Cobden in his boundless mid-Victorian optimism about free trade could no more have imagined such a plight than Adam Smith could have imagined refrige… - Correlli Barnett

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.

The new German conception of organizing and planning opened the modern epoch of war. Nothing like the minutely dovetailed plans, routes, and timetables of the mobilization and Aufmarsch of 1870 had been seen before. Thus an army had become the professional and organizational peer of modern history.

[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.