The Spanish Civil War - pg. 110

The plicy of appeasement was not Neville Chamberlain's
invention. Its roots lay in a fear of Bolshevism. The general
strike of 1926 and the depression made the possibility of
revolution a very real concern to conservative politicians. As
a result they had mixed feelings towards the German and Italian
regimes which had crushed the communists and the socialists
in their own countries. Much of the electorate also held anti-militarist
sentiments in their own countries after the First World War and
feelings of guilt about the Allies' humiliation of Germany at the
Treaty of Versailles. The British population, moreover, knew little
of events abroad. As the British minister in Berlin, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick,
wrote later, the country 'could not be expected to take an enlightened
view of the situation when the government had done nothing to inform it.'