Our newspapers are under a conventional obligation to be optimistic at the beginning of every year. But honesty makes it hard for them to respect this obligation; and some of them, while recognizing that things are not as good as they might be, tell us that we-the government and the people of this country-can make them as good as they ought to be. The Times, echoing Matthew Arnold and William Pitt (without acknowledgement) exhorts England to spread sweetness and light and to save herself by her exertions, and Europe by her example. The Daily Express, which has a circulation of more than four million, is peremptory: “War should be repudiated It should be utterly dismissed from the thoughts of the public… war will have no place in the policies which Britain will pursue… Armaments should be reduced to the utmost extent… let the demand for arms be limited to the minimum that Britain requires for safety.” Arms must not be used for “warning to some potentially hostile land.”
The past Christmas is said (perhaps rightly) to have been the most cheerful since-since when? Nobody knows exactly, but in any case it was the most cheerful Christmas we have had since some unspecified Christmas before the war. The public is in a rather fatalistic mood, but, on the whole, cheerfully so. It is hard to say whether there is any general dissatisfaction with the Government. But among Conservatives-especially among those who do not hold office but are well informed (and even a few who do hold office, though not perhaps the highest)-there is deepening dissatisfaction.
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