Let us announce to the League that we admit Germany's right to development and that we are prepared to concede something to procure it. An impartial … - Lord David Cecil

Their elaborate manners masked simple reactions. Like their mode of life their characters were essentially natural; spontaneous, unintrospective, brimming over with normal feelings, love of home and family, loyalty, conviviality, desire for fame, hero-worship, patriotism. And they showed their feelings too. Happy creatures! They lived before the days of the stiff upper lip and the inhibited public school Englishman. A manly tear stood in their eye at the story of a heroic deed... They were equally frank about their less elevated sentiments. Eighteenth century rationalism combined with rural common sense to make them robustly ready to face unedifying facts. And they declared their impressions with a brusque honesty, outstandingly characteristic of them.

The eighteenth century was the age of clubs; and Whig society itself was a sort of club, exclusive, but in which those who managed to achieve membership lived on equal terms; a rowdy, rough-and-tumble club, full of conflict and plain speaking, where people were expected to stand up for themselves and take and give hard knocks. At Eton the little dukes and earls cuffed and bullied each other like street urchins. As mature persons in their country homes, or in the pillared rooms of Brook's Club, their intercourse continued more politely, yet with equal familiarity. While their House of Commons life passed in a robust atmosphere of combat and crisis and defeat.

England can best express her passionate will to peace by proposing something concrete to solve present difficulties. To show ourselves generous and sensible is in our own finest tradition. Cannot we, through the League, propose to offer Germany some mandate or devise other means to allow for her expansion? Even if it is only to gratify her desire for prestige, we are sufficiently proud of our prestige to sympathize with this desire. To refuse to do so is to show ourselves guilty of the same narrow, selfish nationalism that we deplore in the more reckless utterances of Fascist leaders.