Poles of all kinds, and they have possibly spoken to me with
less reserve than to yourself. I hope therefore I may, without
impertinence, submit to you the reflections which follow.
20. In handling the publicity side of the Katyn affair we
have been constrained by the urgent need for cordial relations
with the Soviet Government to appear to appraise the evidence
with more hesitation and lenience than we should do in forming
a common-sense judgment on events occurring in normal times or
in the ordinary course of our private lives; we have been obliged
to appear to distort the normal and healthy operation of our
intellectual and moral judgments; we have been obliged to give
undue prominence to the tactlessness or impulsiveness of Poles,
to restrain the Poles from putting their ease clearly before
the public, to discourage any attempt by the public and the press
to probe the ug1y story to the bottom. In general we have been
obliged to deflect attention from possibilities which in the
ordinary affairs of life would cry to high heaven for elucidation,
and to withhold the full measure of solicitude which, in other
circumstances, would be shown to acquaintances situated as a
large number of Poles now are. We have in fact perforce used
the good name of England like the murderers used the little conifers
to cover up a massacre; and in view of the immense importance
of an appearance of allied unity and of the heroic resistance
of Russia to Germany, few will think that any other course would
have been wise or right.
21. This dislocation between our public attitude and our private
feelings we may know to be deliberate and inevitable; but at
the same time we may perhaps wonder whether, by representing
to others something less than the whole truth so far as we know
it, and something less than the probabilities so far as they
seem to us probable, we are not incurring a risk of what--not
to put a fine point on it might darken our vision and take the
edge off our moral sensibility. If so, how is %this risk to be
avoided?
22. At first sight it seems that nothing less appropriate
to a political despatch than a discourse upon morals can be imagined;
but yet, as we look at the changing nature of the international
world of to-day, it seems that morals and international politics
are becoming more and more closely involved with each other.
This proposition has important consequences; but since it is
not universally accepted I hope the following remarks in support
of it are not out of place.
23. Nobody doubts that morals now enter into the domestic
politics of the United Kingdom, but it was not always so. There
was a time when the acts of the Government in London were less
often the fruit of consultation and compromise in the general
interests of all than of the ascendancy of one class or group
of citizens who had been temporarily successful in the domestic
arena. It was realisation of the interdependence of all classes
and groups of the population of England, Scotland and Wales which
discouraged the play of intestine power-politics and set the
welfare of all above the advantage of the strong. Similar causes
are producing similar results in the relations of States to each
other. "During the last four centuries of our modern era,"
writes Professor Pollard, "the last word in political organisation
has been the nation; but now that the world is being unified
by science and culture" the conception of the nation state
as the largest group in which human beings are organically associated
with each other is being superseded by the conception of a larger,
it may be of a European, or indeed of a world-wide unity; and
"the nation is taking its place as the bridge, the half-way
house, between the individual and the human family.
Europe, and indeed the world, are in process of integrating
themselves, and "the men and women of Britain," as
you said at Maryland, "are alive to the fact that they live
in one world with their neighbours". This being so, it would
be strange if the same movement towards the coalescence of smaller
into larger groups which brought about the infiltration of morals
into domestic polities were not also now bringing about the infiltration
of morals into international polities. This, in fact, it seems
to many of us is exactly what is happening, and is why, as the
late Mr. Headlam Morley said, "what in the international
sphere is morally indefensible generally turns out in the long
run to have been politically inept."
It is surely the ease that many of the political troubles
of neighbouring countries and some of our own have in 'the past
arisen because they and we were incapable of seeing this or unwilling
to admit it.
24. If, then, morals have become involved with international
polities, if it be the case that a monstrous crime has been committed
by a foreign Government--albeit a friendly one--and that we,
for however valid reasons, have been obliged to behave as if
the deed was not theirs, may it not be that we now stand in danger