Foreign News: Cream-Puff Plea

• Share

Eighteen assorted British bigwigs, men like Montagu Norman, John Masefield, Lord Derby last week sent a cream-puff plea to Adolf Hitler to keep the peace of Europe, just as Handsome Adolf was about to say what he was going to do to Europe next.

"War under modern conditions between highly organized States can bring no good," the manifesto declared. "We appeal above all to the leaders and people in the Great German Reich at this moment of power and influence in their history. We appeal to them to use those great gifts by which they have for centuries enriched our common heritage ... to join with us in a supreme effort to lay the spectre of war." A good idea of the impression this kind of amiable but useless talk makes on the dictators was presented in a cartoon printed in the Glasgow Daily Record & Mail. John Bull, in a phrenologist's parlor run by Hitler and Mussolini, was having his head examined.