CHAPTER X

TWO-EDGED: SWORD OR PLOUGHSHARE

TURN now, from platform to procedure. In the first place, Allied labor believed the principles in its platform were worth fighting for. That was the first edge of the labor blade. Against the Prussian embodiment of conquest, of punitive indemnities and subjugated peoples, they would have been found resisting with the last ounce of blood and brawn, had other elements in the community been willing to sacrifice the East for the West, and throw the war at cost of the principles for which they were fighting. In this sense, we have the paradox that by their peace aims, the workers made it essentially their war. In February, 1915, a conference of Socialist and Labour Parties of the Allied nations had recited the wrongs to Belgium and Poland and declared that “throughout all Europe from Alsace-Lorraine to the Balkans, those populations that have been annexed by force shall receive the right freely to dispose of themselves.” Three years to a month later, the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference in London reaffirmed that labor was "inflexibly resolved to fight until victory is achieved to accomplish their task of liberation.”

Vorwärts did not make the mistake of those reactionaries who attacked Henderson as a defeatist. Vorwärts charged that he "preaches the aim of reconciliation, but does so raising the fist of enduring readiness for war.” Renaudel, the French majority leader, was quoted as saying in the spring of 1918 that it brooked little should Germany yield the provinces wrested from France in 1870 if half a dozen new Alsace-Lorraines were set up in the East. Said Vandervelde at London, in words which forecast the impending German drive:

We are meeting in very serious times. At the time this conference assembled, it was stated in the newspapers that all the forces of imperial Germany were to be thrown against Paris. On that very day we also learned that the Russian revolution, overcome by the weight of its own miseries, and its own mistakes, had resigned itself to the signing of peace with the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. We cannot ignore what the Bolshevikists have done to discredit their own country and international socialism, but we must not for

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get, on the other hand, what the Russian revolution has done for internationalism and socialism. In the splendor of its first triumph, it proclaimed those principles which, adopted by President Wilson, will form the basis of the democratic peace of to-morrow.

But we have more to do than to congratulate ourselves on the achievement of the Russian revolution; we must also draw lessons from its failures. The great lesson is that democracy was committing an irretrievable mistake by throwing away its arms before imperialism had been defeated. Whilst holding the olive branch in one hand, we have to hold the sword in the other. We have been forced to take up the sword as the only means of defense. We must not forget that if we are able to assemble here, it is because the British navy holds the seas, and the millions of allied soldiers maintain the line. If the German offensive were to succeed the resolutions we pass would be mere "scraps of paper” and of no more value than the bank notes of the Russian state bank. If our soldiers are able to throw back the attack with which we are threatened, we shall have the glorious opportunity of taking a leading part in the effort that can then be made to attain a just and democratic peace.

To Vandervelde, beside him on the platform, Ramsay MacDonald said in his speech at Nottingham in January:

We can assure him that however we may differ in some things, there is no difference between him and us regarding national selfdetermination; no difference between him and us that Belgium must be free and independent. If we made peace to-day without that, peace would be false, and in two or three years militarism would raise its head more devilish than ever before.

This edge of the British-Allied labor blade was driven home in April, 1918, as part of the general marshaling of Allied arms to meet the shock of the German drive toward Amiens and Paris. The executive committee of the British Labour Party that month passed this resolution:

Resolved, that the National Executive of the Labour Party places on record its deep sense of gratitude for, and admiration of, the heroic resistance offered by our armies in the field to the terrible onslaughts of the enemy during the recent offensive. Such magnificent courage and resolution--so consistent with the best British traditions-imposes an imperative obligation upon all sections of the country to assist by their skill. energy or substance, to carry on the great work of liberation in which our armies are engaged in order that our joint efforts may eventually result in the final overthrow of militarism and secure for the world a lasting and democratic peace.

With the development of implements of warfare, from crossbow to gunpowder, from gunpowder to high explosives, to airplanes and submarines, it is not strange that modern labor should have set out to improve upon the ancient anvils on which swords were laboriously pounded into ploughshares, and to fashion an implement which could serve both purposes at once; two-edged: sword or ploughshare.

The Inter-Allied labor meeting in 1915 had resolved to resist any attempt to transform this defensive war into a war of conquest, which would only prepare fresh conflicts, create new grievances and subject various peoples more than ever to the double plague of armaments and wars. In the three years intervening, the workers had marked the grasping of French imperialists after the left bank of the Rhine; they had learned of the claims of Italy for the East shore of the Adriatic, for Smyrna and what not; they had learned, through the Russian exposures, of the secret treaties for the parcelling out of the Turkish Empire, and underlined not only the booty for the Mediterranean Allies and the Czar, but those paragraphs where “Great Britain obtains”; they had seen the jingo press from Allied countries circulated in Germany by Pan-Germans, as part of the junker propaganda to convince the German people that theirs was a war against annihilation.

So in 1918 the Allied workers did more than reaffirm their resolve to resist the transformation of a defensive war into a war of conquest. They "condemned the aims of conquest of Italian imperialists,” they "condemned the imperialist aims of governments and capitalists who would make of ... territories now dominated by the Turkish hordes merely instruments either of exploitation or militarism"; they disclaimed any intention to "pursue the political and economic crushing of Germany''; they disclaimed as a war aim “dismemberment of Austria-Hungary or its deprivation of economic access to the sea"; declared against "all the projects now being prepared by imperialists and capitalists, not in any one country but in most countries,” for an economic "war after the war.” But they did more than resist and denounce; they came forward with a series of affirmative proposals, whose reasonableness and freedom from imperialistic taint they believed must awaken response from such chords of democratic feeling as might persist in Central Europe. They set out to press for a joint statement from the Allied governments to match the statement British labor had elicited from the Premier and to match the 14 points through which President Wilson had not only spoken for the United States, but voiced the democratic aspirations of inarticulate forces for democracy among all the Allies. More, pending such a joint

pronouncement on the part of the Allied governments, they forged their labor weapon to the same end, and in the British labor offensive, we had a two-edged implement whose blade clove at once for war and peace.

To labor's mind, the principles in their platform were not only worth fighting for; they were worth pressing home with all the moral and political force they could muster. By the issuance of the Inter-Allied platform they sought to turn the hard pan of German official control and reach the soil of working class opinion beneath. It was the proposal of an interbelligerent labor meeting, safeguarded, while the war was on, that was the ploughshare edge of their blade.

The New Republic in publishing the London memorandum in full as a supplement on March 23, 1918, put the tactic in a nutshell:

Just as the labor and socialist parties of the western Allies have succeeded, where their governments have failed, in reaching, a common statement of war aims, so the labor and socialist parties of the whole world may reach a similar agreement in spite of the chasm which still divides the belligerent governments.

But here, again, we can turn to outside English witnesses of standing. At the opening of the London Conference (February, 1918) the London Times chronicled the British labor offensive in all but the same words as employed in Chapter II, which at the time they were published in The Survey (March 9, 1918) were denounced in some quarters in America as a perversion of the facts. The Times began:

The present conference of labor and Socialist parties representing the Allied countries is evidently guided by skilful hands. They have gone to work in a methodical and purposeful way, very different from the crude and impetuous attempt to hold a general international meeting at Stockholm last summer. It is clear now that if the meeting then proposed had been held it would have been a Babel of discordant voices expressing irreconcilable views in diverse tongues and with extreme heat. ... The project fell through at the outset because no preliminary agreement could be reached in this country among the intended delegates. The problem of overcoming this initial difficulty has occupied the best heads among them during the ensuing six months, and substantial progress has been made along a very laborious road. ...

Of the whole procedure, the Manchester Guardian of February

25 said:

It is a sound and practical program and it is to be hoped that none of the Allied governments will raise any objection to its being carried out. It ought, on the contrary, to be welcomed by all.

While the conference was on, the London Daily News held that the importance of the agreement there is every prospect of attaining at the present conference can hardly be over-rated. ...

There are certain services to the world which only democracy can render. No appeal, no warning, no menace from the British government, or the French, or even the American, will detach a single German democrat from his allegiance to the Kaiser. If German democracy is to be kept true, or made true, to democratic principle, it must be by the establishment of a frank understanding with the democracies of England and Italy and America and France. If Russia is to be saved even yet from the cataclysmic disasters that threaten her, it can only be as she establishes with western democracy relations she will never countenance with western governments.

In discussing the project of an international labor conference, the London Times called attention to points which "must be given consideration,” such as that enemy labor might "return specious answers” which would have to be "carefully scrutinized before going further.” Nonetheless, this is what The Times said of the procedure which was determined upon and which, if this British journal closely identified with the administration found worth fair discussion, would seem at least to have warranted a fair hearing from American labor bodies:

Let us, therefore, suppose again that the Allied labor declaration of war aims is brought to the notice of the corresponding bodies in the enemy countries. The first object is to extract an answer from them which will show their real position, and if that agrees in any measure with the Allied labor views, then to proceed further with negotiations and attempt the international meeting. The eventual object appears to be to convince the enemy labor representatives that they have been deceived by their own government and that no intention of crushing or ruining them is cherished on this side; that what we are fighting against is German “militarism” and the gospel of force which it represents.

That is a fair and proper object which has been pursued by President Wilson and others; and not only have the labor organizations a right to pursue it too, but they can in some respects do so more effectively than statesmen or governments.

Arthur Henderson, in speaking at the closing luncheon at London, said: