Our Threatened Values

"An hour before I sat down to write this essay I read extracts from a speech made the previous evening by Field-marshal Viscount Montgomery. "The German food-cuts have come to stay,’’ he is reported to have said. "We will keep them at 1,000 calories (Britons get 2,800). They gave the inmates of Belsen only 800.’’ These words reveal—they could not have revealed more clearly if they had been spoken for the purpose— the moral crisis with which western civilisation is faced."