to do everything possible to further the reestablishment of 
 
peace, and to prevent the spread of the present war. Mussolini 
 
again interjected to say that this again was entirely true.
 
He said that he had done everything possible to avert the 
 
and that if he had not in fact desired with all his 
 
heart to bring about the reestablishment of a "good" peace,
 
two hundred millions of additional human beings in the
 
Mediterranean and in Africa would now be engaged in the
 
present hostilities.
 
     I then said that to answer his inquiry as best I could
 
within the limitations set forth, I had gained the conviction
 
everywhere I had gone that the basic and fundamental demand 
 
was for security; not a fictitious and illusory security, but 
 
a security based upon real disarmament, upon the abolition 
 
of types of offensive armaments and, above all, upon the 
 
dispelling of that nightmare by which peoples were
 
oppressed namely the ever present possibility of the
 
bombardment from the air of civilian populations and the 
 
slaughter of defenceless women and children. 
 
     It was the kind of security which would make small
 
nations free from the threat of aggression or of conquest; and
 
all nations, large and small, able, because of their freedom
 
from menace and through disarmament, to dedicate themselves
 
to the sadly-needed task of economic and financial reconstuction.
 
         I said that in our last conversation the Duce indicated to 
 
me his own belief that the territorial and political 
 
readadjustments required in order to insure a durable peace 
 
in Europe were the reconstruction of a free and independent 
 
Poland with access to the sea; the restoration of their 
 
liberties to the Czech people, although with the proviso that
 
the Czech State should not again become a militarized state,
 
and the retention within the German Reich of Austria, with the
 
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