In my first Address from this chair I chose as my subject ‘The Foundations of British Policy’, in the belief that its study is more than ever incumbent upon ourselves and upon the succeeding generation, and that neglect and incomprehension are among the major causes of the most devastating war in all our history. And if it is an urgent duty, in the interests of future peace, to study and discuss the workings of our own policy, it follows that we must also clear our minds as to the underlying motives of other Powers, both friendly and hostile. The price that we have all had to pay for neglect of German history is even to-day not yet fully understood. But to the plain man Russian policy, with its many shifts of extreme violence, is even more mysterious. Thus the events which brought us together in 1941, in an alliance of twenty years for which there is no precedent, ought to be, nay are, the personal concern of every one of us. These events, the result of Hitler's supreme blunder in invading Russia, represent a rebound from unreasoning isolation and appeasement to a policy first of guarantees, then of increasingly effective intervention, and finally of unswerving ‘jusqu'au-bout-isme’. Are we to assume that that unconventional alliance was merely dictated by passing necessity and is in gradual dissolution, or alternately that it rests upon a solidarity of interests which far outbids ideological aims?