CHAPTER VIII THE INTER-ALLIED CONFERENCE AT LONDON On the opening day of the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference in London (February 20, 1918), J. W. Ogden, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the British Trades Union Congress, presided. The gathering, he said, was unique in the history of the labor movement—the first occasion on which the workers had unitedly evinced a determination to take a dominating part in the issues of war and peace; and for justification: Our initial declaration that, whatever may have been the causes of the outbreak of the war, it is clear that the peoples of Europe who are necessarily the chief sufferers from its horrors had themselves no hand in it, is a truth so insistent and indisputable that we are justified in putting the strongest possible emphasis on the statement. The London Times in its news report put the case from another and less sympathetic angle: Whatever else may be uncertain, there can be no doubt that those who have called to-day's meeting are determined to strain every nerve in the effort to secure a settlement of the war by the intervention of what are, after all, only sections of the nations. This London conference of February, 1918, according to the official statement issued at its closing session, consisted of the following delegations: The members of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress and of the National Executive of the Labour Party; representatives of the Italian Socialist Union and the Italian Official Socialists; representatives of the Confédération Général du Travail and of the French Socialist Party; and representatives of the Belgian Labour Party. There were also present consultative delegates from South Africa, Rumania, and the South Slav organizations. Messages were read from organizations in New Zealand, Portugal, South Africa, Rumania and from the Social Revolutionary Party in Russia, endorsing the British labor memorandum ou war aims. Camille Huysmans (secretary of the International Socialist Bureau) read a telegram sent to the French Socialist Party by Roussanoff, Soukhomline, and Erlich, on behalf of the Menshevik section of the Russian Social Democratic Party and the Russian Social Revolutionary Party, intimating that these sections of the Russian Socialist movement had appointed delegates to attend the Inter-Allied Conference. The Bolshevist government, however, had refused passports to the delegations, and the message recorded their emphatic protest against this measure. Incidentally, the concluding sentence supplied an interesting footnote to the attempt, currently made in the United States, to identify the proceedings at London with the Bolsheviki and the Brest-Litovsk" negotiations. There were present at London, however, representatives of the Italian Official Socialists, whose national officers, Lazzari and Bombacci, were in March, 1918, sentenced to prison for issuing circulars in November, December and January. In these they had urged, according to the Rome dispatches, “every possible opposition to war," and upheld “their Russian comrades." Their defence was that they considered themselves bound by the International Socialist Congress at Basel in 1912, and “that it was their duty to remain apart from the war and do everything they could to secure peace.” At London, also, the French minority socialists had equal representation with the French majority (numerically the names had become a misfit) in the united French delegation; but the Kienthalians (the extreme left) were not represented. But to set up the inference that the London conference was only a new front for the extremists is as beside the mark as were the efforts to characterize the suffrage movement in its earlier stages by the positions taken on marriage by some of the more pronounced feminists; or to identify the Lincoln Republicans with the abolitionists in the campaign of eighteen-sixty. The engineers of the British labor offensive set the gauge of their movement broad enough to draw into their affirmative program and procedure, elements which until then had been largely negative in their attitude towards the war, together with the larger groups which had been consistently for the war. To do less than that would have been to defeat the very purpose of the movement, namely, to afford a constructive sluice-way for all the springs of working-class unrest and aspiration among the western democracies and turn them into a constructive force. It was this affirmative program and procedure which, as such, united them and became the object of their support. That labor should seek unity in things essential, in things not essential, liberty; is one of the most characteristic of Henderson's phrases. It was the spirit of the conferer.ce leadership—letting the defeatists, on the one extreme, and the chauvinists, on the other, go their ways apart, while proceeding deliberately with the majority program, backed up by the center and the strong intermediate elements toward right and left. The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, commenting on the success of the February conference to get together, where that of August had failed, pointed out that platform and procedure were the result of a “distinct will for unity." Early in the meeting, Canepa for the Italian reformist group reported that they were ready to agree with the British memorandum with very slight amendments and that they had had conferences with the Jugo-Slavs as a result of which a considerable measure of agreement had been disclosed-a statement foreshadowing the later official approachment between the Italian government and the Jugo-Slavs. Albert Thomas, who as minister of munitions earlier in the war is credited with having done for France what Lloyd George did for England in speeding up the production of war material, toured England following the London conference, speaking on platforms with members of the cabinet and others in behalf of Anglo-French understanding and unity. He stood for the same thing in the conference of the workers. At the opening session he reported that never had there been such a "healthy and unanimous collaboration between the Socialist Party and the Federation of Labor in France as now." “The French Socialist Party in their National Council had registered agreement in such a majority that it might be described as practically unanimous.” And at the closing luncheon, the London Times quoted him as saying that the conference had done what the governments and the old traditional diplomacy had refused to do. It had never hesitated to face difficulties and differences, even on delicate questions. It had been able to deal with the question of the colonies, although that vitally affected certain British interests. The delegates had also been able to discuss frankly and fully the war aims of Italy. They had not hesitated, as governments had done, to support the claims of oppressed nationalities, and they had given a definite reply to the appeal of the southern Slavs. The governments were concerning themselves with propaganda in Germany. Lord Northcliffe had been placed in charge of this work here. If he was to be well advised he would not rely exclusively on the help of business men, scientists, or newspaper men, but would turn to the representatives of the working classes. Then he would receive sound advice on the best method of speaking to the German people. |