This Conference was not so large as the International. There were several of the Socialists present; but, generally speaking, the Congress was different in its personnel and in the character of those present. It was more bourgeois in appearance. I do not say that with the intention of reflecting upon its quality in any offensive way. I have not the hatred of the bourgeois because he is a bourgeois, which animates some Socialists. I am not sure, indeed, what the word means precisely in the mouths of some people I know. As used by many it appears to mean a man who wears a clean collar and cuts his hair short; or a woman who speaks in a soft voice and wears a pretty dress. With such persons, educated manners, courtesy in debate, destroy a Socialist’s bona fides; whilst well-cut finger nails and a pair of white cuffs positively mark him down as a “social traitor.” I am not joking. I am stating a literal fact. With these solemn idiots the bourgeois is a man who keeps his family respectable and goes to church on Sunday. He is a man who retains some affection for the old-fashioned virtues of industry and thrift. There is, for them, a bourgeois morality, a bourgeois mentality, a bourgeois faith. Radek writes of the necessity of destroying the bourgeois institutions of religion, the family and private property. Lenin jeers at the bourgeois idea of liberty. To be middle-class is to be bourgeois, even if you have to work hard for a living. To take a pride in clean table-linen is bourgeois. To delight in a daily bath is bourgeois. And to be bourgeois is to be condemned by this class of “superior” person in Socialist circles. It is all so very silly—and so very young!
The delegates to the League of Nations Conference were in the main professional people, lawyers, professors, doctors, teachers, journalists. One or two were aristocratically connected—Count Max Montgelas, for instance—and there were two or three generals. But the same features marked this Conference as the other. The German and the Austrian delegates looked hungry and ill-nourished. All that I have said of the German Socialists—the dry grey skin stretched tightly over the bones, the bloodshot eyes, the pale lips, the thin nervous hands—was true of the men and women who confronted me as I spoke on that glorious March morning. It was a very pitiful sight and told eloquently of what the German people had had to endure up to the time their rulers fled before the indignant revolutionaries.
I was very happy to have arrived in time to give the greetings from the two organizations I represented, the National Peace Council and the Union of Democratic Control, and to be able to promise them the presence in a few days of my two colleagues, Miss Joan Fry and Mrs. Charles Roden Buxton.
Miss Joan Fry is one of the daughters of the late Sir Edward Fry. She is an active member of the Society of Friends. She came to the Conference to testify to her foreign friends of the same religious persuasion as herself the solidarity with themselves of the like-minded women and men of Great Britain. She made several speeches of deep spiritual power which were well received by the delegates.
Mrs. Charles Roden Buxton, the daughter of the late Professor Jebb, is also a Quaker. She has two very lovely children whom she adores, and the knowledge of Europe’s suffering children moved her to come to Berne, not only to attend the Conference, but to see what might be done immediately to send aid to the little sufferers in Vienna. During the weeks we were in Switzerland, she and I (but chiefly she) did what we could to start an international organization for child relief. It was a difficult piece of work. The Swiss were apt to be afraid of doing anything which would seem to violate the principle of neutrality, although I am sure they never faltered in their desire to help. The Austrians were incapable, through suffering, of very energetic co-operation. The French were intransigeant at the time. Also, it was very difficult to avoid falling into the hands of the selfish and unscrupulous, never deterred from their habit of exploitation by the thought of the poor people they were robbing. We were warned of this man and that woman. This man was buying in a certain expensive market for reasons of his own; that woman was taking a fat commission for securing contracts for goods to be bought with our funds!
The Vienna children were dying for lack of fats. Mrs. Buxton determined to send them a truck load of cod-liver oil at once, preserved milk and milk chocolate to follow. She pledged the greater part of her private fortune in order that its going might be expedited. It is almost inconceivable how many difficulties were placed in the way of its going by the authorities, in spite of the generous act of Mrs. Buxton which satisfied the business interests. Endless delays for no obvious reason; endless calls on dilatory officials; endless pleadings with suspicious legations; endless regulations to be subscribed to, and finally the probability that it would never arrive at its destination. A military guard had to be provided to go with the train. Incredible though it may seem, at that time, and even now, not only goods travelling by train but whole trucks, down to the wheels and the buffers, have entirely vanished during transit, and not a rivet or a plank has been traced. How it is done is a matter of wild conjecture. But no valuable stores were ever sent by train in that part of Europe without a strong military guard.
Out of Mrs. Buxton’s noble efforts in Switzerland and those of her devoted sister in England, Miss Eglantyne Jebb, has evolved the Save the Children Fund, the British branch of which alone under the chairmanship of Lord Weardale has, since its inception, raised nearly one million pounds of English money for the relief of child-life in the famine areas of Europe. The fund does not itself administer, but allots to Relief Organizations already in existence if satisfied with their work and their workers. Its great hope and desire is to continue in existence after the pressing needs created by the war have been met; to unite, not only in this country but all over the world, so as to prevent waste and overlapping and to get the maximum of efficiency out of the workers, the organizations of all kinds connected with the nurture and protection of children in all lands. I am neither a prophet nor the child of a prophet, but I venture to think that when the history of these times comes to be written, the work of the Save the Children Fund will be regarded as one of the redeeming features of a situation otherwise black and wellnigh hopeless.
The other bright gleam on the dark sky-line of European politics in these years will be the Society of Friends. The Quakers have done infinite things for the relief of distress in Europe. A gallant young soldier told me of the strength he received whenever he saw set up on a hut somewhere in France, “Société des Amis.” In every big city and in countless little villages of Europe their work has been quietly and persistently carried on, without noise and self-advertisement, with no looking for praise, and no expectation of reward. It began with the war. It has been carried on during the peace. Many workers have died of their labours, poisoned with typhus germs or collapsed from overwork. Hundreds of thousands of sufferers will live to bless them, who would have died but for their work. Countless little children have been saved alive or preserved from stunted manhood or womanhood through them. Their selfless devotion has softened the cruel impressions made by the war. Their presence amongst the defeated has saved from utter hate and despair many of those who pictured the foe to themselves as wholly given up to revenge. To the Friends must be given the credit for the preservation of such little faith and idealism as may still be left in Europe.
The purpose of this Conference as of the other was the creation of machinery which should aid in the preservation of international peace. It was met to give support in particular to the League of Nations idea. It sought to suggest such points for the Charter issued from Paris as would make of the League of Nations a real and vital thing. Without going into the discussions at great length it may be briefly stated that the Conference recommended the inclusion of all nations within the League, all-round disarmament consistent with the preservation of internal order, and a thoroughly democratic organization. The Peace had not yet been concluded, so that the delegates were not influenced in their conclusions by the astounding deviations from the Fourteen Points which that peace was so soon to reveal. They were in the mood of wishing to join all nations in an effort to put together the pieces of a broken and suffering Europe. And they believed in President Wilson.