FURTHER to Alan Cure, P R Addison and all the other correspondents, who regularly describe my views as somehow unpatriotic, In A Short History of the World, H G Wells said the following about the British people:

"The English reader must not take the possibility of an end of British world-ascendancy too much to heart. We held it for a term of years and we made a poor use of it. We did some fine and liberal things but not enough of them to justify our leadership.

"We English must now, in a phase of comparative adversity, prepare to recognise a fact we would never have accepted in our days of Disraelian and Kiplingesque euphoria, the fact that the ideal destiny of man is towards equality and unity throughout the earth."

May I also remind them that the great 18th Century English writer Dr Johnson said: "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

L SPITERI,

Worcester.