to throw back in defeat Hindenburg's supreme effort to break through. It entered the new year with the President's message on war aims which, in the words of an English journalist, was worth a dozen army corps and a regiment of angels to the democrats of Western Europe.

British labor also entered the new year with freshly girded strength. Nothing would have been worse than for the British people to have come into the weeks of strain throughout the spring and early summer of 1918 with the purposes of the war as fogged as they had been the year preceding. It is not too much to say that, while the bloody gains of the German drive in France were strengthening the grip of the Prussian imperialists upon Germany, the British labor offensive proved a counter force for coherence and endurance at home. In its own statement of war aims and in the statement it elicited from the British government, at the close of 1917, it gave the common people afresh the democratic issues that had fired them in those earlier days of trial in 1914. So doing, like the American president, British labor gave them to the common people of all the Allies.

Meeting in London in February, 1918, representatives of labor and socialist groups in England, France, Italy and Belgium (Rumanian, South Slav and South African delegations sitting in) accepted in substance the war aims put out by British labor in December; called on socialist and labor groups in the central powers to match this declaration; projected a consultative conference with them while the war was on if the conditions laid down were met; endorsed plans for an international labor conference to sit concurrently with the official peace conference whenever held; and called for a labor representative on each national delegation to the latter.

Thus, the early winter months of 1917-18, which marked the turn of the tide in Allied unity in waging war and in democratic statesmanship, witnessed three steps in the deliberate execution of the British labor offensive.

Their first step was to get unanimity on war aims among the labor bodies of Great Britain; their second to bank up majority and minority labor groups among the Allies behind a common program; their third to outflank the trench deadlocks and diplomatic inhibitions that for four years had isolated the working classes of Europe, and to get their conception of an unimperialistic settlement before the workers of the Central Empires. In so doing they sought to find out for themselves first-hand whether or not they might help open a way to a peace which would not only be safe for democracy, but democracy's own.

The succeeding chapters in this section (Part I) will interpret the slow crystallization of working class opinion in England first in the Labour Party and then in the Trades Union Congress which, in 1917, had led up to the first of these steps. Succeeding sections will interpret the later steps (Part II]; the deep-seated forces which impelled them in the political (Part III) and economic (Part IV] life of Great Britain; labor's share in the swift events of 1918, leading up to the armistice and the end of the war (Part V]; and the presage inherent in these things of British labor's part in the new epoch of reconstruction [Part VI).

CHAPTER II

THE NEW MAJORITY IN THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

If we go back but a year, we find the British Labour Party not at all taking the initiative in the matter of labor diplomacy, but rather hanging back. In January, 1917, its convention at Manchester voted against participating in an international conference as promoted by the Stockholm committee. In March, 1917, its executive turned down an invitation from the French Socialist Party for a conference of Allied socialists in Paris; in May, 1917, it turned down invitations to consultations arranged by the DutchScandinavian committee in Stockholm. It did not respond to the announcement shortly thereafter that the Russian Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies had decided to issue invitations "to the socialist and labor parties of all nations to a conference, with a view to securing the adoption of a general working class policy" other than to appoint a committee to visit Russia, which never set sail.

Meanwhile, Arthur Henderson, then a member in the British War Cabinet and one of the labor leaders at that time opposed to an international conference, had proceeded to Petrograd on a government mission, in the course of which he met the executive of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council and spoke to them in his capacity as secretary of the Labour Party. It was made clear to him that, whether the British workers participated or not, an attempt would be made by the Russian workers to hold the conference. \Out of his experience in Russia, Henderson came to believe that unless negotiations for a constructive peace were associated in the minds of the Russian people with their provisional government, it would crumble—as it later did; he felt that many confused ideas were current in Russia as to the aims for which his fellow countrymen were continuing the struggle; that such a conference would clear them up; and that it would be "highly inadvisable and perhaps dangerous for the Russian representatives to meet representatives from enemy and neutral countries alone.” On the other hand, he made it equally clear that British labor could only join in the plan if it were turned from an obligatory conference to a consultation for the purpose of exchanging views.

I made it as plain as I was capable of doing that if a conference was held in which we participated there could be no question of negotiating peace terms. I pointed out that the socialists and labor parties in this and other countries were not yet the nation, and that the only people who were responsible for negotiating actual peace terms were the governments of the respective countries, for upon them rested, on behalf of the people, the entire responsibility.

—This paragraph is quoted from Henderson's report to a special party conference held in London in August, 1917, which followed consultations between Russian and British labor leaders in London, and Russian, British and French labor leaders in Paris, at which the British reconsidered their decision to stay out of the conference; and on the other hand, its non-binding character was agreed to by the others. On Henderson's recommendation and by a vote of 1,846,000 to 550,000, the British Labour Party approved the amended plan.

The parting of the ways came at a special conference held by the party at Central Hall, Westminster, London, on August 10, 1917, when by the majority of 1,296,000 the membership sustained the executive in its resolution:

That the invitation of the international conference at Stockholm be accepted on condition that the conference be consultative and not mandatory.

Preliminary canvasses, according to the London Times, indicated that the vote of the miners would carry the decision one way or another; "while the miners' decision was, in turn, believed to be largely dependent on the statement which Arthur Henderson, M.P., labor's representative on the War Cabinet, would make."

Henderson's speech carried the miners, and in the afternoon the resolution came before the conference on motion of representatives of two of the most powerful trade union groups of Great Britain, W. C. Robinson of the textile workers moving it, W. Carter of the miners seconding. The attack came from the right, when J. Sexton of the Liverpool Dock Labourers (47,000 members) moved an amendment that:

While agreeing that he (Henderson) was actuated by a sincere desire to serve the best interests of the British democracy, no case had been made out for the appointment of delegates to the Stockholm or any other conference which would include delegates from enemy countries. There were times, he said, when loyalty to an executive, particularly in a case like this, meant treason to the rank and file. To go to

Stockholm, he concluded, was to meet men who had not repudiated the brutality of their masters, men whose hands were red with the blood of Capt. Fryatt, Nurse Cavell and the crew of the Belgian Prince. When they had repudiated these crimes, and not before, his objection to meeting them would be gone.

His attack was supported by Henderson's fellow labor members of the ministry—G. N. Barnes (Minister of Pensions), who shortly supplanted Henderson as a member of the War Cabinet, and who denounced the proposal of a consultative conference as a distinction between Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum; and George Roberts, M.P., then secretary of the Board of Trade, to whose mind Henderson's speech was little more than an endeavor to "take a scenic photograph through a Scotch mist.”

Said Barnes:

I say that if you go there you will go to discuss with the Germans and the Russians, and with the Dutch-Scandinavians as a makeweight, or a make-believe, with no other purpose than to vote for peace on any terms. ... It is a matter as between tweedledum and tweedledee whether you are there in a consultative conference or a mandatory one. It seems to me the difference is very small and if you go at all you will be in the same position whether it is one or the other. The main fact is that if you decide to go there you will be going there to discuss terms of peace. Is this the time to discuss terms of peace in that manner? (Cries of “Yes” and "No.") I think it is not. Whatever are the ostensible purposes of the conference, you will be drawn into a discussion of the formula “No indemnities and no annexations.” Do not let us be misled by phrases. This war will end in a way that will be determined by the relative strength of parties at the end of it, and if we end this war now the Germans will decide for you what is meant by “no indemnities and no annexations." I decline to be led away by any such phrase-mongering. I believe that the only way of ending this war is the way in which our boys at the front are trying to end it.

Said Roberts:

The Stockholm Conference would be the greatest embarrassment to those who were seeking to bring order out of chaos in Russia. What M. Kerensky and his government needed now was to be left alone. The Stockholm Conference would only sow further dissension and play into the hands of the greatest enemies of law and order in Russia. As to misrepresentations of British views and perversion of the British cause in Russia, parts of their own movement were responsible for it as much as anything. The conference would be futile unless it included representatives of American labor. Mr. Gompers and his colleagues had scented the futility of the thing,