A POLITICAL PILGRIM IN EUROPE
CHAPTER I
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, JANUARY, 1919
“How infinitely little is the best that we can do, and how infinitely important it is that we should do it!”
To begin a new book with an old quotation is bad; but it must be forgiven because it expresses in a phrase the sentiment upon which the whole of my public life has been built, and it explains in a sentence the object and purpose of those wanderings in many lands of my colleagues and myself about which I have engaged to write.
Nothing less than a clear understanding on the part of the critical observer that they held very strongly the belief, old-fashioned it may be, that “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” is strength ordained, can save from the charge of madness or of folly the plunge of twelve members of the British Labour Movement, with a bright hope in their hearts, into the maelstrom of Europe and of European politics in January of 1919.
Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Secretary of the National Labour Party, had made strenuous efforts during the later days of the war, and after his return from Russia, to open a door to international understanding and possible reconciliation by trying to obtain from the British Government permission for representatives of British Labour to attend an international Socialist conference at Stockholm, but without success. Time alone will prove the folly of the Government’s refusal. It is sufficient here to remind the reader that a deep and widespread desire for some attempt at an honourable peace by understanding had existed in Great Britain for nearly two years before the end of the war came. A working women’s organization, the Women’s Peace Crusade, collected in a few weeks nearly 60,000 signatures to a petition for a negotiated peace; and at 133 public meetings addressed in less than a year by myself, with an average attendance of 1,000 persons, was carried a resolution on similar lines, with fewer than thirty dissentients in all. These were small things in themselves, but symptomatic.
So great was the anguish and concern at the time of the Stockholm proposal that a great Conservative London newspaper headed one of its daily leaders with the words: “Hands off the Socialists!”
Whatever may have been the reason for the Government’s refusal to allow British workmen to meet the workmen of other lands at Stockholm, whether on account of French pressure, which was said, or through fear of impairing the moral of the soldiers, which was inferred, they withdrew their opposition after the Armistice, and in January of 1919 we left for Berne and the Second International.
I have the most vivid recollection of that first journey to Europe after the war, probably because it was the first. I think that every delegate felt the same, a revival of faith, a renewal of hope, a quickening of life. For months before the sudden end of the war, acute sadness and cruel pessimism had possessed us all. Ten, twenty, thirty years, the best that life held, had been devoted by one or the other to the building of a better humanity, and this destruction of everything we had worked for, this swift rattling back to the beginning of things, and to worse than the beginning in some ways, was at times too tragic to be borne. But before the opening of new opportunities pessimism promised to fly and hope to return and stay.
“Isn’t it glorious!” shouted Margaret Bondfield to her colleagues as we shot swiftly into Folkestone station.