Supposing I had gone to the country [in 1933], and said that Germany was re-arming, and that we must re-arm, does anybody think that this pacific democracy would have rallied to that cry at that moment? I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain... we got from the country [in 1935], with a large majority, a mandate for doing a thing no one, twelve months earlier, would have believed possible.

Baldwin answering Winston Churchill in the House of Commons (12 November 1936), as quoted in Churchill: A Study in Failure 1900-1939 (1970) by Robert Rhodes James, p. 268