The Last Peace and the Next

64 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY to Hitler's rule, in spite of the (act that the great majority of the army and nation is opposed to the anti-religious, cruel and corrupt dictatorship o( the Nazi party. Only when the faith o( the whole German nation in the righteousness of their cause has been shaken and destroyed, will the preparation for a "second front in Europe" be completed. If the realization of these truths is born out of defeat on the battlefields of the Ukraine, then the price that the Democracies must pay will not be too exorbitant. II. THE LAST PEACE AND THE NEXT LIONEL GELBER WHAT men deem to be the issues of the war will shape their thoughts about the nature of the· peace. Even amid the clash of arms, the clamour of rival schools is not inaudible. But when the roar o( battle subsides, those who aspire to be architects of the future will coine more fully into their own. In the ensuing debate the views of two noted Englishmen, Mr Harold Butler and Mr E. H. Carr,* are bound to exercise wide influence. On many of the social, economic arid political topics of the day they seem to agree. But on one basic question, that of Germany and the Germans, they afe poles apart. And this is of the utmost importance . For the riddle of Europe, Mr Butler observes, is the riddle of Germany; the problem of Europe, Mr Carr re-echoes, is the problem of Germany. How, then, does each tackle what he considers the central factor of European stability? As guides to the peacemaking their attitude towards the GermaI} question is by their own terms the acid test of reliability. Mr Carr is best known for his previous book The Twenty Years' Crisis, published in the autumn of 1939 after the outbreak of war. A lucid, .provDcative work, it was the only serious vindication .ever to appear of the philosophy of appeasement. "The negotiations which led up to the Munich Agreement of September 29, 1938, were," he " declared, "the nearest approach in recent years to the settlement of a major international issue by a procedure of peaceful change." With that incredible sentence an era of shame wrote *The LOJt Peace, by HAROLD BUTLER. New York, Harcourt Brace (Toronto, McLeodl, 1942, $3.50. ConditionJ of Pwce, by E. H. CARR.. London and Toronto, Macmillan, 1942, $4.00. THE WAR AND OPINION 65 its own obituary. It Y'as, nevertheless, a logical consequence of Mr Carr's general otitlook; and what his new volume does IS to restate under altered circumstances the thesis of his old one. In1:l international affairs the measure of judgment is not learning or style but the immediate application of reasoning and ideas to key events. The case against Mr Carr is not, however, a book which was too late to be more than a mirror of official pre-war sentiment; what does' come as a shock is to discover that he is still ,saying in 1942 what he said in 1939. A partisan of the discredited policies of Lord Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, Mr Carr in his social and economic aims is today a spokesman of the extreme left. But these fundamentally were seldom incompatible. For on the suicidal impulses of appeasement the right never held a monopoly. And as the left now grows in political stature the appeasement forces within it are striving to gain ascendancy so as to chart itsl course. The conflict with them, whether on the left or the right, promises to be the dominant conflict of the peacemaking. Appeasement is a strange mixture of narrow vision, national self-hatred and hatred of natural allies. But it has remained for Mr Carr to dignify it with the semblance of a coherent doctrine. As he has done before, Mr Carr exposes the failure of the notion of an automatic harmony of interests which underlay the world order of the nineteenth century. It will, he feels, have to be supplanted by some higher moral purpose. But what that will be eludes Mr Carr himself. And it is as manifestations of this deeper crisis that he analyses...