This book re-examines the widely held view, that the National Government in Britain was culpable for the Second World War because it failed to recognize and resist the German menace when this could have been done without war. It relies on recently released primary documents which show more intimately than ever before, the men of the time, and their feelings and motives. The author asserts that the root of the great calamity was the abandonment, even by Great Britain itself, of free trade principles in favor of protection and other more extreme forms of economic nationalism. Played upon skillfully by the Continental dictators, what was in essence an economic crisis was transmuted into a political one which no merely economic measures could solve.