TECHNOLOGY, WAR, AND GOVERNMENT 497
bourgeoisie's private property as a quid pro quo for the abrogation of
their country's national sovereignty,1

If in France the Vichyssois policy and spirit had thus demonstrated
that the experience of a First World War had made one once aggressively
martial-minded Western nation willing to purchase peace 'at any price*,
the French people's British allies had been convicted of.a willingness to
purchase peace 'at almost any price'2 by a policy and spirit of 'appease-
ment* (in a pejorative connotation of the word) that had been in the
ascendant in Great Britain from the i8th September, 1931, when her
inter-war temper had first been put to the test by the opening move in
a new Japanese campaign of military aggression in the Far East, and the
loth May, 1940, when the British people had taken for their leader a
statesman who had lost no time in putting their temper to the test again
by his challenging offer to his countrymen of 'blood and toil and tears
and sweat'3 as the price that must be paid for the United Kingdom's
present survival and future victory.

From June 1940 to August 1945 the British people had paid as
appallingly heavy a price for the purchase of an inestimably valuable
spiritual treasure as the French people had paid in A.D. 1914-18; and in
A.D. 1952, some seven years after their release from this supreme ordeal,
it had still to be seen whether the ultimate psychological effect of a
Second World War on British moral would or would not prove to have
been the same as the effect of a First World War had proved to have
been on French moral. Would British souls that had been willing to pur-
chase peace *at almost any price' rather than have to face a Second World
War be found willing to purchase it 'at any price' if a third world war
were to descend upon them? There were, after all, limits to Human
Nature's powers of endurance, even in communities of the toughest
moral fibre fortified by the most Spartan martial tradition. If the spirit
of France had flinched in June 1940 at the prospect of having to face
casualties in the field even heavier than the French casualties in A.D.
1914-18 and having to see the whole of her metropolitan territory over-
run by a temporarily victorious enemy, how was the spirit of Britain
likely to react to the prospect of seeing a congested island subjected to
an intensive bombardment with guided atomic missiles which would do
incomparably greater execution than the heaviest of the blows recently
delivered by Goring's Luftwaffe ?

The answer to this question was no foregone conclusion, and any
future follower, German or Russian, in Hitler's footsteps would be
inviting the fate that Hitler had brought on himself and his ambitions
if, like Hitler, he were to gamble on the answer to the question turning

1 Similarly, in a China that had been living under the regime of a Kuornintang
during the years A.D. 1938—48, a considerable section of the industrial working class and
even of the peasantry had apparently come, by A.D. 1948, to feel that the incompetence
and corruption of this ruling clique of a Chinese intelligentsia -was a greater evil than the
hegemony of the Soviet Union under which they would be allowing their country to fall
if they acquiesced in the liquidation of the Kuomintang regime by a Chinese Com-
munist Party,

2 'Not peace
Commons at We

3 Mr. Churchill in the

y,

ace at any price, but peace at almost any price* (Mr. Eden in the House of

t Westminster on the 2$th June, 1937)-

urchill in the House of Commons at Westminster, *3th May, 1940.