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ing, perhaps irreparably, some other. However delicately one
stepped, the floor of the commercial edifice was alive with vested
interests, every one of which was apparently sacred and defended
by a whole chorus of jealous hierophants. The utter fiasco of the
much advertised World Economic Conference in London, in the
summer of 1933, was an illustration, if any was needed, of the
omnipresence of the disintegrating forces in contemporary
human society. It was poor Ramsay Macdonald's last attempt to
view the. world as a unified whole. Despite his oratory and good
intentions the task was beyond his or apparently any other man's
comprehension.
e. •••••••

Before the Conference broke up in cynical despair the emphasis
was already passing from internal ills, still uncured, to still
graver external ones. Adolf Hitler, rising to stormy political
victory on a surge of angry oratory and the bitter despair of six
million unemployed and thirty million underfed, became the
ruler of Germany. His aims, shrilly enunciated for fourteen
passionate years, were the repudiation of the Peace Treaties and
the establishment of a greater Reich that should dominate the
Europe which had humiliated her. He was a man of hate, who
hated the French, hated the Jews, hated his own rivals and pre-
decessors in hatred, the Bolshevists. He hated everything which
opposed the interests and destiny of Germany and, as he always
identified himself with Germany, by implication every one who
barred his path.

Apart from an instinctive dislike for the man's manners and
methods, the British people were not at first interested in Hitler.
That they might themselves be among the causes, though as yet
not amongst the immediate objects, of his vituperative fury
never struck them. At the time of the Armistice, when almost
every family in the land was mourning some relative and when
many haxsh and bitter things had long been said and done, they
had not unnaturally responded to a hasty request from their
politicians for a mandate to rebuild Europe by telling them to
hang the Kaiser and squeeze the German lemon till the pips
squeaked. After that, being heartily tired of foreigners and their
. problems, they had turned their backs on- the Continent and,
immersing themselves in their own affairs, left their politicians
and publicists to reshape Europe as they chose.

Their brief spasm of ill-humour had soon passed. With tern-