a continuing struggle, from which the maximum advantage must be derived for the next episode, was therefore alien and repellent to them.

Moral force, or righteous indignation, was in fact the only means the British left themselves with which to influence the course of world affairs. For their parsonical belief in the powers of moral reprobation was accompanied by an equally parsonical dislike of "immoral" forms of pressure, such as bribery, threats or force. The British ruling classes deliberately rejected from their thinking the fundamental operating force in international relations – power. To take note that power existed, and was the prime mover, was denounced as a cynical and immoral wish to play "power politics". This was about as sensible as denouncing aircraft designers who took note of aerodynamics. To the post-evangelical British, however, power in the relations between States was like the sexual urge in the relations between people: elemental, frightening, and to be denied. It was an era when Bismarck and D. H. Lawrence were equally ill-thought of. The British approach to diplomacy was therefore rather like their approach to sex, romantically remote from the distressing biological crudities.

British policy was therefore the child of their insemination of the politicians – politicians like Baldwin and MacDonald, the Chamberlains, Simon and Henderson, Halifax, Eden. It was as if the encumbents of quiet early-nineteenth-century rectories and nonconformist minister's houses had been miraculously transported into the great offices of State of a hundred years later. Instead of the suspicious minds of pre-Victorian statesmen, there was trustfulness; instead of a worldly scepticism, a childlike innocence and optimism. And instead of a toughness, even a ruthlessness, in the pursuit of English interests, there was a yielding readiness to appease the wrath of other nations. For the very bedrock of the national character had been crumbled since the eighteenth century. Whereas the pre-Victorian Englishman had been renowned for his quarrelsome temper and his willingness to back his argument with his fists – or his feet – now the modern British, like the elderly, shrank from conflict or unpleasantness of any kind. In Lord Vansittart's words: "Right or Left, everybody was for a quiet life."