Personal and Private                    
 
                       6th June 1944                        
 
                   My dear Myron Taylor,                    
 
                                                            
 
 
 I received your letter of May 22nd a few days ago in which you   
wondered how far the views I had put to you in previous letters had been   
modified or expanded owing to the events of the war or the lapse of time   
itself. I have accordingly refreshed my memory with copies of these   
letters and am interested to find how little I should be inclined to   
          change any of their general conclusions.          
 
                                                            
 
 
  As regards the European situation I still believe that the   
right ultimate solution is some sort of loose Federation or Commonwealth   
of the main body of i European nations west of the Russian frontier. In   
such a Commonwealth a chastened and regenerated Germany must obviously   
play her part, and that is why I am all against long term punishment and   
all in favor of drastic punishments, economic and territorial, to be   
carried out at the moment of victory. A good deal of that will be looked   
after by those who have been the victims of German oppression, as well as   
by internal trouble in Germany itself. But I would not, for instance, wait   
for any peace treaty before expelling the German population of East Prussia  
 and other districts which are to go to Poland, and beginning to colonize   
hem with the Poles whom Russia is I gather willing to releas
 
                                                            
 
 
 I fully realise that the conception of a European   
Commonwealth, which Churchill and almost every speaker in the recent House   
of Commons debate have blessed, may not be very palatable to the Russians,   
and there maybe an initial stage in which we maybe mainly concerned in   
bringing together the states of Western Europe and letting them form a   
nucleus of the future European Union. But that should  
be only a transitory stage and should not be allowed, by  
the consistent exclusion or depression of Germany, to drive  
her into Russia's arms. The Russian system expanding to  
the Rhine might very well become a menace to Western civi-  
lization such as Mackinder has envisaged in his book. in any case I still   
feel as strongly as ever that neither this country, nor Russia nor the   
United States, could, for varying reasons, become actual members of a   
European Commonwealth though concerned actively in facilitating and   
sponcsoring it during the early years of its growth. You will find the   
    argument on this developed in a recent lecture by...