of the League over Manchuria, he called repeatedly for "a League within the League", of nations pledged to uphold international law and oppose aggression. "Since the War," he wrote in 1933, "British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble." Having read Mein Kampf in the unexpurgated original and taken its threats as a statement of intent, he urged in September 1933 that Nazi Germany be prevented from re-arming. "Versailles was monstrous", he wrote in The Week-end Review, "but one thing surely comes first: Germany must not be allowed to re-arm. How prevent it? By an international police-force? It would be ideal. Unfortunately it does not exist. The French have urged it. We in our muddle-headedness want neither it nor the alternative – war. Are we prepared to see France do its work instead and take action in Germany? – or are we going to sit sanctimoniously on the fence, disapproving, but secretly relieved? I devoutly hope the first. Germany must not re-arm; even if the French had to invade it once every five years, that would be better than the alternative." This letter struck some readers as "brutal", and marked him as a hard-liner. The pro-appeasement Times refused to publish him after 1935 (he described the Editor's office as "an annexe of the German embassy"); and when he condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the democracies' inadequate response, he received abusive and threatening replies from Fascists, including one from Ezra Pound (he put Pound's letter on display at the Cambridge Anti-Fascist Exhibition). In the years following he varied his arguments, but not their message. A hatred of war, he urged in 1936, "can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries 'peace' where there is none." By 1937 the emphasis was on the dishonesty of British policy: "We have not kept agreements we made; we have made agreements we should not; we have tried to cheat our way to security, and now the security proves a cheat. We have forgotten the wisdom which says that since we cannot foresee where any road will lead in the end, we should stick to the straight and honest one." Despite the prevailing pacifism of the time – and he exchanged views with "passive pacifists" in the correspondence-columns – such sentiments struck a chord. "This is the voice of the England I love," wrote a