The chairman of the Cromwell Association <nowiki>[</nowiki>Maurice Ashley<nowiki>]</nowiki> asks why Charles II's escape from the Battle of Worcester… - Arthur Bryant

[L]ike most of my countrymen I loathe injustice and cruelty, and unlike them I happen to have had some recent experience in Spain. And after reading the pages that follow, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the people of this country have been misled by those who form its public opinion into condoning, in the name of an abstract theory, cruelty and injustice of a particularly horrible kind. There doubtless have been many harsh acts committed by the Spanish Nationalists: men do not wage civil war with gloved hands. But they do not include the wholesale rape, murder, and mutilation of non-combatant women and children, such as the Communist leaders in Spain will have to answer for... Over here the intellectuals—our foolish wise—have mislead us into thinking of such men as democrats, and of the Spanish Civil War as a fight between a properly constituted Liberal-cum-Socialist government and a gang of Fascist saboteurs. But no university lecturer or anonymous BBC commentator has told the just and compassionate people of England about the women of San Martin de Valdeiglesias.

During the last four centuries, the most important things that had happened were the extension of the Anglo-Saxon race into every corner of the world and the growth of the American Republic and the view of life it stood for... That ideal was born four centuries ago when a few bold persons believed it would be possible to find on the other side of the Atlantic a land in which they could make for themselves a new home, with a freer and better life than they had hitherto enjoyed. Hence gradually developed the founding of small English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America.

Compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, became a national habit. The freedom of the Press—a forebearance unnatural in any Government—was an English invention; so was the secret ballot which enabled a man to record an unpopular vote without danger to himself. The English, as self-opinionated as any people, mastered the lesson that they could only possess liberty by allowing it to others, enjoy the propagation of their own views by listening patiently to their neighbours'.