Politics & Power Quote by Neville Chamberlain

Chamberlain is trying to launder a hard pivot into war as something nobler than geopolitics. The line refuses the blunt truth - that Britain is about to stake blood and treasure on a place many citizens could not locate on a map - and replaces it with an elevated, morally portable rationale: principles. Its rhetorical force comes from that substitution. A "distant city" sounds like imperial overreach or continental entanglement; "principles" sounds like duty.

The wording does double work. "Not for the political future" signals a deliberate break from old-style balance-of-power justifications, the kind that had helped march Europe into World War I. Chamberlain frames the coming fight as preventative, almost hygienic: if these principles are destroyed, the very "possibility" of peace collapses. That is an argument designed for a public still haunted by the Great War and wary of being dragged into another. He is selling war as the only path back to peace, a paradox made palatable by the word "possibility", which implies Britain is rescuing the future itself rather than choosing a battlefield.

Context sharpens the stakes. Spoken by the architect of appeasement, this is also self-revision. Chamberlain had been willing to bargain over territory; now he insists the issue was never territory at all, but the rule set that keeps small states from being swallowed. The subtext is a late, urgent attempt to unify a reluctant nation: if security is global, sacrifice must be collective. Even his uncertainty shows - he cannot promise peace, only the chance of it - but he turns that fragility into a moral imperative.