continuation for a single day of the present war for the purpose of obtaining any objects aimed at by any of the secret treaties or agreements which are not in accord with the fourteen propositions of President Wilson or the Memorandum on War Aims.

Next came the passages lifted from the statement of the British delegation summing up the results of the 'diplomacy of democracy":

The Conference, taking note of the declarations and replies made to the Memorandum on War Aims of 20th-24th February by the labor and Socialist movements of the several countries in alliance with the Central Powers,

1. Expresses its satisfaction with the replies of the Bulgarian and Hungarian Socialist, and the German Social Democratic party of Austria, in so far as they accept the decisions of the London Conference as the basis of discussion at an international meeting; and

2. Expresses its deep regret that the reply of the German Majority-though their published letter expresses their willingness to attend an international-does not accept the London proposals, and fails officially to accept even the neutrals' proposals as a basis of discussion. So long as these points remain unanswered they create an obstacle to the holding of an international conference.

The Conference directs that the commission to be appointed for this purpose shall, as soon as may be possible, draft and forward replies through the press and other channels to the labor and Socialist parties whose replies indicate a willingness to discuss the situation on the agreed basis, pointing out that the difficulty in the way of an immediate international meeting is that the German response does not fulfill the conditions laid down by the Conference of 20th-24th February, and urging them to use their influence to get the German attitude changed, and also to send a considered reply to the German Majority. . . .

Here again the majority leadership was in for an attack from the French left. Longuet protested emphatically against the phrase that the non-acceptance of the London memorandum by the German majority was an obstacle to the holding of an international conference. He favored an unconditional meeting with German labor, stating that France had already 1,700,000 dead, and that protraction of the war meant extermination. But on the vote to change the wording from "obstacle" to "difficulty," only twenty-five votes were registered for the change. To quote the London Times:

Mr. Henderson said the memorandum demanded reparation for Belgium. Would M. Longuet show them a single word from the German Government or the Majority Socialists accepting that condition? Had the condition been fulfilled in regard to Alsace-Lorraine, which they decided was a question not of territorial adjustment, but of right? M. Longuet wanted an unconditional conference. He

could have it, but he would have it without British labor. (Cheers.) British labor was not going to defend German Socialism and sacrifice world democracy. They declared on February 14, 1915, and at every conference they had held since, that a victory for Germany would mean the destruction of democracy and the annihilation of liberty.

GOMPERS GOES DOWN WITH THE EXTREME RIGHT

It was then that the attack shifted to the extreme right; and Gompers struck at that element in the Allied labor procedure which he had opposed throughout the year. He moved an amendment:

That we will meet in conference with those only of the Central Powers who are in open revolt against their autocratic governments. Again to quote the London Times:

He said he hoped to live to see the day when the workmen of all nations would refuse not only to take up arms, but to manufacture them, and by this means make war impossible. (Cheers.) He had not lost faith in the Internationale, but to end the struggle now would mean the breaking out of a new war as soon as the autocratic governments could get their machinery to work again.

Gompers was voted down, as decisively as had been Longuet, 63 to 26 (the Canadians and Italian Trade Unionists voting with the A. F. of L. delegation). The majority of 63 included the full British, French, Belgian, Serbian and Greek delegations and three votes cast by the Italian Socialists. W. J. Bowen announced that if another conference were held during the war to which delegates from enemy countries were to be admitted the representatives of the A. F. of L. would not take part. However, the American Federation agreed to be represented in the new bureau appointed by the conference to carry out its policy and to draft replies to the parties of the Central Powers.

The touchstone of the whole inter-belligerent conference procedure had been the old question of passports, which dated back to the initial refusal of the governments at the time of the Stockholm meetings. Not only had the Inter-Allied Conference in February been balked in sending delegates to America, and later the British Trades Union Congress; but Henderson and Bowerman had been held up in going to France, and the Dutch Socialist Troelstra had been prevented from coming to England in June to report to the Allied labor leaders on the position of the German Socialists toward the war aims memorandum. In these things, Havelock Wilson and the Sailors' Union had been partners to the obstruction. Official

copies of Allied labor's war aims memorandum had been held up in transit by both the British and the German governments. The Derby Trades Union Congress had passed a vigorous protest as to passports and the French Confederation had gone further and threatened strike action if labor were continually thwarted. The American delegates abstaining, the inter-Allied conference adopted the following, 57 to 10

The conference, in view of the refusal of the governments to afford passport facilities to the properly elected representatives of organized labor, condemns the policy of the governments, and declares that the continuance of such policy is bound to lead to an acceptance of the government's challenge by the organized labor

movement.

The conference warns the governments that the patience of the organized working people is rapidly becoming exhausted by the continued affronts which are thus offered.

The resolutions were carried paragraph by paragraph throughout, voting being by nationality, the American, British and French delegates being allotted 20 votes, the allotments to other delegations being proportionately smaller. The conference reached virtually unanimous decisions, Allied and American joined, upon (1) the Austrian peace proposals, (2) Russian intervention and (3) war aims.

It was a saying of Poor Richard that if one "would have a thing well done, go; if not, send." In the winter and spring of 1918, Gompers sent, and the information brought back by the American labor delegation which visited England at the expense of the British government, was of a distorted sort, both in fact and in prophecy. Their chairman described Henderson and his group as weak-kneed in the war and political parasites and what not. The efforts of the American labor mission to wean them from heresy failed; the group of pro-war Socialists posted off to try their hand, but with very similar results and very similar prophecies.

Then Gompers himself went.

If, as it was freely circulated in the American press, his mission was to bring back Henderson's head on a platter,-if his coming was to set up a trade union rival to the British Labour Party, split off from it the great Trades Union Congress in their joint war-aims program, and set up a purely trade union inter-Allied body to take the place of the inter-Allied Socialist and Labour Conferenceif these things were the purposes of his trip (as they were the subject of the confident prophecies), it was a complete failure. In the

last chapter we saw how these separatist movements fizzled. Gompers brought home two old silver plates, the gift of British labor, but Henderson's head was on neither.

But in a larger and finer sense, Gompers' trip was a success. A convinced opponent to socialism and to political action, he is, none the less, out of a lifetime's experience in adjusting difficulties between labor bodies, used to dealing with organized realities. And the British labor movement is an organized reality. Gompers was big enough to deal with it as it is and not as it had been painted. At the American-Allied meeting, New World labor joined with Old in reaffirming opposition in the field to Prussian militarism. Old World labor joined with New in reaffirming belief in President Wilson's statement. New World labor joined with Old in subscribing to the Allied labor war aims. Old World labor subscribed to the industrial charter offered by the American Federation of Labor. Old and new united in reaffirming the American labor proposals as to labor representation at the time of settlement. When it came to the issue of the inter-belligerent conference, the two parted and went their ways.

That question, after all, was one of tactics-tactics which were rendered out of date within a month by governmental exchanges across the war that were as bitterly attacked in some quarters as labor's attempts had been; but tactics whose influence in provoking democratic risings among the German and Austrian and Bulgarian workers only the future historian will be able adequately to appraise. Once on the ground, Gompers split with British labor on the subject of tactics, but joined with it on the broad program for an unimperialistic peace which was common to both and to the American President. Said Gompers on the floor at the AmericanAllied Labour and Socialist Conference in London, September, 1918:

It has been said in Germany that I came to Europe to squelch the flame of revolt among the workers of England. I have been in England now three weeks and I have not seen the flame. I have only seen a spark here and there, far removed from the torch that is burning in the hands of British labor, and the labor of France, to carry on until we have the liberty to live our own lives.

CHAPTER XXIII

DEMOCRACY COMES TO THE TEST

THE opening day of the American-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference in London, [September 18, 1918] word came of the Austrian peace note.

Within a week of its closing session, at which President Wilson's 14 points became in a new sense the common platform of these workers of the New World and the Old, the President responded, in his Liberty Loan address, to the "assemblies and associations" of "plain workaday people," with a declaration as to five elements which must go into a democratic peace-elements that had been stressed by the Labour and Socialist Conferences of February and September. Within the month President Wilson's 14 points of January 8 and his five of September 27, became the basis of the appeal for peace of the new German chancellor.

Swiftly, in those autumn weeks of 1918, democracy scored its double triumph. The stuff of that triumph was compounded of military force and political ideas. From the English Channel to the River Jordan, its armies drove victoriously at the forces of super-militarism. From Berlin and Vienna and Constantinople, the capitals of autocracy sent word that they accepted the terms set forth by the elected American President.

Here in the United States we had seen less clearly perhaps than had democrats in England and France what distinctly new strength America brought into the Allied front in addition to what was reënforcing. Men, money, ships, supplies-these things they had employed before, these things mixed with courage and high resolve and the fighting capacity of the liberty loving peoples of Britain and France, of Belgium and Italy, Greece, Serbia and the rest. With two million men transported overseas, and with divisions, corps and armies in the thick of the great battles from the channel to Switzerland, we of the United States are stirred that American help turned the scales when that help was most sorely needed.

But the American President brought into the conflict still another force. He set going a moral and political drive. It remained for Woodrow Wilson to parallel the military with a diplomatic offensive.