This letter struck some readers as "brutal", and marked him as a hard-liner. The pro-appeasement "Times" refused to publish him after 1935 (he described the Editor's office as "an annexe of the German embassy"); and when he condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the democracies' inadequate response, he received abusive and threatening replies from Fascists, including one from Ezra Pound (he put Pound's letter on display at the Cambridge Anti-Fascist Exhibition). In the years following he varied his arguments, but not their message. A hatred of war, he urged in 1936, "can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries ‘peace’ where there is none." By 1937 the emphasis was on the dishonesty of British policy: "We have not kept agreements we made; we have made agreements we should not; we have tried to cheat our way to security, and now the security proves a cheat. We have forgotten the wisdom which says that since we cannot foresee where any road will lead in the end, we should stick to the straight and honest one." Despite the prevailing pacifism of the time – and he exchanged views with "passive pacifists" in the correspondence-columns – such sentiments struck a chord. "This is the voice of the England I love," wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, "and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich."