Thank God, there is one thing which unites the great masses of men and women of all nations, whether in peace or in war; and that is a tender concern for children. When Nature fails there, and children are deliberately sacrificed to satisfy the ambitions of men, the end of the world will come, even though all the guns be cast into the midst of the sea, for the belief in immortality, which is implicit in the love of men and women for children, will have given place to a calculating materialism in which the be-all and end-all is self. And selfishness is of the very essence of corruption.
CHAPTER XI
CONCERNING THE JEWS
“I hear you are going to Georgia,” said Mr. Macdonald to me as we sipped our coffee in the hotel breakfast room one morning in Geneva. I had heard nothing about an expedition to Georgia and expressed my surprise. “Well, I happen to know that arrangements are on foot for a delegation from the Second International to visit that country and that we shall be amongst those invited to go. Will you accept?” he continued, lighting his pipe and rising to go.
My first impulse was to say no. I had been home from Russia barely four months. Anything remotely connected with the Russia I had seen had not the faintest attraction for me, and the Caucasus was only recently a part of the great Russian Empire, and enjoyed an independence of doubtful quality and stability. Apart from all that, the journey was frightening, not because of its dangers, which were real but not known, but because of its fatigues, which were numerous and foreseen.
When Tseretelli, the handsome and distinguished Georgian who represents his country in Paris so ably, and whose revolutionary career during the old regime in Russia included several years of solitary confinement, approached me with a cordial invitation to visit his country, instead of refusing I took a day on the hills on the French side of Geneva to think about it and promised a definite answer on the following day.
A Polish fellow-delegate, K. Czapsritski, came with me, and I told him of the scheme. He neither spoke nor understood English, and my German was negligible; but we contrived to understand each other in a curious mixture of French and German. When I spoke of the Georgian enterprise he waxed suddenly warm and eloquent.
“Why don’t you come to Poland, comrade? You go everywhere—to Petrograd, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Geneva, but never to Warsaw or Cracow. Why not? We need you in Poland more than they need you in Tiflis. Surely Poland has as good a claim as Georgia?” I had praised the hills by which we were surrounded. “We have beautiful mountains in Poland, far more beautiful than these,” he said, waving his arm in the direction of the Alps, shimmering in the mists of a summer morning. “Our mountains are wild and solemn. And very, very beautiful”—his voice grew tender. “Come to Poland and read Heine in the Polish hills.” I had brought a copy of Heine’s shorter poems with me, and we had read them together at a wayside inn where we called for coffee. I shall remember that little inn for another reason, not so happy. The last time I saw my friend Mary MacArthur in the flesh was when she flashed past that tiny inn in her automobile, on her way to Italy in a restless search for health, never found.
“But the Labour Party has already sent a delegation to Poland along with other Socialist nationals, Mr. Tom Shaw, M.P.——”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, “it is true. But we want more to come. We want a woman to come. We should like you to come. Our condition is very bad. We need help and we need understanding. We think the world does not like us very much.”
“But why do you say that? Some of us are inclined to think that Poland is the spoilt darling of the Entente. Surely France, at least, likes you very much!” I said, with a quizzical look at his dark, rather heavy good-natured Jewish face. He appeared to be a well-educated specimen of his race with the broad forehead and developed cranium of so many intellectual Jews. He was certainly very widely read in Polish, French and German literature.