My Reason For Writing This Book

During the fateful summer of I938 I began writing a book in an effort to come to terms in my own mind and heart with the mounting disorder in our Western society. I was living in Paris at the time, and I had learned that the decision had been taken which was soon to lead Mr. Chamberlain and Monsieur Daladier to Munich. Little hope remained that another world war could be averted except by abject surrender, and yet there was no sure pros­pect that France and Great Britain would be able to with­stand the onslaught that was coming.
They were unpre­pared, their people were divided and demoralized. The Americans were far away, were determined to be neutral, and were unarmed. I was filled with foreboding that the nations of the Atlantic Community would not prove equal to the challenge, and that, if they failed, we should lose our great traditions of civility,1 the liberties Western man had won for himself after centuries of struggle and which were now threatened by the rising tide of barbarity..
I began writing, impelled by the need to make more intelligible to myself the alarming failure of the Western liberal democracies to cope with the realities of this cen­tury. I had done a draft of the book when the fall of France naade it evident that we, too, must soon be en­gaged and, moreover, engaged alone if the Battle of Brit­ain was lost..

But at this time the American people were as unpre­pared in their minds as in their military establishment. Could the democracies be rallied, could they be collected and' nerved for the ordeal so that they would be equal to this mortal challenge? They had the superior assets. They had the numbers, the resources, the influence. But did they have the insight, the discipline to persevere, and the resolution to go through with it? Though they had the means, did they also have the will, and did they still know how? A second world war was making up out of the ruins and the failures of the first, and there was nothing to show that the Western democratic governments were in control of their affairs and capable of making the necessary decisions. They were reacting to events and they were not governing them. Could they avoid defeat and conquest without an exhaustion which would rend the fabric of Western society, without enormities of suffering which would alienate the masses of the people, and with­out resorting to measures of violence which might be­come inexpiable? They were so very late, and they were becoming engaged in they knew not what. They had re­fused to take in what they saw, they had refused to be­lieve what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope.

It did not come easily to one who, like myself, had known the soft air of the world before the wars to recognize and acknowledge the sickness of the Western liberal democracies. Yet as we were being drawn unready and unarmed into the second of the great wars, there was no denying, it seemed to me, that there is a deep dis­order in our society which comes not from the machina­tions of our enemies and from the adversities of the human condition but from within ourselves. I was one of a large company who felt that way. Never doubting that the utmost resistance was imperative and that defeat would be irreparable and intolerable, they were a com­pany who knew in their hearts that by total war our world could not be made safe for democracy nor for the four freedoms. We were, I had come to see, not wounded but sick, and because we were failing to bring order and peace to the world, we were beset by those who believed they have been chosen to succeed us.