India Office                        
 
                         Whitehall                          
 
                   3Oth September, 1941.                    
 
                 My dear Mr. Myron Taylor:                  
 
                                                            
 
 
 It was a great pleasure seeing you at lunch today and I only  
wish we could have had time for a longer talk.  
There were two things in particular which you said which I  
wish we could have had time to elaborate further in discussion. One was what  
you told me of Salazar's statement that we have to reckon with a fundamental  
social and economic revolution in Europe. I think that is true and there   
seems to me a real danger that in combating the evil forces that have been   
let loose in connection with that revolution, and which threaten to destroy al  
all that we have built up over 2,000 years, we should overlook the fact that t  
there are constructive elements in that revolution of permanent value, and e  
perhaps even necessary if democracy is to survive. After all, while we   
rightly fought the excesses of the French revolution and the aggression of  
Napoleon,  
there was much underlying the former that we absorbed into our political   
system here and that Europe needed, in the subsequent half century. The under  
lying essence it seems to me of the European revolution is the more organic  
 conception of society and the realization that politics cannot be separated  
 from economics, but that a certain measure of State interference with indiv  
idual economic freedom is essential to preserve real freedom for the masses  
, for whom political freedom without economic security or hope is a mockery.  
 But once that identity of political and economic life is admitted then we h  
ave abandoned the old free trade idea of an international world in which ind  
ividuals trade and invest regardless of national boundaries. The unit of int  
ernational trade in fact becomes not the individual but the nation. That in   
turn brings out the fact that in the world of today there is no real equalit  
y, political or economic, between units of wholly different dimensions. Ther  
e is no real hope of any sort of tolerable freedom for the little State whos  
e capital can be bombed in 20 minutes by a neighhour, whose home market and   
resources are inadequate to any decent self-containe. life, while its trade   
is entirely at the mercy of much more powerful factors. The only chance for   
such a smaller unit is to get into a group with others so as to attain in co  
mbination, whether by customs unions or, what is much easier, by mutual pref  
                 is for its economic life.                  
 
                                                            
 
 
That brings me to the other interesting subject you raised, namely that of y  
our talk with Briand and his schemes for European economic unity. I cannot h  
elp believing that the only hope of