Lewis Bernstein Namier Quotes

For 20 years between the two wars the Germans have contended that the cutting off of East Prussia by the Polish Corridor created an utterly untenable situation, and they certainly did their best to make it so. But Poland cannot exist without access to the sea, and the behaviour of the Germans in Czechoslovakia (and elsewhere) has proved that no State can safely harbour them as a minority. Therefore their removal from East Prussia is the only solution. Lord Quickswood dwells on the cruelty of transfers of population; nothing can surpass in cruelty what the Germans have inflicted on humanity by this second world war. A third must be prevented. Lord Quickswood admits that "the great mass of the German people have doubtless a certain moral responsibility for the crimes of their rulers," but sees in it mainly sheep-headed stupidity. Millions of German soldiers and civilians have witnessed the unspeakable massacres and atrocities ordered by their rulers; had there been a normal human reaction these orders could not have been carried out. The German nation is corporatively responsible for what has happened.

The relations of groups of men to plots of land, of organised communities to units of territory, form the basic content of political history. The conflicting territorial claims of communities constitute the greater part of conscious international history; social stratifications and convulsions, primarily arising from the relationship of men to land, make the greater, not always fully conscious part of the domestic history of nations—and even under urban and industrial conditions ownership of land counts for more than is usually supposed. To every man, as to Brutus, the native land is his life-giving Mother, and the State raised upon the land his law-giving Father... There is some well-nigh mystic power in the ownership of space—for it is not the command of resources alone which makes the strength of the landowner, but that he had a place in the world which he can call his own, from which he can ward off strangers, and in which he himself is rooted—the superiority of a tree to a log. In land alone can there be real patrimony, and he who as freeman holds a share in his native land—the freeholder—is, and must be, a citizen.

The declaration of war on September 3, 1939, is one of the great turning points of history, and should be remembered in awe and gratitude. At the last moment Britain, though fully conscious of the mortal danger she was facing and of her own weakness, called a halt to a process which had gone much too far, and which, had Hitler pulled off his trick once more, would have subjected all Europe, and perhaps ultimately the world, to Nazi Germany.

[O]n a careful inquiry it will be found that the coming in of American wheat has wrought a greater change in the composition of the British House of Commons than the first two Reform Acts.

Whether the theory of an actual paternal origin of government is a correct phylogenetic or logical inference, or merely a psychological delusion, we shall probably never know; but this much is certain, that it is an assumption natural to us all. Correct perception of a psychological fact underlay Sir Robert Filmer's theory: all authority is to human beings paternal in character, for they are born, not free and independent as some of Filmer's opponents would have it, but subject to parental authority; in the first place, to that of their fathers.

Before the war the manor-houses on the big landed estates were centres of high culture and mainstays of modern economic life in Eastern Europe. They resembled Roman villas in semi-barbaric lands. Their inhabitants read the works and thought the thoughts of the most advanced civilisation in the midst of an illiterate peasantry.

He writes about the decade before the war:—"Foreign policy ('rearmament') and social services ('the dole') were competitive claims on a straitened national output." Surely, with 2,000,000 unemployed the output could easily have been expanded to satisfy both claims. It was not; because we believed in "thrift" and transferred this conception derived from individual economy to that of the nation, in which it is apt to turn into sheer nonsense. Further, in the "thrifty" view of national economy production for export is a virtue, but for self-consumption it is, at the best, excusable. This led us into a second absurdity. If we produced material for armaments and exported them, say, to Germany (and they were financed by city loans on which the Germans duly defaulted) "classical economists" beamed with pleasure over our "roaring exports." But had anyone suggested using these materials for the rearmament of this country he would have been decried as a "spendthrift militarist."

States are not created or destroyed, and frontiers redrawn or obliterated, by argument and majority votes; nations are freed, united, or broken by blood and iron, and not by a generous application of liberty and tomato-sauce; violence is the instrument of national movements.

But most of all there is that marvellous microcosmos of English social and political life, that extraordinary club, the House of Commons. For centuries it has been the goal of English manhood, and besides those who found seats in it on the strength of a tradition or of a quasi-hereditary right, there were in every House many scores of men, for whom its membership set the crown (and often the coronet) on achievements and success in other walks of life. Generals, admirals, and pro-consuls entered it, business men who had made their fortunes and now aspired to social advancement, Civil Servants, lawyers and political wire-pullers who tried to raise their professional status, etc. The rise of "interests" and classes can be traced through the personnel of the House of Commons, the forms of English gregarious existence can be studied, the social structure of England is reflected in it, the presence or decay of independent political life in boroughs and counties can be watched in their representation.

I have always maintained that British history in the eighteenth century is primarily a history of country houses.

The official "Conservative" leaders of 1938–1939 were mostly ex- or semi-Liberals of middle-class Nonconformist extraction, whose Liberalism had gone rancid – anxious business men lacking imagination and understanding even in business, and in foreign politics lay preachers full of goodwill à bon marché.

[T]o millions of Jews, Palestine means much more than the solution of their individual problem—it stands for the oldest national and religious tradition known to the Western world. It is not within the power of men to make us renounce it.

[T]he German scene was transformed by the entry of Hitler: never before had a man so malignant attained such power, nor a nation shown so little revulsion from evil. Crude and hysterical, full of virulent hatreds and envy, he powerfully appealed to the Germans, and set about doing their work in Europe... Hitler had shrewd skill, but no wisdom; with him there was no appealing to reason or even to rational interests—which men like Chamberlain were slow to grasp. Nor was there in him a conscious control of his own moves; hence he appeared incalculable and chaotic.

If it is a question of policy, the rights and claims of non-Arabs in the Near East must not be swept away by a legerdemain into the wide Arab pocket. The historic connexion of the Jewish people with Palestine has received international acknowledgement, and so has the fact that they are in Palestine of right and not on sufferance. The Arabs now look forward to fuller realisation of their desire for union and independence; the Jews claim the right to establish a free Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The blood of a million Jews murdered by the Nazis cries to heaven; the world-wide Jewish problem calls for a solution; it has its roots in Jewish homelessness: in Palestine, and through Palestine alone, can a solution be found. It should not be impossible to arrive at a settlement of the Near East which would satisfy the needs of both Arabs and Jews, and realise their national aspirations.

For us Jews no sacrifice is too great for the sake of Palestine and of our National Home. Soil shall be created in Palestine where there is none at present, and trees shall be planted however many times Arab hooligans uproot them; and Haifa and Tel-Aviv shall grow into ports and cities equal to, or greater than, Alexandria.