A POLITICAL PILGRIM IN EUROPE

Photograph by S. A. Chandler & Co.

A Political Pilgrim
in Europe

BY
Mrs. PHILIP SNOWDEN
Author of “Through Bolshevik Russia”

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1921

To
MY NOBLE AND HEROIC MOTHER

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

In these days everybody is writing his memories. Disappointed politicians decline to be forgotten. Successful and unsuccessful generals refuse to be neglected. People of all sorts and conditions insist on being heard. The most intimate affairs of a life are laid bare in order to arrest public attention. Intolerable to most is the fear that the world will go past him. Nobody will willingly let himself die. This is the conclusion to which one is driven by the publication during the last two years of a vast mass of autobiography.

I am writing my own memoirs—two years of them. It never would have occurred to me unaided that they could be of the slightest interest to anybody. Friends have listened to my stories with interest, and public meetings on several occasions have, by their silence and attention during the telling, shown a certain pleasure in their recital; but only the insistence of a valued few has induced me to put some of them into a book.

These are not the most interesting experiences of my life. The four years of the war could reveal much more, and better, if it were possible to write about those times. I doubt if I could—fully. The big experiences of life are seldom even spoken about, much less put down in black and white. Things happened during the war which are as sacred as the birth of a child or the death of a lover.

The twelve years of agitation for woman suffrage, during which time I addressed more than two hundred public meetings a year in as many different towns, were packed full of incident, grave and gay, which a little quiet thought might dig out of the recesses of the mind. They were gallant days, full of fine friendships.

But these stories of my wanderings in Europe since the Armistice, with no other purpose in view than to do what one person might do, or at least attempt, to restore good feeling between the nations and the normal course of life as quickly as possible, will interest chiefly those who understood, and those honest folk who wondered at, the position which a few of us adopted during the war.

Those who have been brought up to believe, as I was, that war is alien to the spirit and teaching of Christianity, will scarcely blame me for taking that teaching literally. I believed with all the intensity of conviction that evil could not be wholly destroyed by evil. The application of this belief to war was clear: Militarism could not be destroyed by militarism even though the princes of this world declared that it could.

I had read enough history to prove to myself the mad folly of wars. All of which never clouded my apprehension of the fact that war may be an evil and yet, by reason of vicious policies and pledges over a number of years, become the lesser evil of two wrongs in the eyes of many wise and good men and women. To choose between the evil and the good is simple. To decide which of two evil things is the lesser evil is anything but simple. I believed myself to be intensely right. This never meant that the other person was necessarily wrong. I never tried to influence by so much as a hair’s breadth the judgment of the young man called upon to fight. What he did was his business, not mine. If pure-motived, he was entirely honourable whether he chose prison or the front.

I believed from the first hour that the overwhelming majority of those who enlisted for the war and of those who supported the war did so from the best of motives, and from the same idealism which made it impossible for me to believe in its good issue. It was all a matter of method. The young men went to fight for the thing which I believed could not come by fighting. But as a woman, who could not be called upon to go into the trenches, it was peculiarly my business to seek to end the war as soon as possible for the sake of the gallant lads who had no choice consistent with their sense of duty.

During the last year of the war, after Trotsky had proclaimed the terms of a just peace at Brest-Litovsk, after the German Reichstag had embodied the same terms in a resolution passed by an overwhelming majority of its members, after President Wilson in his wonderful speeches and Mr. Lloyd George in his masterly phrases had given the world to understand that these objects were theirs also—self-determination and the rights of small nations, universal disarmament, and the League of Nations for the preservation of peace—I toured the country from Land’s End to John o’ Groats making speeches in favour of a just and lasting peace by negotiation. A moderate estimate places the number of people I spoke to on this topic at not less than 150,000.

I have re-read those speeches, widely reported in the local Press. I can find no word that I would alter, no principle which I would retract, no position stated from which I would withdraw.

In them I gave my reasons for fearing the effect upon Europe and the world of the policy of the knock-out blow. Every one of those prophecies has come true. They are becoming more dismally true every day.

I made it clear that a negotiated peace might not be successful. It might be proved that the peace honourable to all concerned, which was to justify to the immortal spirits of our dead the sacrifice they had made, and make their dreams come true, was not possible by conference. Very well. The loss of young life was so appalling that it ought to be attempted.

I gave the utmost credit for sincerity and honesty to those who differed from me in their views. I paid my full debt of sincere praise to those who fought and died for the right.

No; there is nothing in those speeches to be regretted. And I do not regret them.

I am still profoundly convinced that the war went on two years too long, and two years more than were necessary. Time will prove me right or wrong. I am content to wait.

But I cannot wait, and no patriot in this country can afford to wait, for the Peace to come right. He must begin to make it come right. The imperialists of Europe are poisoning the world. Into the pit which they are digging for one another they are destined to fall themselves, dragging the innocent with them. Russia, Germany, France, England, America—all will go the same way to ruin unless the great awakening comes soon, and men learn that the bonds which unite nations are indissoluble, or are cut by them at their own peril.

It is needful that all should become, if not pilgrims, priests and prophets of peace and good will. It is vital to do so. Communism cannot save mankind if it be imbued, as so far it has been, with the old bad spirit of hate. Capitalism is failing before our eyes. Militarism has failed.

A new conception must be born, or an old vision reborn in the minds and hearts of men. The everlastingness of Love! The indestructibility of Faith! The eternity of Hope!

“Many waters cannot quench Love,
Neither can the floods drown it;
Who shall slay or snare the white dove
Faith, whose very dreams crown it?
Gird it round with Grace and Peace
Deep, warm and pure and soft as sweet sleep.
Many waters cannot quench Love,
Neither can the floods drown it.”

A POLITICAL PILGRIM IN EUROPE

CHAPTER I
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, JANUARY, 1919

“How infinitely little is the best that we can do, and how infinitely important it is that we should do it!”

To begin a new book with an old quotation is bad; but it must be forgiven because it expresses in a phrase the sentiment upon which the whole of my public life has been built, and it explains in a sentence the object and purpose of those wanderings in many lands of my colleagues and myself about which I have engaged to write.

Nothing less than a clear understanding on the part of the critical observer that they held very strongly the belief, old-fashioned it may be, that “out of the mouths of babes and sucklings” is strength ordained, can save from the charge of madness or of folly the plunge of twelve members of the British Labour Movement, with a bright hope in their hearts, into the maelstrom of Europe and of European politics in January of 1919.

Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Secretary of the National Labour Party, had made strenuous efforts during the later days of the war, and after his return from Russia, to open a door to international understanding and possible reconciliation by trying to obtain from the British Government permission for representatives of British Labour to attend an international Socialist conference at Stockholm, but without success. Time alone will prove the folly of the Government’s refusal. It is sufficient here to remind the reader that a deep and widespread desire for some attempt at an honourable peace by understanding had existed in Great Britain for nearly two years before the end of the war came. A working women’s organization, the Women’s Peace Crusade, collected in a few weeks nearly 60,000 signatures to a petition for a negotiated peace; and at 133 public meetings addressed in less than a year by myself, with an average attendance of 1,000 persons, was carried a resolution on similar lines, with fewer than thirty dissentients in all. These were small things in themselves, but symptomatic.

So great was the anguish and concern at the time of the Stockholm proposal that a great Conservative London newspaper headed one of its daily leaders with the words: “Hands off the Socialists!”

Whatever may have been the reason for the Government’s refusal to allow British workmen to meet the workmen of other lands at Stockholm, whether on account of French pressure, which was said, or through fear of impairing the moral of the soldiers, which was inferred, they withdrew their opposition after the Armistice, and in January of 1919 we left for Berne and the Second International.

I have the most vivid recollection of that first journey to Europe after the war, probably because it was the first. I think that every delegate felt the same, a revival of faith, a renewal of hope, a quickening of life. For months before the sudden end of the war, acute sadness and cruel pessimism had possessed us all. Ten, twenty, thirty years, the best that life held, had been devoted by one or the other to the building of a better humanity, and this destruction of everything we had worked for, this swift rattling back to the beginning of things, and to worse than the beginning in some ways, was at times too tragic to be borne. But before the opening of new opportunities pessimism promised to fly and hope to return and stay.

“Isn’t it glorious!” shouted Margaret Bondfield to her colleagues as we shot swiftly into Folkestone station.

“Isn’t what glorious?” I asked, thinking she meant our first view of the sea, stretching black and restless beyond the veil of fine rain which dimmed the windows of the railway carriage.

“Why, that we can travel once more, and that we are flying as fast as we can to see the comrades from whom we have been separated so long.” And she waved her passport gaily. “I wonder if Clara Zetkin will be at the conference; and Balabanova? It is ages since I saw Angelica.”

Margaret’s bright face beamed with happiness, and her brown eyes shone like stars as she gathered up her wraps and bags for transport to the boat. She was like a bird set free from the cruel cage that had held her for four tormenting years. She suggested a warm little bird in her looks and manners. Small and brown, with a rich russet colouring of the cheeks, and quick in her movements, there is nothing in the world she resembles so much as the robin with the red breast.

She was one of the delegates representing the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress. I was a representative of the political side of the Movement. Miss Sophie Sanger was invited to accompany us as interpreter, and was possibly the most practically useful woman of the party. She speaks four languages with equal fluency. What Miss Sanger does not know about the world’s laws regulating labour and labour conditions, especially those affecting women, is said not to be worth knowing; which probably accounts for the fact that she now enjoys an appointment of considerable value and importance in the League of Nations Labour Department.

Mr. Henderson did not travel with us. He had gone ahead several days previously to help M. Huysmans with the final arrangements for the Conference. There had been some slight hitch with the Swiss Government, which at that time was tormented with the fear that we were a body of Bolsheviks out to subvert the loyalty of Swiss citizens. It was necessary to reassure President Ador and his associates on this point. Mr. Henderson was the man to do it. Nobody could look at him, the simple strength and solid respectability of him, and think him a Bolshevik! In spite of assurances given by him, every delegate was obliged to sign a statement repudiating the Bolsheviks and all their works before he was permitted to enter Switzerland!

Mr. J. H. Thomas was also one of the delegates; but whether he was attending a special conference with Mr. Barnes at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris, or whether he was busy settling a strike I cannot remember—strikes were epidemic at this time. He came to Berne later in the week.

The short passage across the Channel was quiet and uneventful. We sat in our deck-chairs well covered with warm wraps. A grey mist soon hid the land from our view. A slight rain moistened our hair and faces. We could not read for excitement and the blowing of the wind. We sat watching our fellow-passengers’ efforts to control their nerves and the busy sailors engaged upon their various tasks.

I do not know why the sentimental confession should be made here, but ever since I was a child chatting to the fishermen on the beach at Redcar I have felt a peculiar liking for the men of the sea. Perhaps it is an inheritance from a seafaring ancestry. It should be in the blood of every Briton. There is something in the brave, blue eyes of the sailor, his jolly frankness, his courage, his simplicity which goes straight to the heart of one. His unending contact with Nature in all her moods has stamped itself upon his being as plainly and unmistakably as the heated atmosphere of the weaving-shed or the smutty environment of the mine have set their mark upon the workers in these places; but in a pleasanter, more wholesome fashion.

In an hour or so we sighted Boulogne. It was raining hard, and the little French town looked very dreary and very dirty. French, British, and Belgian troops in considerable numbers mingled confusingly, the bearded poilu laughingly replying in cockney slang to Tommy’s amusing French. Incredible quantities of war material of all sorts met the eye. The railway track which we crossed from boat to train was a swamp. We had waited till our backs were almost broken with fatigue for the examination of our passports in the smoke-room of the steamer. At that time the element of common sense had not entered in the faintest degree into the organization of this business. Several hundreds of people, packed like sardines in a tin, waited their turn in the crowded ship’s corridor, and as the war had spoilt everybody’s temper and ruined most people’s manners, elbows were freely used to jostle out of their rightful places in the queue the timid and the polite.

A similar rushing, pushing, squeezing, tearing of clothes, wounding of ankles with the sharp edges of boxes, which the owners were too mean to give to the porter or too faithless to trust to him, occurred in the douane. At this time every box was opened and its contents carefully examined. The fatigue was immense. Women fainted and children screamed. Men swore loudly, unashamed. Unperturbed, the blue-uniformed officials pursued their avocation.

Once again an examination of passports, this time by French officials, and again a swaying mass of people in front of the narrow, wooden door, and a hideous scrimmage to enter every time the little French soldier opened it to admit the two or three persons who were permitted to go through at once!

The delegates lost one another in the general confusion. We made a bee-line for the refreshment room as soon as we got through our business, hats awry, hair blown, cheeks flushed with hot air and suppressed fury. Some had lost their umbrellas in the scramble. One missed a good overcoat which he afterwards found. A moderate recovery of spirits and temper followed the appearance on the scene of hot coffee and flaky rolls, the good-natured waitresses smiling a coquettish welcome as we took our seats at the little square tables. Another wave of feeling threatened to overwhelm us when the bill was presented, but this we conquered, and paid up like lords! After all, there were a few food profiteers in England, and it was a little early to complain!

Our indefatigable secretary and comrade, Jim Middleton, had engaged seats for us in the Paris train which left Boulogne two hours after our landing. “Jim,” as he is affectionately and familiarly called by his many friends in the Movement, is one of the rarest souls in the British Labour Party. When the history of the Party comes to be written his name will figure in it very importantly if there is any sense of right and proportion in the historian. What the Labour Party owes already to his selfless and unremitting devotion to the work of its organization can never adequately be estimated or expressed. His is the sort of work which is done quietly, out of the public gaze, with no newspaper advertisement and no clamour of praiseful tongues. But it is there. It is done well and without stint. And it is of the very stuff and fabric of the great machine which Labour is slowly but steadily building for its uses in the struggle for its economic and political emancipation.

Jim is slim and fair as a Norseman. His kind eyes are forget-me-not blue. His blond hair has turned to grey, but he is young. His patience and good nature are inexhaustible. He is never too tired to oblige a friend, and he can always find an excuse for an enemy. He is as good as gold and as true as steel.

So are the other young men on the headquarters staff. There is “little Gillies” as he is everywhere called, whose clear brain and Scottish capacity for hard work have contributed big things to the international side of Labour’s work; and I know no department of future Labour activity more important than the ideas and schemes the Party may develop for the conduct of international relations. By these, even more than by its domestic policy, will Labour government be judged and justified by public opinion.

There is Will Henderson, already a Parliamentary candidate, who will surely follow in his father’s footsteps; Herbert Tracey, excellent writer, full of a fine idealism as well as a practical common sense, who gave rich gifts to the cause until a larger opportunity called him temporarily abroad; Captain Hall, as straight as a die, the Party’s financial secretary; Fred Bramley, the brilliant young under-secretary of the Parliamentary Committee (Trades Congress); E. P. Wake, the very able chief organizer of the Party—but it is impossible to mention them all and the conscientious women who assist them. They are young men of whom any Party is entitled to be proud.

The great strength of the Labour Party lies in the amount of devoted, unpaid work which it is able to command from its members. “But the men you have mentioned are paid good salaries. Why so much praise of men who only do what they are paid to do?” says the carping critic. The query is a common one, and pitifully mean. And it embodies a stupid lie. A few hundred pounds a year is no payment for the work done for the Labour Movement by these admirable servants of the Party from Mr. Arthur Henderson downwards. There are things which cannot be paid for in cash.

We arrived in Paris at seven in the evening. There we stayed several days. We wanted, if possible, a preliminary conversation with certain of the French delegates. We hoped to meet the Belgians. Some of us had designs on the Hôtel Crillon and a possible interview with Colonel House. The Crillon was the headquarters of the American section of the Peace Delegation. Paris, alas! was the ill-chosen seat of the Allies for the Peace Conference. The fate of mankind might have been vastly different had some other centre of discussion been selected.

Paris was likewise a very crowded and uncomfortable city at the time of our visit. Every hotel was full. The enormous staffs of the various national Peace Delegations were a large element in the overcrowding—they, their friends and their visitors. Suppliants to the Conference or to individual members of the Supreme Council were so numerous that hotel accommodation for the ordinary traveller about his simple business scarcely existed; but then the ordinary traveller was not encouraged to travel. A deliberate policy of embarrassment and inconvenience was adopted to persuade him to stay at home; and if he suffered for his wilfulness he had nobody but himself to blame. With a new world in the making, what business abroad had any ordinary person which mattered a tinker’s curse? Thus the official view of affairs.

So that when Miss Bondfield, Miss Sanger, and myself found ourselves without beds, and with no quarters suitable for women to go to, nobody in Paris was surprised. A generous fellow-countryman, hearing of our plight, placed at our disposal his own large and elegant bedroom. There were two beds and a comfortable sofa in it. One of us occupied the sofa for two nights, when we were able to take up our quarters in the Hôtel Moderne overlooking the Place de la Revolution.

Paris immediately after the Armistice was a woeful spectacle of neglect and dirt. It was not much better six months ago. In those early days it was like a handsome slut in need of a bath; which in view of its sufferings was not surprising. The paint on the woodwork of houses and shops was almost all peeled away. Shutters hung awry on their broken hinges. Roads were unspeakably filthy, and full of dangerous holes and swampy gutters. The parks and gardens looked ragged and tattered. The Bois de Boulogne and the Champs Elysées were marred with the shreds and patches of war equipment. Dismal weather made everything look a hundred times worse than it really was. We were wise enough not to come to a hasty judgment about Paris. After all, we had a vast gay literature to contradict the sad story written on Paris when first we saw it!

The living in the hotels and restaurants was riotous and expensive. In the homes of Paris it was another story, we were told. Foods were strictly rationed, but of some kinds it was difficult to get even the meagre portion allowed. The strain was heavy upon the city housewife of the humbler classes. Prices were ruinously high. Wages scarcely kept pace with them. Strikes were frequent and menacing, apt to hold up one or another of the public services at any time, as in England.

But in the public cafés, the dance-halls, and the hotels, nothing dimmed the joyousness of the Parisians, set free at last from the haunting fear of the German invasion. Day and night, and night after night, a lively, exuberant, passionate crowd in each of these public places abandoned itself to an ecstasy of song and dance and play, in utter and unrestrained intoxication.

M. Jean Longuet, the grandson of Karl Marx, and at that time a Deputy in the French Chamber, invited Mr. Macdonald and myself to lunch with him at a little Italian café near his business quarters. We called for him at the office of his newspaper, Le Populaire. On our way all together he took us past the restaurant where Jaurès was shot. He pointed to the window at which Jaurès was sitting at the time of his murder. If I understood him rightly Longuet was present when the awful thing occurred; particularly awful in view of the certainty that the issue of affairs for France might have been infinitely happier, and for Europe infinitely less sorrowful, if this great man had lived during the war.

One of the great scandals of history will be the acquittal of the murderer of Jaurès. He was one of the giant political characters of France. The squalid politicians who govern the affairs of Europe at the present time could never have been where they are if there had not been removed either by force or fraud, or by the ordinary process of nature, death, so many of the great men entitled by intellect or character, sometimes both, to occupy the seats of power. Jaurès was murdered by a common assassin, and official France has seemed to rejoice. But I recall the impressive fact that the most arresting picture in the Chamber of Deputies is the immense canvas of Jaurès addressing the chamber from the tribune. They may have hated him, but they insist on his being remembered!

Jean Longuet was born in London, and speaks excellent English. He is tall and dark, with curly hair and brown eyes. He has a rich voice, and is a very eloquent speaker, full of passion when moved. Friends of his assure me that I may trust his sense of humour, and, in order to present a quick picture of the physical man to an English reader, I may say that when Longuet makes a public oration and warms to his subject he assumes an attitude and appearance which irresistibly remind one of a genius of another sort, Charlie Chaplin. Given Charlie’s creased trousers and big feet, the picture would be complete!

But Longuet is no comic figure in international politics. He is a sincere idealist and a most engaging personality. There are those who would regard this statement as less of a compliment than a comparison with the artist whose amazing gift makes honest fun for millions. This, they say, is much better, and much safer for mankind, than to be the advocate of ideals too lofty for statesmen and people to achieve because too great for them to comprehend; ideals so high that they mean crucifixion for the few who live up to them, and greater degradation for the many who deliberately elect to live below the best they have heard and seen.

The tiny Italian café I sought again on the return trip, but never found it. One delicious dish of macaroni, prepared as only the Italians know how to prepare it, was more pleasing to the taste than all the accumulated delicacies of the best Parisian table d’hôte; for those rich hotel meals were impossible to eat without a thought of the millions who were reputed dead or dying, in fields and ditches, and on roadsides, in their houses, in hospitals, in prison camps, for the lack of a crust of bread or a glass of pure water. Our friend and host of the café we learnt afterwards was a Socialist, and a member of the Party; a fact we had rather inferred from the whispered asides with Longuet during the smoking of cigarettes and the drinking of the wine and coffee.

Our chief business in Paris was to try to persuade the Belgian Socialists to come with us to Berne. They were sitting in conference at Brussels at the time. They had there decided not to attend the Berne Conference, and had sent delegates to Paris to explain the reason why. We met them at the headquarters of the French Socialist Party. All our pleading with them was of no avail. Their conference had so decided, and though they would personally have liked to go, if only for the fellowship of the thing, Party discipline must be maintained. Camille Huysmans would be there as secretary of the International, but they could not go.

Their great difficulty was their unwillingness to meet the German Majority Socialists, who had supported the war and who had not protested against the invasion of Belgium. How could they take part with such men in the building anew of the International? What sort of internationalists had these men proved themselves to be? The German Majority must first express its contrition. Then would be the time to forgive. They could never forget.

“Why do you not come to Berne and say all this to the Germans themselves?” I asked in my speech. “Come and say all you feel about this, where not only the German Majority but the whole world can hear you say it.” I reminded them of the brave and splendid gesture of the Belgian women who came to the International Conference of Women at the Hague while the war was still raging, and who, seated on the right of Miss Jane Addams, with the German women on the left, resolved with them and with the women of all nations represented there to do all in their power to make wars impossible in the future.

“Surely,” I said, “so far as the plain citizens of every country are concerned, we are all in the same boat. We are all far more the victims of circumstance than its architects. We have all been deceived, cheated, lied to. In the clash of various loyalties mistakes are made and cruel things are done and acquiesced in. But is there one of you who, in his heart of hearts, blames any man for taking the part of his country in an international quarrel? Is anyone amongst us quite sure that in the same circumstances we would act otherwise? I refuse to believe that any German Socialist rejoiced over the invasion of Belgium. In any case, is it not better to get face to face and talk it all out, where no false newspaper can come between, and no misunderstanding blind and paralyse, instead of brooding alone over wrongs for which the wrongdoers may be only too ready to atone? Come!”

We left without them. The first meeting of the Second International included no official Belgians. But I left the meeting in Paris with the feeling that the time of complete reunion would come very soon. Eighteen months later in Geneva the Belgians were present, and no more international note was struck in that gathering than the speech of Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Minister of Justice.

We were obliged to travel from Paris to Berne in two parties, and even then were unable to enjoy sleeping compartments. The trains were packed in every available corner, and many of the passengers were obliged to spend the night in the corridor. There had been an immensity of passport business in Paris, but the burden of all this had been borne by the secretary. He could not save us from the individual examination at the Gare de Lyon, nor the ever-recurring nuisance at intervals along the whole route.

Belgarde is the French frontier town, and here we were hauled out of the train for further torture by passport and Customs officers. It was the outrageous imperturbability of these fellows that made me sick. They seemed devoid of all human feeling. At Belgarde we were roughly questioned about our money. Had we any gold? Had we more than £40 in any kind of currency? More than this sum was not allowed to be taken across the frontier. Later no silver was permitted to be transported. My bags were diligently searched by a woman official, but not one cigarette did she find for her pains, nor wine, nor spirits, nor jewels, nor perfumes, nor any one of the half a hundred things they appeared to be on the prowl to discover.

These performances were repeated at Geneva in the Swiss interests; and half a dozen times between Belgarde and Geneva Swiss police examined our unfortunate passports, which were rapidly assuming a limp and dog’s-eared appearance with so much handling. I never inquired, but I imagine these people were the officials of the various cantons through which the train passed. Any other theory would establish the Swiss Government as insane with fear and suspicion. But finally, through sheer weariness of flesh and spirit, I ceased to question the doings of these minions of the law, but quietly submitted to any number of exasperating formalities.

The Paris train arrived in Geneva at 9 in the morning. The connexion for Berne left at 4.10 in the afternoon. We had ample time to see this famous old city, beautifully placed at one end of the great crescent lake of the same name. Mr. Macdonald, like a true and faithful Scot, left us to visit John Knox’s church. Some lingered over the ample breakfast in the comfortable café. The fascinating lake drew the attention of the rest. It was along the side of this lake that my friend—well, I will not disclose his name—was walking, gaily swinging his stout English walking-stick. He knew two words of French, oui and merci. Humming a gay tune and twirling that stick, he struck a man in the face. “Ah, merci!” he cried, meaning “I beg your pardon.” The man stared in blank astonishment, and then said in good, plain English: “I think it is I who ought to cry ‘Mercy,’ young man.”

Snow lay hard and frozen upon the ground, and capped and covered the mountains in the distance. The vast masses of Mont Blanc were visible in the clear, crisp air. Delivered from the cramped and poisonous conditions of a filthy railway carriage, super-heated, we enjoyed blissfully the bright beauty and clean orderliness of this Puritan capital of French Switzerland. And in the evening, when the last rays of the sun had changed into a glowing pink the white of the Alpine snows, we entered upon the last stage of our long and tiresome journey, to begin our labour of reconciliation.

We were met at the Berne railway station by an odd assortment of European Socialists.

“Willkommen, kameraden,” said a little man with a profusion of long sandy hair and an abundant beard. “Es macht uns Vergnügen die Englischen kameraden wieder zu sehen.” (Welcome, comrades. It is a great pleasure to us to see the English comrades once more.)

I gazed fearfully at this amazing group of people, who looked for all the world like a committee of anarchists ripe for an expedition! They were, in fact, the gentlest of human beings and as pacific as Quakers! The man who welcomed us was Kurt Eisner, President of the Bavarian Republic, who was afterwards murdered in the streets of Munich, in part for the attitude he adopted in this Conference. But in his large-brimmed hat and conspirator’s cloak nothing could have saved him from the suspicion of a raw Englishwoman, unused to the manner of dress and style of speech of so many Socialists in European lands. And those who met us were all alike.

“Comment allez vous, camarades,” exclaimed a French-speaking delegate, and I found myself shaking hands with an even more terrifying apostle of the gospel of Karl Marx, whose brilliant red tie would have served for a railway signal!

I recall a conversation I had with M. Renaudel, at that time the editor of L’Humanité, when we travelled together in Georgia eighteen months later.

“Why do you English Socialists never use the word ‘comrade’ in speaking to each other? In France it is always ‘comrade,’ never ‘monsieur,’ except to the bourgeoisie.”

“The word comrade is often used in England also,” I replied. “I rarely use the word myself, and if you want to know why, my reason is very simple. It is a very beautiful word, but it has been frightfully misused and has lost a good deal of its value. I have heard it so often in the mouths of people who have no more comradely feeling for me than a nest of mosquitoes, that it is now no guarantee to me of real friendship. On the contrary, I am suspicious of those who use it most. It is like that even more beautiful word ‘love,’ which has been cheapened and vulgarized by its misuse until now it means exactly nothing on the lips of most. What value would you attach to the love of somebody who in the same breath expressed the same fervent devotion to a jam tart? ‘Comrade’ means nothing. It is a mere form of expression, a hackneyed formulary. I keep this word for those I know to be truly my friends.”

I told Renaudel of an acquaintance of mine, a Trade Union leader who received a post card from an angry fellow unionist, with a skull and cross-bones at the head. “Dear Comrade,” it began, “What do you mean by selling out like you did? You are getting something good for yourself out of this. You are a liar and a scoundrel! You ought to be shot! Just you wait till I catch you out by yourself! Look out for your dirty hide! You filthy dog! Yours fraternally, B. S.”

It was nearly midnight, and we were worn out with the long journey and sleepless night. Soon we were fast asleep between the spotless white sheets of those exquisite beds, happy in the thought of the morrow’s meeting and its possibilities.

CHAPTER II
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL (continued)

The secretariat of the Conference had its headquarters at the Belle Vue Hotel. The Conference itself was held in the Volkshaus, the headquarters of the Socialists. This fine building in the heavy German style comprised within itself an hotel, a theatre, a restaurant, a lecture-hall, and any number of Trade Union committee rooms. The funds for its building were supplied by the members of the Party and the Municipality jointly. If this were the only building of its kind in Switzerland it would be remarkable; but I very much doubt if there are a dozen cities of any size in the whole of Central Europe which have not a similar Labour Temple. Some of these buildings are very fine indeed, and can lay claim to a certain architectural distinction. Their numbers put to shame the British Labour Movement, which has not a single building set apart for the social uses of all its members.

Similarly with their newspapers: The Daily Herald is the only daily newspaper in Great Britain which can claim to represent organized Labour in the slightest degree, and the Daily Herald is not the property of the Labour Party, which has no right to dictate its policy nor control in any way its activities. In Germany alone, before the war, there were more than sixty Socialist dailies.

The necessity of frequent meeting obliged all the British delegates to remove from the charming pension, to which some of their number had gone, to the Belle Vue Hotel. This public palace could tell strange tales if its walls could speak. Some day a writer will appear who will tell the true story of this modern Babel; but he will have to wait until this generation is dead and gone before he publishes it, or else commit suicide when it appears! It housed the most extraordinary medley of princes and peasants, dukes and dockers, ex-kings and Socialist presidents ever collected in one building since the Great War turned the world upside down! In the wake of these illustrious or dangerous personalities crept that indigenous growth of the centre of diplomatic life and political activity, the political agent or spy.

Unaccustomed to the society of this individual I never sought him. Unaware of his existence before the war I never recognized him. He may have spoken to me. It is possible he extracted enough information from me to fill several sheets of a report and earn his squalid wages; but the fear of him never obsessed me. It was painful to observe how suspicious everybody was of everybody else. Nobody dared to speak freely. You realized that your companion, whoever he might be, was making reservations and preparing an escape when he was talking to you. Nervousness showed itself in every gesture, fear in every glance.

To be an object of suspicion oneself is not pleasant. To have to be frightened of everybody else is disgusting. I refused to do it. I would avoid nobody. I would speak to everybody who wanted to speak to me on serious business. I wouldn’t pay any attention to his nationality beyond the inquiry necessary for an intelligent appreciation of his conversation. So far as I was concerned there was nothing to hide. What I felt and thought about the political situation I was prepared to say from a public platform, and did so, not only in this Conference, but later in Zurich, at the Women’s Conference held there in June. I had come to Switzerland on a mission of reconciliation, and it was obvious from the first hour that the personal touch and warm human sympathy were more needed and would be more warmly appreciated than any number of Conference resolutions.

A friend—one of those well-known friends possessed by everybody, who always hasten to tell one the unpleasant things—told me that I was in the reports of the spies of every Legation in the city. “Splendid!” I said. “It will give them something to think about, and will keep them all guessing.”

I made four separate journeys from London to Berne between January and July of 1919. On various occasions during that period I heard a great deal about myself that I had never known before! I was a dangerous Bolshevik! I was a spy of Clemenceau’s! I was a British agent! I was an active pro-German! I was an anti-German pretending to sympathize with Germany! I was aiding and abetting the royalists of the ex-enemy states! I was an anarchist in disguise! I was in the American Secret Service! I was a pro-Turk! I was a friend of Karolyi’s! I was a secret Communist posing as a moderate! I was a pacifist!

Of all these stories only the last was true. And in these days, when I hear pacifists defend the methods of Bolshevism, I want to have a definition of that word before I desire to be classed under it.

Poor little spies! They have to earn their salaries, so this is the sort of thing they say. A chance phrase in their hearing, and you are promptly labelled. You take tea with a charming princess who speaks a little English, and wants to practise on you, and you are in some Royalist plot! You talk to a polished French diplomat with a Scottish ancestry, as I talked with Lieutenant Gilles of the French Embassy, and you must be in the pay of the French! You entertain a sweet English lady who is the very lonely wife of a German attaché and you are a pro-German! You seek knowledge from some authoritative person on one of the thousand questions in which you are interested, not knowing that he is the agent of one Government, and the spy of another Government reports you his confederate!

During our Conference the Swiss police picked up in the streets of Berne a packet of papers in a language which they did not understand—English. Seeing the name of Mr. Arthur Henderson in the context they sent the papers to him. They purported to be a detailed report of one of our private meetings, a tissue of lies from beginning to end, with a pathetic note at the end asking for more money! Mr. Henderson was at first annoyed, as anyone would be who took such things seriously; but he preserved enough of the ironic sense to send the papers with his compliments to the address for which they were intended, the British Legation!

It took my breath away to learn that the staff of every Legation and Embassy in Berne contained scores, even hundreds, of men and women agents, at any rate, before the war when money was not so scarce. In any sphere of life other than those of politics and diplomacy such activities would wear an ugly name. By a general consensus of opinion in diplomatic circles such a system is necessary. So much the worse for a society which requires lying and trickery for its preservation. It is admitted that ninety-nine out of every hundred reports are entirely worthless, often misleading. It is for the hundredth valuable discovery that all this costly machinery is maintained. With the system goes an enormous amount of corruption. Bribes are freely given and taken by surprising people in the most unexpected places.

A young girl from Bohemia came to see me in the Belle Vue Hotel. I invited her to my room where we could talk quietly. Ostensibly she had come about child relief, in which she knew me to be actively interested. But her talk was all of the ex-Emperor Charles, whom she had seen; whose secretary, with the assistance of a British officer whose letter she showed me, had helped her to get into Switzerland. I was distinctly puzzled. What was her game? Was she soliciting British interest in unfortunate ex-royalty? Incredible! Was she trying to make me say something which would result in my being sent out of Switzerland? To this hour I have not the faintest idea. I never saw her again. She was young and very pretty, with brown eyes and fair hair, an English type. If she really were a spy she was an artist in her work, for when I spoke in the clear English which fifteen years of public speaking have developed into a habit, she held up a deprecating hand, answered in a whisper, and looked fearfully round.

“We are quite alone. What is troubling you?” I inquired. “Say anything you wish to say. Nobody will hear you. Nobody knows you are here.”

“It is not so sure,” she said anxiously. “In some of ze bedrooms is ze machine and ze speak is heard. Zey listen to us. Il faut que nous parlons doucement.”

The general conduct of Conferences in Europe differs very greatly from the method in England. Delegates from the four corners of the earth come to an International Conference, and owing to the exigencies of travel, it is quite impossible to assemble them all at exactly one time. They arrive in batches during the two or three days preceding the Conference. But it is equally impossible to waste these days waiting for the late-comers, so the method pursued is to have a preliminary discussion of the questions set down in the agenda. The general feeling of the delegates on a particular topic, the broad divisions of opinion among them are known beforehand in this way, and the form of the final resolutions on the subject made easier of design. The fresh arrivals who join the group take up the discussion where they find it.

When the Conference proper assembles the first thing done after the speech of the chairman and the announcements of the secretary is the division of the delegates into Commissions. Each important subject is delivered over to a Commission, whose duty it is to report in the form of a resolution when a unanimous decision has been reached. Each country represented in the Conference is entitled to be represented on each Commission. The Commissions adjourn each to a separate room, elect a chairman (at this time a neutral), and begin business. The full Conference begins its deliberations with the presentation of the first Commission report.

These Commissions are not committees, as might very well be supposed. They are the Conference in miniature. The speeches are as long and as fervid as if delivered to the full Conference. I was a member of the League of Nations Commission of the Second International, and well remember a speech of great eloquence upon the subject delivered by a Frenchman which lasted for an hour and a half! Then followed two translations, English and German. I never expected to reach the report stage during that week or the next! And there were only twelve members of this Commission.

Delegates may not rise and speak when they wish. It is not the man with the loudest voice or the most aggressive manner, nor the one who is lucky enough to catch the chairman’s eye, who speaks. The would-be orators are taken strictly in their turn. Names are sent up to the chairman, who calls upon each in order, and all are expected to speak from the platform.

Disorderly interruptions are frequent, and sometimes quite terrifying. On this occasion the French and German Majoritaires raged at each other across the heads of the delegates. But then so did the French Majoritaires and their Minoritaires. These last were just as bitter and violent as the first two sections. Similarly with the German and Austrian Majorities and Minorities. When feeling ran high the hall became a veritable bear garden. The one astonishing thing to those of us who expected every minute an ink-bottle or a book to come hurtling across our heads at one or another of the combatants, was that these furious men never came to blows. Infuriate rage and cheerful good humour followed each other with the suddenness and regularity of sunshine and rain in an English April.

But it was all very tiresome to those of us who were more concerned with the future than the past. Just when we were about to settle down, as we thought, to something really constructive, up would jump Albert Thomas, bursting with rage and quivering like a jelly, shaking his long hair and roaring like a mad bull; or Renaudel shrieking in a high-pitched voice like the enraged tenor at Covent Garden when he sees his lady-love in the arms of the villain; provoking the plethoric Wels to an apoplectic fit of frenzy, and the angry Müller to an ironic reply shouted above the heads of the lesser partisans on either side, whose fearful and monotonous yells: “You are guilty! They are guilty! We are not guilty! We are right! You are wrong!” almost made the tops of our heads come off!

Then the English delegate Stuart Bunning stepped quietly up to the platform. He made no brilliant speech. There was no attempt at eloquence. He was just as tired of that as the rest of us. He spoke in an even, level voice, making a few quiet, common-sense observations about the object of our Conference and the need for getting to work. The effect was magical! The storms ceased raging. The Conference quietened down. From that moment the idiotic charges and counter-charges ceased to be made. It was one of the two noteworthy and outstanding events of the Conference.

But the British delegation was the most harmonious in the room. It was not that we had no differences of opinion. We had many differences; and some of them were so deep that several of the delegates preferred not to travel with the rest. But when we got to Berne we kept these differences for the privacy of our own committee room, and endeavoured to present a united front in the conference hall. Only once did something bellicose threaten to develop amongst the Britons. It was when two gallant miners, who had borne with marvellous patience the interminable speeches they couldn’t understand, saw a jolly fight about to begin between two sections of the French. It was too much for them. They would be in at that; and, anyhow, they were sick and tired. Why not have some fun and set the whole Conference going again. “Come on, fellows!” said one of them, leaping to his feet, his ruddy face glowing with pleasure. “Come on, chaps! Let’s have a b——y row!”

A foreign conference is certainly no picnic. It means very hard work for a conscientious delegate. Both commissions and conference sit irregular and interminable hours. There is no stopping at 5 to resume at 10 the next morning as in England. The delegates go on until they finish or as long as they can keep their eyes open. At Berne we were sometimes debating at 2 in the morning. On the other hand unpunctuality is the besetting sin of the Continental. With him 10 o’clock means 11, 1 o’clock, 2 or even 3. To the British this is a maddening vice; but I fear familiarity with it resulted in our embracing it ourselves.

Our first meeting with the Germans took place in the Belle Vue Hotel three days before the Conference proper began. I had anticipated this meeting with curious and painful interest. I knew that some at least of the men we were to meet had opposed the war from the beginning, even voting against the war credits; but it is curious how the separation of two nations by war can affect the consciousness of the individual national. All such feeling of hesitation and reluctance on both sides vanished at the sight of one another, men and women bound by a common aim in indissoluble bonds.

The little group which we approached in the vestibule of the hotel included Herr Kautsky and his wife, and several Austrians I met here for the first time. The physical appearance of all was very touching. Kautsky who was at all times frail and delicate, is now an old man with a fringe of white hair round his smooth and well-developed head. His wife is a clever, dashing woman, full of energy, the antithesis of her less dominating spouse. Both showed in a marked manner the effects of terrible underfeeding. The eyes were red rimmed, and the skin dry and of a yellowish cast. Their faces lit up with pleasure as we greeted them. We asked about their journey, and found that for two days they had travelled in an ice-cold train, with broken windows and tattered upholstery, and with no opportunity of eating warm food. Such was the general condition of transport in the countries of Central Europe at this time. Naturally the strain of the journey had added to their appearance of suffering; but I never heard them complain about themselves. Their instant concern was for the sufferings of their children, the German children, innocent of the war, and dying like flies from diseases which were the result of under-nourishment. And we were only too painfully aware that the blockade of Germany and the embargoes against Austria were our share, the British share, in the responsibility for this unnecessary torture of little children. We felt shamed in the presence of men who had never wavered in their opposition to their Government’s policy, that our Government should be using the very weapon most conspicuous in the defeat of Germany three months after it was decided to lay down arms!

Kautsky is the greatest living exponent of the philosophy of Karl Marx. He is at the moment the great philosophic antagonist of the Bolsheviks and supporter of Social Democracy in Europe. He is hated with a deadly hatred in every part of the world by the Communists, and is denounced as a “social traitor” by the slavish adherents of Zinoviev and Radek, the two most extreme Bolsheviks in Russia. A lifetime of self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of Socialism has not saved this distinguished writer and his able wife and collaborator from the unmerited scorn of the extremists. But the extremists in every land have always had more hatred for the colleagues from whom they differed in method than for the capitalist enemy, separated from themselves by oceans of difference in principle. On this the capitalist and his allies count to defer the day of their doom.

Herr Seitz, who was one of the group in the hotel, was then President of the new Austrian Republic. I am quite sure from his sad expression of face and the tone of his conversation that he had found more pain and anxiety than honour and glory in his new position. He is a tall and strikingly handsome man of perhaps fifty years of age. He spoke no English, but Mr. Charles Roden Buxton, our gifted English interpreter, translated his talk for us. Again it was of the children, this time of the Austrian children who, if one half of what he told us was true, were enduring things which were a disgrace not only to the conquering nations but to civilization itself.

I determined then and there to go to Austria to satisfy myself by the sight of my own eyes if such things could be true. Here was a matter engaging the honour of every Briton, for the reasons I have already given; and things must be bad, I felt at a later stage, when even the neutral Swiss took occasion to point out to some of us very earnestly the real loss of prestige the Allied cause was suffering from what appeared to be the wanton destruction by famine of the helpless and innocent children of the ex-enemy states. “Eight hundred thousand children in Germany have died of starvation during the war” was a statement made by one of the German delegates during the Conference, a statement which made for a moment even the most belligerent delegate speechless with pity. The man who made it became afterwards the Chancellor of Germany, and one of the unhappy men compelled by superior force to sign a treaty at Versailles which no sane man either in Germany or in England, having thought about it, believed for one moment that Germany could carry out.

The Socialist Governments of Europe—Austria, Bavaria, Germany, Russia—entered upon their responsibilities at a time very unfortunate for themselves. The terrible war had left everything in ruins. The difficulties of restoration were so appalling that the old governing classes had everywhere fled, not only from the anger of their peoples, but from the wellnigh insuperable difficulties of government. The people were everywhere hungry. They lacked clothing. They were without fuel. They were full of disease and had neither medicines nor disinfectants with which to deal with it. Transport had wholly or partially broken down. Money had woefully depreciated. Trade had entirely stopped as in Russia, or seriously diminished by reason of blockades and embargoes. Prices were incredibly high. There were the hard conditions of the Armistice to be fulfilled. In addition to all this, revolution and counter-revolution, Red rioters and White Guards, brewed special troubles for their unhappy rulers, and kept their countries in a constant state of terror and unrest. Into this indescribable mess and muddle were tossed the Socialists by a newly-born will of the entire people. Who else was there to take the responsibility, the old rulers having fled? And was it not possible that the Socialists, whose programme was magnificent, and who had not been tried, might restore them to the prosperity that had been destroyed by the rulers who had been tried and found wanting?

But it was precisely because they had not been tried that it was unfortunate for the Socialists. They had to make the biggest of experiments in the circumstances least favourable for them. They had to please their parties, which expected certain things of them, and satisfy their constituents who demanded certain others. They made mistakes. They were bound to make mistakes. No Government of any kind could have avoided making mistakes. I doubt if any alternative Government in any of these countries would have made fewer; but the mistakes made by the Socialists were those most likely to provoke the reaction which has already so disastrously set in, the mistake of putting the party programme before the general interest in the face of the conquerors ready to smite; and that of adopting the militarism of the Governments they had overthrown.

Less than any of the Socialist Governments of Europe had the Austrian Government offended, largely on account of the firmness and moderation of its leaders, of whom I shall have something to say later, and of the discipline of the party, which is perhaps the best organized and best-disciplined Socialist Party in Europe.

But a growing knowledge of all the circumstances of Europe made it increasingly clear why no Socialist Minister I have met in Europe looks happy; unless it is Lenin. And I am inclined to think that even Lenin’s merry, red eyes must be frequently shadowed in these days, as he sees his great experiment gradually withering away in the atmosphere of realism created by hungry workmen and angry peasants.

The great test of a system, any system, the Communist system amongst others, is its power to produce healthy, happy men and women and keep them so. If it fails in that it is condemned in all.

The German Majority Socialists did not arrive in Berne until some time after their comrades of the Minority. They had supported their Government after a fashion, but not by any means in the uncritical manner of the British Labour Movement during the first two years of the war. And this in spite of the fact that the Labour Party held a meeting in Trafalgar Square on the Saturday preceding the declaration of war in which it had called for non-intervention! The quarrel between the nationals of Germany and France was, as I have said, of the greatest bitterness. The German Majoritaires kept strictly to themselves during the whole of the Conference, probably shrinking from the harsh judgment which they knew would surely be passed upon them by their comrades from the enemy countries. To my mind they showed great courage in coming to Berne; and the restraint and moderation of their ultimate actions made for a greater measure of unity than had been expected by the most sanguine.

This small group of men were the most pathetic in the Conference. The last time I saw Müller he was a big, broad-shouldered, stalwart man, six feet or more in height, and straight as a ramrod, with a fat, jolly face. Here he appeared stooping and shrunken, a shadow of his former self, his skin grey, and his lips bloodless. Wels looked a little better, for he is a dark man, and his complexion is naturally ruddy; but his manner was nervous and apprehensive, and his eyes were restless and unhappy. Mölkenbuhr, who, the year before the war, had attended a Labour Conference in England, a happy, jovial fellow, was old and feeble beyond recovery.

Edouard Bernstein, the best-known figure in England of the pre-war Socialist Movement in Germany, an opponent of his Government’s war policy, was another ghost of himself. He shuffled about the Conference room in soft slippers, his hands shaking nervously, his short-sighted eyes peering out of his strongly Jewish face as if looking for something he had lost. But he was looking for the faces of old friends, and exhibited an almost childish delight whenever he discovered one, wringing the hand of his friend vigorously and beginning to chat volubly, unmindful of the speeches which were being delivered or the votes which were being taken.

“I have a son and daughter in England. They have been there during the war. I hope to see them in a few days,” said the old man to me whisperingly, as he passed to where Mr. Macdonald was sitting. His amiable wife followed him about, making good his defects of memory. The step was very feeble, and the crisp black hair had grown grey. I knew when I heard the rumour that his colleagues would send Bernstein as Ambassador to England that it was but a rumour. He would never recover enough of vigour and health for that.

The able lawyer Haase, attached to the pacifist minority, made an excellent impression upon the British delegates. His manner was less deprecating than that of the others, and he had a merry twinkle in his blue eye that went straight to the heart. He is dead now. He was shot on his way from the Reichstag by an assassin and died after a few days’ illness.

When the full Conference assembled on January 26 it was found that twenty-seven countries had sent delegates, including the principal antagonists in the Great War—Germany, France, Russia and Great Britain. The neutrals included Holland, Sweden, and Spain. The secretary was Camille Huysmans of Belgium, who, with M. Branting and Mr. Arthur Henderson, made an Executive Committee of three persons. A Council and a Committee of Action were formed from the Conference, which were to meet when important decisions had to be made for which it was impossible to call the full Conference. And so was created the simple machinery for the work of rebuilding the Workers’ International.

Of the two dramatic figures who appeared at the International one I have already mentioned, the weird, arresting personality who met us at the railway station, who paid with his life for his simple and courageous speech, the Bavarian Prime Minister, Kurt Eisner. Of him I shall write at length on another occasion. Here I would paint at some length another picture on an even larger canvas.

We were somewhat listlessly pursuing our debates when suddenly there appeared on the platform a short square figure of a man with broad humped-up shoulders and a shock of fair wavy hair. He still wore his travelling coat. His short-sighted eyes peered through a pair of large spectacles. His nervous hands fidgeted with his coat. He began to speak, quietly and distinctly, with a slight pleasant drawl.

It was Friedrich Adler, “the man who killed Count Sturgh,” who made this dramatic appearance towards the end of the Conference. We were told he was on his way some days before. Then we heard he had been detained on the Austrian frontier by the Swiss police, who refused to permit him to enter Switzerland on account of his political crime. Curious, that the men who applaud William Tell and teach their children with pride the story of the tyrant Gessler and the apple, objected to the Austrian version of their national story. Moreover, the Emperor Charles had pardoned Adler. Knowing the dilatoriness of officials all hope of seeing him at the Conference in time to take part in the debates had fled.

At the sight and sound of him the delegates sprang to their feet electrified. “Adler! Adler!” they shouted. For several minutes they cheered without intermission. Wave after wave of genuinely passionate pleasure was expressed in shouted greetings and thunderous applause. It was remarkable; the most astonishing thing that happened at the Conference! To see the French and German antagonists, and the Majoritaires and Minoritaires of the various countries allied in a moment to render tribute to this one man was as delightful as it was puzzling to the simple soul whose quarrels are not so easily set aside.

But the explanation was really very simple. It was not what it looked like, a company of pacifists illogically applauding a murderer. It was the spontaneous tribute of his comrades of all lands to a man whose consistency to his ideals called for their devotion. Very few men in that gathering had remained true during the war to the central idea of the International. Henderson had been a member of the British War Cabinet; Branting had taken the side of the Allies; Müller had supported Germany; Thomas had been a French “patriot”—all, or almost all, had taken sides and had forgotten their International obligations and their peace ideals in the overwhelming disaster of the war. Adler had stood firm. From the first to the last hour he had never faltered in his allegiance. From the first he had denounced the war as a crime against the peoples. And he had carried his party with him. The Austrian Party was the only Socialist Party in Europe which had denounced the war and defied the war-makers from the beginning to the end. This was one of the reasons why the Austrian Government did not dare to assemble Parliament upon the declaration of war. For more than two years of the war the Constitution of Austria was in abeyance. The Socialists and Nationalists clamoured in vain for the rights of the people. Force ruled. Adler decided that only force could upset that rule. If the man who represented the autocratic system were killed, it would be a symbolic act that would be understood by the people. The head of the tyrannical Government dead, the system would follow. So this gentle dreamer and man of letters, who had never before had a revolver in his hand in his life, went into a restaurant and shot the Austrian Prime Minister dead in his chair!

His trial became famous. His speech of defence lasted for more than seven hours. It was full of devastating accusations against the Government of Count Sturgh. The speech has become one of the greatest political documents in existence, and is, as I am informed, one of the masterpieces of German prose. Reading it and knowing Adler, one comes to understand why this kind and gentle man came to kill; and one understands how it was that in spite of that every man in the International rose to applaud him.

He was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to one of twenty years’ imprisonment; and just before the Austrian Revolution he was pardoned by the young Emperor Charles. This treatment by the Austrian Government of Adler is in painful contrast to the British Government’s treatment of Roger Casement.

There is a certain quality of poetic justice in the last chapter of this interesting story. A few months ago the ex-Emperor Charles made an attempt to recover the throne of Hungary. He left his place of asylum in Switzerland and appeared unexpectedly in Hungary. The inevitable happened. The armies of Czecho-Slovakia and Rumania were about to be set in motion. Hungary was menaced from all sides. The Entente expressed its official disapproval. The Hungarians threatened to revolt against the Government. Charles was obliged to leave the country. At a little railway station in Styria the royal train was held up. Eight hundred enraged workers threatened to capture the ex-emperor and his suite. Bloodshed was imminent. The man sent to appease the workers and save the unfortunate prince from the effects of his folly was Friedrich Adler. So, he paid the price of his pardon of three years before. So, the ex-monarch learnt by practical demonstration the value of generosity in government.

Let no thoughtless reader imagine that Dr. Adler, eminent scholar and scientist, the gentlest of men in private life, liked doing the thing he did. He hated it; but this man, Count Sturgh, stood for every tyranny. Adler removed him, and the long-delayed Austrian Parliament was called together immediately after.

Adler’s work since he was set free has been to save his country from the Bolshevism menacing it from Hungary. The wild men of his party would probably have preferred the Adler of the smoking revolver. Once an extremist always an extremist is their creed. A noble inconsistency is not for them. Hate is the fundamental of their gospel. He was falsely charged with running away from his principles. But, in spite of everything, he maintained a moderate attitude, had the courage to be a coward in the estimation of the vulgar, and saved his suffering country from the tyranny of the Red, which is invariably followed by the tyranny of the White, both disastrous in the appalling circumstances of Austria’s menaced existence.

Adler is the foremost figure in the enterprise which aims at bringing together the two Internationals on the basis of honourable compromise. A Conference of what is universally spoken of as “the 2¹⁄₂ International” was recently held in Vienna. I admire the optimism of these people, but have little faith in the issue of their work. So far the compromise has the appearance of being that of the lion and the lamb. They will lie down together—the lamb inside the lion!

Many of the spectators at the Conference, and even more newspaper men expressed to me deep and bitter disappointment that the Conference had done so little; but what did they expect? Did they hope that a few Socialists from several countries could accomplish what President Wilson, backed by the idealism of the world, had failed to achieve? Before the echo of the cannon had died away, did they expect this small group of people could have cleared the debris from the field and buried all the corpses? It was a mad thought. The utmost that ought to have been expected was a beginning with the reconstruction of the great world-organization of workers, which is destined some day to make itself a terror to evil-doing Governments all the world over. And that we did.

The main achievement of the Second International was the bringing face to face after years of agonizing strife men and women severed from one another, not only by the compulsion of circumstances, but by wounded and outraged national feelings. It was a delicate and difficult task. But it was done. The ice was broken. Men breathed more freely who before had felt a tightening of the heart. For the future common action would be easier, unless the Russian Bolsheviks pursued the disruptive tactics of the militarists and capitalists of the European bourgeoisie; and if they did so it could be only for a time.

The Conference devoted itself to two outstanding pronouncements, although very much more was discussed. It recognized as imperative that the German Majority should make clear its position, both in relation to its past attitude and future conduct, if the French were to be appeased; and on this subject a resolution satisfying to both sections was eventually carried.

In view of the amazing events taking place in Russia at this time, and of the reported Red Terror, the great body of the Conference felt it highly important to put the International unequivocally on the side of democracy as opposed to the dictatorship of Lenin and Trotsky, which it did in an ample resolution that did not neglect to congratulate Russia on the overthrow of the hated regime of the Czars.

Friedrich Adler and Jean Longuet ventured to submit a second resolution, in which they sought a middle way, one they believed would be less offensive to the Bolsheviks. They did not want us to shut the door of the International in the faces of the Russian extremists who, they hoped, would one day return to the fold. They declared that too little was known about the Government of Lenin and Trotsky to warrant an out-and-out condemnation of it. Their resolution is recorded in the minutes. But I venture to think they must now be feeling that they wasted their efforts. The Russians have never done denouncing Longuet and those who think with him. And they have established their own International in Moscow, commonly called the Third International, an International governed from Russia, where all individuality, whether of person or nation, must be ruthlessly suppressed at the dictates of the governing brain in Moscow. All attempts at an honourable compromise with the arbitrary Russians is doomed to failure. It is impossible to reconcile the irreconcilable. The haughty and bigoted doctrinaires of revolutionary Russia will continue their violent and destructive work of poisoning and dividing the working-class movement of the world, unless the age of miracles revives.

A marked feature of the International was the immense number of newspaper men who attended. I am convinced there were more reporters than delegates in the hall. They were there from every land, representing every sort of newspaper. There were as interesting personalities at the Press table as on the floor of the conference hall. Oswald Garrison Villard, Editor of the American Nation, Simeon Strunsky, of the New York Evening Post, and Norman Angell, representing The Times newspaper, were amongst the ornaments of their profession present. Dr. Guttmann, who was the representative of the Frankfurter Zeitung in England before the war, was amongst the ablest and most sympathetic of the journalists who attended; and Herr Rudolf Kommer, of the Neue Freie Presse.

I may be quite wrong, but I formed the opinion as the result of careful observation and subsequent inquiry, and of a close acquaintance which has ripened into friendship with very many conspicuously able journalists abroad, that a higher standard of culture is required of journalists on the Continent than is expected of those of a similar status in this country. Perhaps I ought to put it a little differently. The leading lights of British and American journalism are of the first degree both in general culture and in literary attainments. But there appear to be two very separate and distinct classes of journalist in England and America: the one thoroughly educated, the other entirely uneducated. I saw no such wide difference in the various ranks of journalism abroad. I doubt very much if there were one European reporter at the Conference whose standard of education was below that of a good university. Would this be so in England? It certainly would not in America. In America a “good story” is wanted. In Europe a good argument or a witty satire is more in favour. I know very few journalists in Europe, though doubtless they exist, who would consider it serviceable to their journals deliberately to misinterpret a speech or misreport a conference. They may make a little fun, employ a little irony, caricature a speaker; but very few would deliberately mislead their readers on matters of fact. Courage in facing realities is commoner in some countries than in England. Our prowess is in the field, whether with the hunt or in the battle.

CHAPTER III
THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL (concluded)

The International had an audience, a very large and interested one. It sat at the back of the room, glad of an experience which relieved for a while the tedium of life in Berne. Amongst the listeners of every nationality I observed Indians with turbans and Turks wearing the fez. There was a beautiful dark-eyed Jewess sporting three vast links of matchless pearls. A handsome American woman, full of vivacity, wearing a large picture hat, sat next to her husband, a tall, good-looking Hungarian with a clean-shaven face and an American accent to his excellent English. There was the faded but vivacious mistress of a notorious ex-king; two red-haired Greek ladies of extreme beauty; several ambassadors; a whole medley of chief secretaries; a gang of spies of both sexes, and a group of well-known pacifists engaged on preparations for their own conference, which was timed to follow the International. There was Mr. William Bullitt of the American Peace Delegation in Paris; Mr. George Lansbury, and Mr. John de Kay, famous for mystical millions! Last but not least there was a sharp little woman unknown to any of us who sprang upon Mr. Macdonald like a tiger-cat. “How dare you come to this conference to talk to the enemies of your country!” she demanded. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, you and Mrs. Snowden and all the others?” Mr. Macdonald was white with anger, but he behaved like a gentleman. If the lady had said it to me I should have told her that it took far less courage to come and talk to an ex-enemy than to marry one and produce four or five little enemies. The spiteful lady was an Englishwoman, and is the wife of an Austrian and the sister of a notorious English suffragette. She has several fine Austrian children!

There was something very interesting about those rabid anti-enemy people. Examine them closely and you found that those who hated most often did it because they were implicated either by birth or marriage in enemy associations, and felt it necessary to protest their loyalty as loudly and as frequently as possible. I believe that language also had a great deal to do with war affinities. People took the French or German side according to the language they had mastered! The knowledge of a foreign language is a distinguished accomplishment in a Briton! Protesting too much is always a mistake. I do not believe it has ever done the protestant one ounce of good. Often it has done positive harm by raising suspicion. I have a distinguished friend in England, German by birth, English by sympathies. From the beginning of the war he has taken the side of the Allies. His writings prove that unmistakably. The English authorities have treated him outrageously. It is a long and painful story. They refuse to allow him to stay in the country, although before the war he lived here for more than twenty years, owns property here, and his daughter was born here. He has abundant credentials from important people. He wants to adopt English citizenship. Nothing that is done to him can alter his devotion to this country; and yet the Home Office is inexorable. There are violent pan-Germans in this country who are suffering less than he—gentlemen on whom the Peace Treaty has bestowed a new nationality!

One particularly tiresome day, when the air of the Conference hall was thick and close with human breath and stale tobacco smoke, and when the lions raged more loudly than usual, pounding the table with their fists as they consigned to perdition their various antagonists, there walked into the room an interesting figure of a man whom nobody could forget who had seen him once. He was dressed in a grey suit, which matched his silvery hair, and showed in a marked way the exceptional breadth of his powerful shoulders set upon a short and sinewy frame. He walked the whole length of the room with all the dignity and solemnity of a reigning prince come to review his loyal troops; his head thrown back and his slightly swaying body vibrant with a self-importance and a quality of proprietorship more arresting than displeasing. A closer acquaintance with him as the Conference proceeded confirmed in everybody the judgment formed at the first casual glance, that the lines round his mouth and at the corners of his bright grey-blue eyes betokened a keen sense of humour.

His immense blue necktie fluttered shoulder-wards and marked him, in conjunction with a clean-shaven face, the American citizen, although it was alleged he was born in the East End of London. But where else in the world, unless in the Quartier Latin, would you find so much good cloth wasted on neckties as in America? Like big butterflies these enormous bows repose upon the breasts of their wearers, as serviceable as the Stars and Stripes in designating the home and habitation of their owners.

Mr. John de Kay was the mystery man of the Second International. Nobody knew whence he came nor whither he was going. His business in life was a secret never revealed. He was a mystery to a great many more than the delegates at the Socialist Conference. He had a castle in Switzerland and another in France. He had an estate in Mexico, and was persona grata with several revolutionary governments. His bust had been sculptured by Rodin. Sarah Bernhardt had appeared in one of his plays. He had written books on social science. He composed poems. He was a multi-millionaire, sprinkling his millions on the altar of good causes like talcum powder after a bath. He kept a marvellous suite of rooms at the Bernerhof, and ordered his dinner with the pompousness of a Napoleon commanding the advance of an army. All these things and a thousand others were said of this extraordinary man; but the mystery remained a mystery to the end.

He was anxious to finance the publicity work of the Second International, and actually contributed large sums to this side of the work both in Berne and in Lucerne. But his larger scheme never materialized. It was discovered later that he had a habit of offering millions for this cause or that, to the International, to the German Socialist Government, to the famine children of Austria, to Turkey, to Hungary; but never have I been able to discover that those millions were forthcoming. There was always some hitch in the business somewhere, some fantastic condition attached to the gift, or some impossible preliminary to carry through satisfactorily.

He was dreadfully impatient of what he called the “blue-sky politics” of some Socialists. He hated equally the politics of the White Guard reactionaries. Strange, queer, haunting character, with the lion head and the despot manner; time alone will tell us who you are and what your place in the scheme of things; but that you meant to help and not to hinder the work of the International I am profoundly convinced.

Mr. de Kay lost his favourite daughter a few months ago. She was drowned in Lake Michigan while on a visit to America. The mystery of her death, like the mystery of her father’s life, is still unsolved. She lies still and cold in her grave. But her father flits fitfully in and out of the game of international politics, too arresting a personality to be ignored, too mysterious a being to be acclaimed.

Seated in that part of the hall reserved for visitors was a dark-skinned Jewish lady wearing an enormous picture hat. It was not she of the ropes of pearls, but another and an older woman. She was dressed in a smart black dress and wore over it a valuable sealskin coat. She followed the debate with a certain amount of interest, but her black eyes roved restlessly around the room in search of somebody in particular. I did not flatter myself that I was the person she was seeking, but presently a little pasteboard card was passed along the line to me, and looking first at the card and then at the visitor, I caught the smile of the picture hat lady and recognized an old acquaintance. She was Frau Rosika Schwimmer, the first woman Minister.

The then Premier of Hungary, Count Karolyi, had signalized his term of office by several acts of a radical character, notably amongst them the appointment of a woman Minister to Switzerland. It was a bold thing to do, at such a time and in such a country, and of such a woman. I wish now that I had accepted the invitation to be the guest of Count Karolyi, extended to me in his name by his secretary and friend Herr Paul von Auer. Courage of this sort, which associates a man with feminism, is extremely rare. It would have been interesting to meet the man possessed of it. The conservatism of the Swiss is well known. They share with the Latin countries the dishonour of an unenfranchised womankind. To send to such a country the first woman Minister, and that woman a Jewess, was to challenge too violently the prejudices of the Swiss. The experiment was bound to fail.

Frau Schwimmer’s business with me was to ask my help with the organization of a women’s conference. Of course, the proposal interested me; but my mind travelled back to my previous association with Rosika and the occasion of my first meeting with her.

It was at the Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance of which Mrs. C. Chapman Catt is the President, held in London about ten years ago. Rosika (as everybody called her) was one of the most eloquent speakers in the Conference. Her style was ironic. She provoked shouts of laughter amongst the women by her pungent attacks on male mankind, and her wit and humour made of her a general favourite as a speaker. She and I were thought to be as great contrasts in our style of speaking as in our physical appearance, and a favourite design of organizers was to send the two of us to address the same meeting. This happened two years later at the Opera House in Stockholm, when the grave and the gay of the woman’s question were divided between the black and the blonde.

But I never really knew Frau Schwimmer till after our several meetings in America. The first occasion was a meeting in the theatre in Lexington, Kentucky, where we discoursed on women and peace to a fashionable audience. It says a great deal for Rosika’s power as a public speaker, that she was able by her eloquence to overcome amongst those critical American women a plainly expressed distaste for her peculiar style of dress. She affected at that time the loose, flowing robe more suggestive of the boudoir than the public platform. Black harmonized with our mood as well as hers, for the war was at its height; but the ill-fitting black gloves she persisted in wearing during her speech robbed her otherwise expressive hands of all their eloquence.

It was to the unauthorized activity of Rosika that I owed my meeting with President Wilson. A propaganda in favour of the calling by America of a conference of neutral nations for continuous mediation amongst the belligerents was being conducted all over the United States, with which I found myself in full sympathy. America was not then in the war, and the greater part of her citizens appeared to be hostile to the idea of entering. Their distaste for the war did not go the length of an all-round strict neutrality, economic as well as political; but there was a very genuine desire in 1915 on the part of vast numbers of American citizens to avoid active participation in the war, for reasons, for the most part, entirely honourable to themselves and the country.

One afternoon in November of that year I had already risen to address a great theatre full of business men in Milwaukee on the importance of their giving the vote to Wisconsin women when a telegram was handed to me: “President Wilson will receive us at the White House on November 23rd. Please return at once.—Schwimmer.”

I had not the faintest conception of what it was about. I looked at the message and read it twice. I was unable to believe my eyes. I had never sought an interview with the President. I had no business of sufficient importance to warrant my seeking his presence. I have always had too much respect for the time of busy men in high office to seek to use it on matters of other than the gravest consequence. I was filled with annoyance at having been placed, without my knowledge or consent, in the position of an intrusive and self-important busybody. But there was the invitation. The arrangement had been made. And my one consolation lay in the thought that the approachableness and well-known courtesy of the “First Gentleman of America” had made the thing possible and would make it delightful. But my indignation against the “meddlesome Matties” who had so outrageously interfered did not cool and is alive at this hour.

I had several important public engagements in Wisconsin and Illinois to fulfil, which I could not cancel without causing a vast amount of inconvenience and expense to organizers, so I wired that it would be a pleasure to attend at the White House if the meeting could be arranged for November 27.

I travelled a day and a night from Chicago to New York, tried there to find out what it was all about, heard a few vague stories sufficient to let me know that it had to do with the peace propaganda, and left the next morning for Washington. I arrived in Washington at 3 p.m. and was taken in a large automobile to one of the theatres where a big meeting was in full swing. Rosika rose to speak after I had taken my place on the platform. Her speech froze me to my chair with its passionate exaggerations: “Millions and millions of people are dying on the battlefields and in the homes of Europe,” she said, which since that time has become only too true. “Millions and millions of men are praying for peace,” which was totally untrue. If “millions and millions” of men in Europe had wanted peace they could have had it. “The soldiers of Europe are looking to you to deliver them——” and so on.

I had had no part in calling the meeting. I could only guess its purpose. I had no idea under whose auspices it was being held nor who was finding the money for it. My peace sympathies were unquestionable, but when I rose to speak I felt myself under a real obligation in the interests of truth to neutralize the impression made upon the minds of the audience by Rosika’s burning words.

“Alas!” I said, although these may not have been the exact words, “I am not able to say out of my own experience that the men of Great Britain are praying for peace. On the contrary they are voluntarily enlisting in millions for what they believe to be the most righteous cause they have ever served. The appeal I make to you is not to act in the belief that you are thereby saving millions of unwilling men forced by cruel tyrants to enter a war which they hate, but by conferring with other neutral nations to discover some terms, honourable to all concerned, which shall save from what they believe to be the absolute necessity of killing and being killed, the gallant young manhood of every nation which is in this fight.”

The meeting over, we drove to the White House through a great concourse of people. Frau Schwimmer and myself were received by the President with the dignity of a grand seigneur joined to the simplicity of a plain American citizen. I liked him. I believed in him. When years later men in Europe laughed at his idealism, I recalled my impression of him and felt he was sincere. When he failed, after the first awful shock of the failure, I believed he had failed where no man could succeed. During our conversation with him his hatred of the war was clear. His desire to maintain the peace in America and restore it, if possible, to Europe was unequivocal. He expressed very warmly his sympathy with the idea of a neutral conference. But the thought of practical difficulties oppressed him. Would China and the South American Republics be invited to such a conference? What should be the basis of representation? Would such an effort be looked upon with favour by the fighting Powers? Could anything be done except through the ordinary diplomatic channels? He welcomed Lord Courtney’s brave speech in the House of Lords and hoped it might be symptomatic. He looked for signs of a growing peace sentiment amongst the belligerents but found few. I agreed with him on this last point and remained silent. Rosika grew voluble, bitter, insulting. She hinted at America’s munition profiteering. The President flushed a little and looked annoyed.

“Surely,” he said warmly, “there are such profiteers in other countries?”

We talked for half an hour or more. The great crowd of men and women outside stood in silent prayer for the success of our effort. They were mostly members of religious organizations; and it was so arranged. Numbers of reporters with pencils and notebooks in hand surrounded us and pursued us in automobiles to the hotel where we had taken up our quarters. Here the secret spring of it all was revealed!

In a sumptuous suite of apartments at the Great Washington Hotel sat the great man. And in another equally sumptuous sat Rosika, with her army of secretaries. Her rooms were filled with costly flowers. Her meals were served privately by waiters specially chosen for the work. Messengers whose sole business appeared to be to attend to Frau Schwimmer’s every wish ran in and out in a constant stream. Newspaper men waited in the ante-room for such crumbs of news as she was disposed to scatter. Well-dressed and important-looking men and women left their cards. Busy, intense, energetic life thrilled through the whole of the hotel. Something more than the usual was afoot. What could it be?

It sprang from a source which kept itself hidden, except when at one dramatic moment in the theatre a thin, clean-shaven man with a keen, sensitive face leapt to his feet and declared in a loud, drawling voice: “I never made a speech before in my life. All I want to say is this: We’ll have those boys out of the trenches by Christmas.”

It was Henry Ford, the great manufacturer of automobiles. He meant every word he said and really believed it possible to do what he wished.

It was this generous, warm-hearted man who was finding the money for Rosika’s lavish expenditure. It was he who secured us the talk with President Wilson. It was he who had even then been involved by the dominating Rosika in the idea of the peace ship—the wonderful ship full of peacemakers which should sail to every neutral land in Europe and invite their Governments to persuade the warriors to make the peace.

As an advertisement for the peace idea the scheme had some value; but knowing something of the temperamental Rosika and her lack of staying power as well as of her extravagance, as anything more serious than that the plan was bound to fail. I felt an enormous pity for Mr. Ford, whom I failed to see after the meeting; but I doubt if at that time anyone could have convinced him that an ambitious woman was using him and his dollars in the most foolish and reckless enterprise that was instigated through the Great War.

I refused to have anything to do with it. I feared what actually happened, that the peace movement would be smothered in ridicule from one end of the world to the other, and that the reputation of sincere and able pacifists would be cheapened and vulgarized by this mad expedition to the ends of the earth of a company of individuals whose motives were mixed and whose abilities were in most cases mediocre.

What was my annoyance and astonishment when I boarded the ship for Liverpool the next morning to hear from a reporter of the New York Times who came to see me before sailing, that I had telephoned from Washington a full column of eulogy of the Ford peace ship in the form of an interview! I had done nothing of the sort. I had never had the telephone to my lips all the time I was in Washington. I had, moreover, travelled all night from Washington to be in time for my steamer the next morning. Someone had telephoned in my name!

Like the dove from the ark the gallant ship set sail with flying pennant; but in a little while crept back to port with drooping wing, dragging in her wake broken spirits and bedraggled reputations. Mr. Ford left before the end of the tour. The domineering Rosika became too much for him. The greatest discontent amongst the passengers throughout the tour was felt owing to the inaccessibility of Mr. Ford, who could never be reached without a permit from Frau Schwimmer. “Whenever we tried to reach him,” said one woeful and malicious pressman, “we found him entirely surrounded by Rosika!”

With the memory of this experience surging up I grew thoughtful as I looked at the little card in my hand. I made a cautious response to the smiles of the Hungarian woman Minister. Of course, I talked to her. Her new position interested us all. I asked her how she liked being a diplomat. She told us a sorry tale of treachery and espionage. The drawers of her bureau had been rifled, her telegrams opened before they reached her or altered when she sent them out. Everything had been done to make her position impossible. We were sorry and indignant till we heard that she had appointed these scoundrels herself and had made the mistake of having recalled many of the old Hungarian officials who had possessed a genuine desire to help her.

Some of these men had declined to go, and their side of the story was of shameless expenditure, unbridled personal extravagance at the cost of a poverty-stricken little state, mangled by the war and the peace, and suffering incredible penury. They spoke, it may be with malice, of an expensive automobile, costly furs, cut flowers and extravagant rooms, all paid for by her unhappy Government, bankrupt and despairing. The Bolshevik Revolution occurred a few days later.

She was recalled after a few weeks of office, having committed a number of political indiscretions involving the reputation with the Allies of at least one innocent and unsuspecting tool. This unfortunate lady was ignominiously returned to her native country.

Frau Schwimmer is of middle age and middle height, with masses of crisp wavy black hair slightly tinged with grey. She wears large gold-rimmed spectacles, and has a hard, aggressive manner and a loud, dominating voice. In speaking she uses her hands a great deal, the forefinger of the right hand playing a conspicuous part in the enforcing of her points. She has a quick intelligence with a brilliant surface cleverness, is sarcastic and voluble, good natured and easy going. She has temperament, but is without stability. She is cruel in her thoughtlessness, but, like her race, has a deep sense of loyalty to her family. She is genuinely devoted to the cause of feminism.

Another visitor to the International I feel constrained to do more than mention was Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Nation and a lifelong friend of President Wilson. Mr. Villard has a rich inheritance from each side of his family. He is the descendant on the father’s side of one of the famous German revolutionaries who fled to America in 1848. His mother is the daughter of William Lloyd Garrison of anti-slavery fame.

During the visit to America, to which I have already referred, I met Mr. Villard and Mr. George Foster Peabody in the lobby of the House of Representatives in Albany. They apologized for not being able to attend the meeting of the State Legislators I was to address, as they were engaged on business connected importantly with the propaganda for keeping America out of the war. “Mr. Villard has just seen President Wilson—they are lifelong and intimate friends, you know—and he has the impression that enormous pressure is being put upon the President by a section interested in dragging this country into the war. We are very unhappy about it,” said Mr. Peabody.

This does not mean that when the war broke out Mr. Villard took neither side. His sympathies were pro-Ally and anti-German; but he hated the whole bad business of the war and desired to end it quickly. The severe terms of the Armistice and the startling conduct of the Paris Conference caused him to react favourably towards the Bolshevik Government. But from various reactions, he has come to the settled conviction of the need for the revision of the Peace Treaties, and for the establishment of some kind of international political organization like the League of Nations for the securing of permanent peace on the earth.

Mr. Villard is not unlike Mr. A. G. Gardiner, the popular one-time editor of the Daily News. Both men are tall and fair, both fresh complexioned and blue eyed. Both have the same political ideals; though I imagine a distinction inoffensive to both men might be made in expressing the view that Mr. Villard’s passionate hatred of the wrong causes him to swing more violently to the right or to the left and back again whenever he delivers himself up to the dominion of his warm-hearted and generous emotions.

I met Mr. Villard in the Hôtel Continental in Paris first, and persuaded him to come to Berne. There we dined together at the Vienna Café.

Berne is the famous capital of Switzerland. It is a lovely old city with quaint fountains and coloured houses. It is beautifully situated on a ridge of hills, with snow-covered Alpine ranges in the distance, the Jungfrau, handsome and conspicuous, in the middle. The swift river girdles the town, gleaming blue and green in the valley below.

There are stately new buildings in Berne, and a fine market square. There is the monument of the International Postal Union, a globe encircled by female figures clasping hands, representing the various races; and there is the bear pit with its fascinating shaggy inhabitants; but place all the attractions of Berne in one scale and the Wiener Café in the other, and the balance will sink in favour of the café, at least for those unhappy human beings compelled by the misfortunes of their country or the tragic circumstances of the Great War to spend their enforced exile in the restricting circumstances of a small Swiss city.

To the Wiener Café daily went these men and women to eat the food so renowned for its cooking. Where was such delicious coffee to be found in Berne? Where was there a greater variety of well-cooked and properly seasoned dishes? The wine was a glory. The Hungarian gipsy band played bewitching music, and brought home near enough for tears to those who came from the lands of the East.

But the Wiener Café drew men and women from the four corners of the earth for something more than its good food and glowing wines. They came for talk, to meet fellow exiles and entertain interesting strangers; to discuss the terrible march of events; to debate political theories; to escape loneliness; to hear gay music, and forget their sorrows in congenial fellowship.

Mr. Rinner of the Wiener Café radiated a welcome from his whole portly person. The waiters, always smiling and efficient, served you as if it were their great privilege to do so and not, as in so many English cafés, as though they were conferring a favour upon you. You never felt constrained to eat so fast that you choked in an effort to get out of the place as quickly as possible. You stayed hours if you desired to read or to play cards or chess. A second portion of every dish could be had if wanted without any further charge. All sorts of delightful odd corners, softly cushioned and conveniently partitioned, furthered conversation, and supplied a certain amount of privacy, contrasting favourably with the square horse-box appearance of so many eating houses in other places. And this is a typical good-class European restaurant.

I made my first acquaintance with the Wiener Café as the guest of Mr. Rudolf Kommer. Mr. Norman Angell and Mr. J. R. Macdonald were of the party. We talked for hours of the day’s happenings at the Conference, and reviewed the prospects of an early peace now rapidly vanishing into thin air. All the time there came through the glass partition the tantalizing strains of the ’cello and violin playing Hungarian dances. I had hoped to see as well as hear these gipsy musicians. And so it happened. The door opened and in they came to give us a private performance.

Smiling, bowing, they drew near to the table, almost bending over it, playing softly, sweetly, merrily, the expression of their faces interpreting the song. They had never studied a note of music. They played solely by ear. Yet they had caught the magic spirit of music, the soul and the rhythm of it. Their bodies swayed in time with the song. Their intimate black eyes invited to the dance. Our feet tapped time to their swaying forms. It was utterly joyous, abandoned, divine! I hear it now:

“Nimm Zigeuner deine Geige, lass sehn was du kannst.”

Our host crowned the evening’s enjoyment with stories of the old café’s famous habitués. At the very table where we were seated Lenin in exile had discussed his political philosophy with admirers and doubters through a summer’s night. In the chair I occupied the volatile and relentless Trotsky had lounged and gossiped. The charming, exuberant Prince Windischgraetz and his beautiful wife had frequently supped there. Crownless kings and exiled grand dukes had played their less dangerous game at the bridge-table in the corner. Poets and philosophers, journalists of all nations, destroyers of old states and architects of new, propagandists of the old order and spies of the new, lovely women of scandalous reputation, virtuous and sober citizens of Berne, delegates to international conferences, travellers to Paris held up on the way, connoisseurs of good beer—all found their way to this famous house of good cheer and joyous fellowship, and have helped Herr Rinner and the Gipsy Primas to make of it to thousands a memory of rich delight or of the haunting sorrow which is akin to joy.

When shall I see the Wiener Café again? I ask myself. And I know that I shall never see it as it was in those days of the war and the peace. All the old friends are gone. Even the gipsy band has fled. Perhaps there remain a few political exiles in Berne who find their way to the café occasionally. It may be that Dr. Ludwig Bauer, that amiable giant who eats at a sitting enough for four ordinary men and washes it down with incredible quantities of beer, calls occasionally to play a game of cards with a fellow-journalist, or to write his daily article in the little back room reserved for honoured and familiar guests. I do not know. All I know is that I have but to close my eyes and listen, and through the windows are wafted softly the strains from the gipsy band:

“Nimm Zigeuner deine Geige, lass sehn was du kannst,
Schwarzer Teufel spiel und zeige wie dein Bogen tanzt.”

CHAPTER IV
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS CONFERENCE (MARCH 1919)

I have written a great deal about the annoyance and discomfort to which the traveller abroad was put in the days immediately following the Armistice; I have said nothing about the performance which had to be gone through before the journey could actually be begun. Some day sanity will be restored to the government of these affairs; but as a matter of purely historic interest a record of this business will be very amusing.

The Executive Committee of the Union of Democratic Control (of Foreign Politics) was holding its weekly meeting, when a letter arrived from Dr. de Jong van Beek en Donk, the secretary of the Dutch Peace Society, inviting the Union to send delegates to the League of Nations Conference which it was proposed to hold in Berne early in March, 1919. It was strongly felt that no opportunity of forming international connexions should be missed. One member after another was pressed to go. Nobody but myself appeared to be free to do so. I had only just returned from Switzerland and the International. The journey home had been full of discouragement and fatigue. I was asked if I would very much mind the trouble and weariness of a second long journey soon. I said I had not the slightest objection to the journey, but that the thought of the passport business was rather daunting. It was agreed that someone in the office should do all that for me, and on that understanding I agreed to go.

But the condition was not fulfilled. It could not be. Passport formalities are personal matters and only in the rarest circumstances can they be gone through by proxy. I had immediately to set about the task myself, and a terrific task it was. The date was already February 27. The Conference was timed to begin on March 3. Two days of that time I knew would be consumed in the journey itself. That left two for the business of preparation. I knew no human being at that time who had accomplished this in less than a week. Generally three weeks was looked upon as a fairly satisfactory minimum of time for this work.

The following was the routine for a would-be traveller to Switzerland in the early days of 1919.

To get a passport you filled in a long form requiring answers to all sorts of impertinent questions about yourself and your immediate ancestors, including offensive queries about your personal appearance! You had to attach to the form a photograph of a particular sort and size. This had to be endorsed, and your passport signed by a magistrate or some other worthy person who knew you, and who would guarantee your character and the truthfulness of your replies. Two other persons of recognized social position and personal rectitude had to permit the use of their names as guarantors. You handed the completed passport form to the clerk at the passport office, and were generally told to call again in three or four days. The urgency of my case inspired me to enclose a letter to the chief passport officer in the fond hope of considerate treatment; which to my surprise was granted to me. I remember that my appeal fell into the hands of an extremely considerate and courteous official.

If you were prepared to wait on the chance that your business would come soon, you were given a number which was called out in its turn. By sitting incredible hours without food, unless you were wise enough to bring sandwiches, it was just possible that your number might be called unexpectedly and your business gone through quickly. Most people grew impatient, or could spare only an hour or two and left. They had to take a new number and a similar chance next day; with probably similar ill-luck. It was of the first importance to “stick it out.” Then when the magic number you held was called, you paid your fee of five shillings and went your way.

After you received your passport you proceeded to the Swiss Legation for a visum. You had to fill in two forms here and attach a photograph to each of them. You were required to sign a paper stating you were not a Bolshevik, and had no dealings with them. You were obliged to provide a letter from the organization on whose business you were travelling. On the occasion of my third application I had to bring a certificate of health and a banker’s letter stating that I was a person of substance not likely to become a charge on the Swiss Exchequer! Another five shillings and the visum became yours.

The next business was a British Military permit. This, I think, you had for nothing. But you filled in two more forms, attached two more photographs and waited long, weary hours for the calling of your number before you got it. I waited five hours on this occasion, and stood the whole of the time!

Lastly there was the Military Permit from the French to be obtained by suffering the same ghastly torments. For this eight shillings was the market price!

I regard it as one of the exploits of my life that I got through all this disgusting business in two days. I could not have done it but for the good fortune that threw me into the hands of considerate officials and for my own British pertinacity. As it was I came out of the French office in Bedford Square only five minutes before the office closed!

So I started by the usual early morning train to Folkestone, tired but triumphant, and feeling that the nuisances ahead of me, calculated to ruin more tempers and create more racial antagonisms than half a century of war, were light by comparison with that whirling rush from photographer to guarantor, from guarantor to passport office, from passport office to doctor, from doctor to banker, from banker to Legation, from Legation to Permit offices, with the endless filling of forms and the interminable aching hours of waiting which I had endured before the journey could begin.

It was a madwoman’s rush across sea and land. The Paris train was nearly two hours late. The Gare du Nord and the Gare de Lyon are on opposite sides of Paris. The wildest scrimmage for taxis took place. My lucky star being still in the ascendant, I secured one, hurled myself across Paris like a lunatic and, like a maniac, tossed myself and my bag into the Belgarde portion of the Geneva express as the train was actually signalled to leave!

There was no empty seat in the whole of the train. I had a first-class ticket, but I passed the night in the corridor sitting on the end of my suit-case. French trains are always super-heated. There had been no time for food in Paris. Hunger, thirst and sleeplessness made that night memorable to me. And as I have already shown, Geneva was not the end. There was the long wait in the city and the seven hours’ journey to Berne to follow the sleepless night from Paris to Belgarde. But it is marvellous what can be done and endured if one is only determined enough. I drove up to the Belle Vue Hotel at 11 o’clock on the evening of March 2; and the Conference was due to begin the following morning. My two fellow delegates of the Peace Council were still in London, although they began the passport business days before I knew that I was to be a delegate; but they yielded to the fatal temptation to leave after waiting for a short time, returning at intervals to the office, instead of seeing the thing through.

I had been in my room just long enough to turn the key in the lock when the telephone bell rang vigorously: “Hallo, Mrs. Snowden!” came the cheerful voice of a friend. “I have just seen your name in the hotel register. But this is wonderful! Come and have coffee at the Vienna Café.”

“Thank you, no,” I replied. “I’m almost dead with fatigue. If anybody tries to keep me out of bed for five minutes, I’ll denounce him to the police as a Bolshevik spy! I’ll see you in the morning. Good night.” Swiss beds are soft and white and very comfortable. In ten minutes I was snugly curled up in one of the best of them, for the first and only time in my life grateful for the Continental habit of unpunctuality. “That Conference is timed to begin at ten, but I am quite sure it will be eleven,” was the last muttered thought as I fell soundly asleep.

The sun was streaming in at the window when I awoke the next morning. I sprang out of bed and pulled back the curtain. Thick snow lay on the ground and reflected dazzlingly the light from the sun. The sky was a bright blue and without a cloud. Again the telephone bell rang. “There are two young ladies to see you, madam. Shall I ask them to wait?” asked the hotel clerk. “No, send them up—and the coffee,” I said, scrambling back into bed and wondering who on earth it could be. Two minutes later there followed the waiter into the room two pale girls about twenty years of age with soft, shy manners.

“We have come to give you a welcome to the Conference and to ask you if you will be good enough to speak at the opening session. Dear Mrs. Snowden, we know how tired you must be, but it is so wonderful that you are here. Do please come and say a few words of greeting to us. It will make us so happy and we are very miserable.” They were starved girls from Munich.

“Of course,” I said. “If you will leave me now, I will be with you in half an hour.” And they left looking very pleased.

This Conference was not so large as the International. There were several of the Socialists present; but, generally speaking, the Congress was different in its personnel and in the character of those present. It was more bourgeois in appearance. I do not say that with the intention of reflecting upon its quality in any offensive way. I have not the hatred of the bourgeois because he is a bourgeois, which animates some Socialists. I am not sure, indeed, what the word means precisely in the mouths of some people I know. As used by many it appears to mean a man who wears a clean collar and cuts his hair short; or a woman who speaks in a soft voice and wears a pretty dress. With such persons, educated manners, courtesy in debate, destroy a Socialist’s bona fides; whilst well-cut finger nails and a pair of white cuffs positively mark him down as a “social traitor.” I am not joking. I am stating a literal fact. With these solemn idiots the bourgeois is a man who keeps his family respectable and goes to church on Sunday. He is a man who retains some affection for the old-fashioned virtues of industry and thrift. There is, for them, a bourgeois morality, a bourgeois mentality, a bourgeois faith. Radek writes of the necessity of destroying the bourgeois institutions of religion, the family and private property. Lenin jeers at the bourgeois idea of liberty. To be middle-class is to be bourgeois, even if you have to work hard for a living. To take a pride in clean table-linen is bourgeois. To delight in a daily bath is bourgeois. And to be bourgeois is to be condemned by this class of “superior” person in Socialist circles. It is all so very silly—and so very young!

The delegates to the League of Nations Conference were in the main professional people, lawyers, professors, doctors, teachers, journalists. One or two were aristocratically connected—Count Max Montgelas, for instance—and there were two or three generals. But the same features marked this Conference as the other. The German and the Austrian delegates looked hungry and ill-nourished. All that I have said of the German Socialists—the dry grey skin stretched tightly over the bones, the bloodshot eyes, the pale lips, the thin nervous hands—was true of the men and women who confronted me as I spoke on that glorious March morning. It was a very pitiful sight and told eloquently of what the German people had had to endure up to the time their rulers fled before the indignant revolutionaries.

I was very happy to have arrived in time to give the greetings from the two organizations I represented, the National Peace Council and the Union of Democratic Control, and to be able to promise them the presence in a few days of my two colleagues, Miss Joan Fry and Mrs. Charles Roden Buxton.

Miss Joan Fry is one of the daughters of the late Sir Edward Fry. She is an active member of the Society of Friends. She came to the Conference to testify to her foreign friends of the same religious persuasion as herself the solidarity with themselves of the like-minded women and men of Great Britain. She made several speeches of deep spiritual power which were well received by the delegates.

Mrs. Charles Roden Buxton, the daughter of the late Professor Jebb, is also a Quaker. She has two very lovely children whom she adores, and the knowledge of Europe’s suffering children moved her to come to Berne, not only to attend the Conference, but to see what might be done immediately to send aid to the little sufferers in Vienna. During the weeks we were in Switzerland, she and I (but chiefly she) did what we could to start an international organization for child relief. It was a difficult piece of work. The Swiss were apt to be afraid of doing anything which would seem to violate the principle of neutrality, although I am sure they never faltered in their desire to help. The Austrians were incapable, through suffering, of very energetic co-operation. The French were intransigeant at the time. Also, it was very difficult to avoid falling into the hands of the selfish and unscrupulous, never deterred from their habit of exploitation by the thought of the poor people they were robbing. We were warned of this man and that woman. This man was buying in a certain expensive market for reasons of his own; that woman was taking a fat commission for securing contracts for goods to be bought with our funds!

The Vienna children were dying for lack of fats. Mrs. Buxton determined to send them a truck load of cod-liver oil at once, preserved milk and milk chocolate to follow. She pledged the greater part of her private fortune in order that its going might be expedited. It is almost inconceivable how many difficulties were placed in the way of its going by the authorities, in spite of the generous act of Mrs. Buxton which satisfied the business interests. Endless delays for no obvious reason; endless calls on dilatory officials; endless pleadings with suspicious legations; endless regulations to be subscribed to, and finally the probability that it would never arrive at its destination. A military guard had to be provided to go with the train. Incredible though it may seem, at that time, and even now, not only goods travelling by train but whole trucks, down to the wheels and the buffers, have entirely vanished during transit, and not a rivet or a plank has been traced. How it is done is a matter of wild conjecture. But no valuable stores were ever sent by train in that part of Europe without a strong military guard.

Out of Mrs. Buxton’s noble efforts in Switzerland and those of her devoted sister in England, Miss Eglantyne Jebb, has evolved the Save the Children Fund, the British branch of which alone under the chairmanship of Lord Weardale has, since its inception, raised nearly one million pounds of English money for the relief of child-life in the famine areas of Europe. The fund does not itself administer, but allots to Relief Organizations already in existence if satisfied with their work and their workers. Its great hope and desire is to continue in existence after the pressing needs created by the war have been met; to unite, not only in this country but all over the world, so as to prevent waste and overlapping and to get the maximum of efficiency out of the workers, the organizations of all kinds connected with the nurture and protection of children in all lands. I am neither a prophet nor the child of a prophet, but I venture to think that when the history of these times comes to be written, the work of the Save the Children Fund will be regarded as one of the redeeming features of a situation otherwise black and wellnigh hopeless.

The other bright gleam on the dark sky-line of European politics in these years will be the Society of Friends. The Quakers have done infinite things for the relief of distress in Europe. A gallant young soldier told me of the strength he received whenever he saw set up on a hut somewhere in France, “Société des Amis.” In every big city and in countless little villages of Europe their work has been quietly and persistently carried on, without noise and self-advertisement, with no looking for praise, and no expectation of reward. It began with the war. It has been carried on during the peace. Many workers have died of their labours, poisoned with typhus germs or collapsed from overwork. Hundreds of thousands of sufferers will live to bless them, who would have died but for their work. Countless little children have been saved alive or preserved from stunted manhood or womanhood through them. Their selfless devotion has softened the cruel impressions made by the war. Their presence amongst the defeated has saved from utter hate and despair many of those who pictured the foe to themselves as wholly given up to revenge. To the Friends must be given the credit for the preservation of such little faith and idealism as may still be left in Europe.

The purpose of this Conference as of the other was the creation of machinery which should aid in the preservation of international peace. It was met to give support in particular to the League of Nations idea. It sought to suggest such points for the Charter issued from Paris as would make of the League of Nations a real and vital thing. Without going into the discussions at great length it may be briefly stated that the Conference recommended the inclusion of all nations within the League, all-round disarmament consistent with the preservation of internal order, and a thoroughly democratic organization. The Peace had not yet been concluded, so that the delegates were not influenced in their conclusions by the astounding deviations from the Fourteen Points which that peace was so soon to reveal. They were in the mood of wishing to join all nations in an effort to put together the pieces of a broken and suffering Europe. And they believed in President Wilson.

One of the most interesting personalities at this Conference was Professor Brentano of Munich, the famous political economist. I was coming down the stairs leading from the conference hall to the street when a handsome old man with white hair and a keen face stopped and addressed me. He had a nervous and slightly deprecating manner, stooped a little, and showed pitiful signs of under-nourishment in his pale face and rather tearful red eyes. He found it difficult to speak without emotion of the condition of things in Bavaria, and his voice trembled as he told of the nerve-strain under which the population lived, partly through anxiety about food and partly through fear of revolutionary disorders. His very obviously democratic sympathies did not reach quite so far as the Communist regime and the amiable but incompetent President Eisner. He told me that nobody who had food in the house, however small in amount or poor in quality, went to bed without feeling that his throat might be cut in the night by men mad with hunger, who knew about the little store. He showed me a scientific chart exhibiting in figures and curved lines the appalling tragedy of starving and dying children in his city, the city of soft church bells and beautiful pictures, of glorious music and fine dramatic art. It was a Munich girl of eighteen who told me her painful story of an elderly and unscrupulous admirer, who endeavoured to buy her with food, a common experience in the stricken lands.

“I will give you two fresh eggs every day if you will be my ‘friend’,” he said (it was the first time I had heard the word “friend” used in such a sense). “I did not know that it was possible to be tempted to so dreadful a thing by anything in the world,” said this poor thing, her pale cheeks flushing as she spoke, “but we are all so hungry and my mother is a sick woman. The eggs would have been very good for her. And an egg costs many, many marks with us.” Her lip quivered and she played nervously with the edge of her shawl. “But my Socialist faith kept me pure. I could never have borne all the misery and hunger; I should have drowned myself but for my belief that Socialism would do away with war and bring a better day for us all.”

The young Socialist Toller, who spoke out bravely for the young people in the Movement at the International, talked to me with the same bright hope in his shining eyes. Two or three months later he was sentenced to four years’ detention in a fortress for leading the Red Guards in a revolt against the Whites. I had talked with him long about the need for peacemakers in our Movement, and then he was a sincere and unqualified pacifist. His Red Guard exploit puzzled me; but it was explained to me that he had hoped to restrain the Red troops from committing excesses if he went with them, and that he did not actively provoke a violent attack. His release should be imminent—if he is not already free.

One of the most distinguished of German pacifists who attended this Conference was Professor A. W. Förster. Dr. Förster published a letter or manifesto during the war which made some of us wonder if he were the only Christian left in Europe, so brave and strong and unequivocal was it! He was for some years professor at the University of Munich; but during the war his pacifist attitude enraged the nationalist students and members of the Faculty. His lectures were continually interrupted by the demonstrations of these students, and the atmosphere of study made utterly impossible. He was therefore induced to take a year’s holiday on full pay, and retired to Switzerland to continue his pacifist activities there. One cannot help contrasting this treatment of its distinguished pacifist citizen by Bavaria with the treatment accorded to the Hon. Bertrand Russell by the British Government. Six months in prison for one of the greatest intellects that ever a country possessed for a sentence in a magazine article which offended them! It was an act which invited and excited the derision of the whole world of letters.

After the Bavarian Revolution, Professor Förster was made Minister to Switzerland under Kurt Eisner. His relations with his chief were very peculiar. These two men were equally firm and uncompromising in their pacifism, but in their political policy they differed. Eisner, like most Germans, favoured the union of Austria with Germany provided the Austrians themselves desired it. Förster was opposed to such a union. In articles, interviews and speeches he fought against the idea, and the people of Switzerland enjoyed the peculiar spectacle of the Prime Minister of a German State and his Minister taking opposite sides on one of the most important issues of foreign policy then exciting the interest of nations! Any other Prime Minister would have recalled Professor Förster. Any other Minister would have resigned. In spite of many remonstrances received, Eisner declined to dismiss his Minister. His worship of free speech was so great that he forgot all about the common sense of politics, which requires that the representative in a foreign country of any state should either support the policy of his Government or be deposed. Malicious critics saw nothing but duplicity in the extraordinary situation. They loudly and cynically averred that the two men were marching along two different roads to the same end; that there was a good deal of pretence about the business intended to deceive the general public and conceal their real design; that they were secretly hand in glove with one another. But it was not so. It was sincere comedy sincerely played by players who did not mean to be funny. It was one more demonstration of the effect of the supersession of government by the debating society, and of action by talk. I have the evidence of my own eyes and ears of the enthralling power of Dr. Förster’s eloquence upon the young men of Berne and of the captivating charm of Kurt Eisner’s theorizing oratory upon the delegates of a great Conference; but theories do not quell mutinies and dogmas do not deter the oppressor; and if ever there were a time when Bavaria (and Europe) stood in need of practical common-sense politics it was during the years succeeding the war and the revolutions.

I made one other friend from the city of Munich. There stepped into the lift in the Belle Vue Hotel one day, a tall, slender woman dressed in deep black who thanked me for something, I don’t know what, and began then and there a friendship I very deeply prize. Annette Kolb is said to have in her veins the blood of Bavarian kings. I know nothing about that. I only know there are few women of my acquaintance who have so much charm of personality as Miss Kolb. She is kind and tactful and of an extraordinary wit. In a dreary wilderness of men and women without humour she shot sparks of the divine fire and kept us from the deadly peril of unutterable boredom on many a weary occasion.

Annette is the child of a French mother and a German father. She is the perfect type of “one between the races.” To say that her soul is torn is no flippant use of serious language. It is written in her face. Her emotions ebb and flow. When France was down she was pro-French; now that Germany is out, she is probably pro-German. She wants a union in friendship of the two. She speaks continually of this. It is the great theme of her writings. She had rough treatment in Dresden when making a protest in public against the malignant lying of a certain section of the Press. Her book, “Briefe einer Deutsch-Französin” (Letters of a German-French), created a great stir in France and for a time was prohibited in Germany. She is a woman of most brilliant gifts. The intimate friend of Busoni, she is a first-rate musician herself. The friend also of the German poet Schickele she has a just appreciation of good verse, and writes well. She speaks several languages with the fluency of her native tongue, and her English is a model for many an Englishman.

There was one name on the list of delegates which attracted my special interest, Andreas Latzko, the author of the book which caused such a world-wide sensation, “Men in Battle.”

“What is Latzko like?” I asked a friend.

“Latzko is a pacifist monkey of Hungarian birth,” replied this complimentary individual. Latzko is small and dark and vain. He makes fiery speeches with nothing much in them except emotion. I should say his experiences in the trenches have seriously impaired his constitution and his nerve. He gives the impression of being neurotic and erratic. He is very self-absorbed. I must tell of a curious experience which befel, illustrative of Latzko’s temperament and character. A friend and I were supping at the hotel where he lodged. Presently came a message from Latzko’s son begging that we would call and see his father. He was seriously ill in bed. “Will you go?” asked my friend. “By all means when he is so ill. He must have something very serious to say,” was my reply. My companion smiled sardonically, but sent the boy with a message to say we would come up in half an hour. When we arrived we found the poor little man sitting up in bed, propped with pillows and making a great moan in a weak, strained voice. He thanked us effusively for coming, gasping as he spoke. I thought he must be dying. He spoke of his wife as of one who would soon be left to struggle with the wicked world alone. He showed us her photograph. She was away in Hungary. He was longing to see her. Then he came to the real business of the occasion. Would I call and see his publisher in England and find out why the royalties were not forthcoming. My companion grinned again.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked, rather puzzled, as we descended the stairs. “I am laughing at an amusing farce just played,” he said. “At supper you sat with your back to the hotel entry. I saw Latzko enter during our meal, look in at the glass door furtively, recognize us, and rush upstairs to prepare for his part. The rest you know.”

“Then he is not ill,” I said disgustedly, thinking of the pillow I had smoothed, and the tenderness I had wasted.

“Oh yes, he is ill, very ill; but not in the way you think,” was the slow reply. “He is sick of self-love.”

One more interesting delegate at this Conference comes to my remembrance, Professor Nicolai, a slight, fair man with hair pushed back over a large forehead, and a thin, small chin. He presented rather a limp appearance, doubtless due in part to under-feeding, but a little also to the radical idealist’s too-frequent inattention to matters of the toilet. His collar had a greyish look and his cuffs were not there!

Dr. Nicolai enjoys the distinction of being the first person to establish the war against war on a scientific basis. His “Biology of War” is an arresting and most valuable contribution to the literature of the movement. During the war he was constantly coming into collision with the German authorities for his pacifist utterances. He was several times tried for his offences, sentenced to prison, retried and tried again. The Government never actually imprisoned him. Such cases as his and Dr. Förster’s are worthy of note for two reasons. There are many people in England who believe that no voice was raised against the war and the war policy of the German Government by Germans in Germany during the war. This is demonstrated untrue. Then the comparatively mild treatment by the German authorities of their pacifist professors is interesting in view of the reputed intolerance of the German war-lords for those not of their own political breed. In 1918 Dr. Nicolai escaped to Denmark in an aeroplane, but is now back in his chair at the University of Berlin. There he is the centre of vicious attacks by reactionary professors, who pit against his new, their old, hoping the turn of the wheel will bring back the old order to the Fatherland.

The Conference and its several Commissions sat for three weeks. There were many occasions for social intercourse between the various sessions. The hotel was packed with interesting personalities. In view of his elevated position as Prime Minister of Hungary, I recall with interest my meeting with Count Teleki. He was presented to me as a moderate Socialist. It all depends upon definition. At that time the Bolsheviks were in power in Hungary. By comparison with Bela Kun I imagine Count Teleki sincerely believed himself a moderate Socialist. Or perhaps I took seriously what was intended for a joke. Perhaps it was one of those insincerities of speech, uttered to please and without the slightest regard to the truth, I found so common in the nationals of Latin and Balkan countries. Count Teleki’s present behaviour suggests the aristocratic reactionary rather than the Socialist. He is said to have aided Kaiser Karl in his ill-timed escapade. But in the Hôtel Belle Vue at the brilliant dinner table he was the charming, cynical, cultivated friend of political saint and sinner alike; a scientist in exile; a professor without a chair; a patriot without a country; a good fellow and a jolly companion. He is a man of moderate height, with thin features and a clean-shaven face. He is not unlike Mr. Bertrand Russell in appearance, and is probably not more than forty years of age. From my conversation with him I cannot imagine for a moment that he is in sympathy with the action of the Hungarian extremists, who have instituted a “White Terror” worse than the Red since the fall of Bela Kun and his associates. And I think it only fair in this connexion to say that every Hungarian with whom I spoke in Berne agreed that Bela Kun himself was no sympathizer with the behaviour of his own extremists. He suffered the common fate of rulers tossed up by violent revolutions—the poisonous association of worse and stronger men than himself.

There was presented to me one day in the lobby of the hotel a tall thin man with laughing eyes and an engaging boyish manner, who had just challenged Fate by dashing at break-neck speed from Geneva to Berne in a powerful motor-car. His English was halting but perfectly intelligible, and he had a way of insinuating himself into the regard of a stranger which reminded one of the wiles of the “White-headed Boy.” It was Prince Ludwig Windischgraetz, the Winston Churchill of Hungary; the gay, irresponsible hero of a thousand romances, military, political and human. He is only thirty-eight years of age, but he has had a very full life, and has held positions of great responsibility in his country’s public life. At the time of the Conference in Budapest of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies he was one of the distinguished champions of votes for women. He was very much concerned that I should understand that he was a sincere democrat. I remember with some amusement at a lunch, where he and his wife, Mr. Rudolf Kommer and myself formed the party, taking his side most heartily in a hot discussion on the relative value of autocracy and democracy. He, the kinsman of kings, was all for democracy. Who was against it must be inferred. But the Prince was very much in earnest.

His memoirs, which are to be published in English very soon, will be interesting reading if they are anything like complete, for the adventures of this temperamental romanticist, this gallant and not too discreet patriot, this reckless and warm-hearted young aristocrat have been many and varied. Recklessness in politics is a dangerous thing; but Prince Windischgraetz has the personality which reminds one how mean a thing discretion can be. I have not the slightest doubt in my own mind that Prince Ludwig Windischgraetz was the prime instigator and organizer of the Kaiser Karl exploit.

But the Prince’s greatest romance is surely his wife. Princess Maria Windischgraetz is one of the loveliest women I have ever seen. Her beauty is of the English type: fair skin, golden hair and blue eyes. She is one of the few women outside feminist and Socialist circles I met on the Continent whose gaze is frank, and who leaves the impression of a decent attitude towards men. I wearied of it almost before I understood the sex-game as it is played in the cosmopolitan cities of Europe (doubtless of this country also). The insolent, sidelong look, the provocative dress, the tasteless conversation and gross manners of the women habituées of fashionable cafés and big continental hotels are a weariness of the flesh to the self-respecting. A relief it was after the hectic atmosphere of the hotel reception-rooms to meet this sweet Hungarian mother of five beautiful children who looks like a girl, and hear her unaffected talk about her home and her country. She very modestly claimed no understanding of politics; but had she had the power she knew enough and felt rightly enough to have saved her country from the pit into which politicians with more experience but less common sense had let it fall.

We met several times, each occasion happier than the last. From entirely different worlds, I think she would agree that we understood each other and held many ideas in common. I remember one meeting with peculiar tenderness. We were the guests of Mr. Rudolf Kommer on the Gurten-külm. After dinner we walked through the trees to see the moonlight on the Bernese Alps. I tried to comfort her with prophecies that all would be well with Hungary one day if Hungary did not lose faith in herself. “And when that day comes, do not, I beg of you, copy the methods you deplore in the Bolsheviks, establishing a White Terror instead of a Red. Someone has got to take a stand against the iniquities and cruelties of terrorism. Let those to whom more has been given do that, the educated, the rich, the aristocratic.”

I do not know what part, if any, Princess Maria has played in the recent politics of Hungary. Her estates have been restored to her; her country is hers once more. Whether or not she approved of the insane policy which has treated simple Trade Unionists and Co-operators as Bolsheviks, and still strikes discriminating blows at the poor Jews, I am not able to say. Probably not. But she said to me when I begged her to take up the cause of women in Hungary: “I have five children to care for and a husband to look after. I have little time for politics.”

Princess Maritza von Liechtenstein is another beautiful blonde who was living in Berne at the time of the Conference. She is stronger looking than Princess Windischgraetz, and more vigorous and active. Her English is amazingly perfect. She is the daughter of Count Geza Andrassy, the Hungarian patriot, and the mother of five or six handsome boys. She bitterly blamed Count Karolyi for having let loose the flood of Bolshevism upon Hungary, especially criticizing his land policy and the break up of the big estates. She evinced considerable interest in English politics. So did her distinguished uncle. Both confessed to a real liking for England which I believe was quite genuine. Count Andrassy appeared much broken by his country’s afflictions. In appearance he struck me as a refined edition of Thomas Carlyle in his later years. He has grey hair with touches of white, a square forehead, shaggy eyebrows, clear-cut features, a slightly stooping figure. A striking resemblance to my own father attracted me. He walked about the hotel full, as one could see, of grave preoccupation: not too occupied to save a woman from a mistake! I was taking tea with him and one other when the concierge brought to me a note from a man who claimed a mutual friendship with a highly respected friend of my own. This man in his wife’s name invited me to his home. I had never heard of the man. I read the name aloud. Count Andrassy suggested that I would be wise to decline the invitation, which I did. I afterwards discovered how right he was!

Prince Johann von Liechtenstein, the father of the six splendid boys, is a tall, grave, elegant man with blue eyes, black-fringed, and a reserved and earnest manner. Soft and slow of speech, without a trace of self-assertiveness, he made a friend of all with whom he came into contact.

Before leaving Berne I paid a visit of investigation to a camp for hungry Austrian children at Frutigen, on the invitation of Baroness von Einam, who ran the camp. This extraordinary woman collected incredible sums of money and organized this camp whilst other people were busy thinking about it. There in the Swiss mountains for seven weeks each, five or six hundred starving little Austrians lived. They were housed in the smaller hotels. Their teachers came with them. The villagers told us in answer to our questions that when the children first came nobody knew they were there, they crept about so languidly and quietly. The second week they began to sing and run about. The third week they tore the air with their happy yells. When we saw them they were about to go home. They looked rosy and brown and jolly. They had played in the fields all the morning. For us they were going to sing and dance. Their costumes were of paper, but very prettily made. And they went through their exercises with great grace and beauty. One incident only marred the day’s proceedings. A little girl had written to Vienna complaining that her teacher ate all her food. She was brought before Baroness Einam. The teacher, a red-faced girl of over-fed appearance, feeling herself wronged, rushed at the pale child as if to strangle her. The girl was stubborn and refused to make amends. What was done to the little Bolshevik I don’t know. But it was gratifying to the organizers of the scheme, and very interesting to us to discover that the kindly Swiss peasants grew so attached to the little Austrians that when the time came for them to go home they offered to keep them all until the next Austrian harvest.

We drove home through the lovely Swiss scenery in the cool evening air. But what obtrudes on the mind to spoil the memory of that drive? The six luckless idiots, with vacant faces and staring eyes, the disfiguring goitre thickening their poor throats, we counted on the roadside before we were out of sight of the little mountain town.

CHAPTER V
THE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN AT ZURICH (JUNE, 1919)

The Women’s International League for Permanent Peace came into existence during the war. It was founded by that section of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies which withdrew from the parent organization because it felt that the attitude of the Union to the war was compromising too seriously the reputation of its members for clear and calm thinking and constructive enterprise. Neutrality for an individual on questions related to the war was very difficult; for an organization it proved impossible. The educated women of the great women’s Union were quite unable to agree to differ on such matters as the causes and conduct and remedy for this and all wars. Some had to resign. The pacifists did so and formed their own organization. They included many of the best and most devoted workers for women’s causes in the country, such as Councillor Margaret Ashton and Miss Maude Royden. The broad line of division between these two sets of equally able women, now happily friends again, was nationalistic. “My country, right or wrong,” and “Let us get down to root causes,” are probably the phrases that represented fairly the different lines of action. Although in the Women’s International League there were many who believed with the others that right in this conflict lay wholly with this country, they differed in believing that the war should not be pursued to the knock-out blow, but should be ended as speedily as possible by the peaceful method of negotiation, if that were possible. But it is only fair to say that in their ultimate hopes and desires for permanent peace the two organizations do not differ by so much as a hair’s breadth.

The Women’s International League held its first Conference at the Hague in April of 1915. Immense difficulties blocked the way to the holding of this Conference. The British Government obstinately withheld passports till the last moment. These were finally granted with extreme reluctance, and more than a hundred women from Great Britain prepared to attend. Many of them actually reached Tilbury, bag in hand, ready to step on board, when the news came that the Channel had been closed and the ship would not sail. Many women to this hour are convinced that the closing of the Channel was a deliberate act on the part of the Government to prevent those women attending the Conference. I am inclined to think that the reason given was the correct one, that there were naval engagements actually begun or feared, which absolutely necessitated the stoppage of ordinary traffic. It would be altogether too encouraging to believe that the activities of a few women had such power to determine the conduct of the Government at such a time; and too flattering to imagine that our influence was of such consequence that this indirect method of achieving its will must in wisdom be adopted by the Government.

Only two British women were present at the Conference, the two who had gone to the Hague some weeks before to help with the organization. Forty American women, including the chairman, Miss Jane Addams, crossed the Atlantic to attend. Both German and Belgian women were present, and women from several other European countries contrived to attend in spite of the difficulties of travel which beset them. The Conference accomplished nothing of a material character, but it gave moral courage to those who were there, and directed the thought and activity of thousands of women throughout the world at a time when most people were feeling too intensely to be able to think clearly.

Miss Jane Addams, the President of the Women’s International League, is a very remarkable international figure. She is a tiny woman of sweet Quaker aspect, with her hair parted in the middle and brushed smoothly back from her ears. She has large sad eyes which look as though the pain of living were too great to be borne, so acutely does her sensitive spirit react to the suffering and injustice in the world. Her dress is simple. Her manner is calm and dignified, but tender to the young and needy, inviting confidence but not frivolity. She is, notwithstanding the general seriousness of her manner, full of humour, and can laugh with the best at a piece of genuine fun. The first time I visited America I sought her at Hull House, Chicago, the chief monument to her life’s labours. “You must go and see the greatest man in America,” said John Burns to me just before I sailed. “You mean President Roosevelt?” I queried. “I mean Jane Addams,” he replied. “The greatest man in America is a woman.” There are those who think they pay the highest compliment to a woman who speak of her greatness as of that of a man. My friend Dr. Anna Shaw told me that she was once introduced to an audience as a “very great woman—a woman with the brain of a man.” The Rev. Anna rose with a mischievous smile twitching the corners of her mouth, and in a drawling voice began: “Before I can take that as a compliment, Mr. Chairman, I want to see the man whose brain I’ve got!”

Jane Addams is indeed great with her own woman’s greatness, great with the greatness of pure goodness and intense and loving sympathies joined to more than ordinary powers of organization. Hull House was the first great Settlement House in Chicago. It was meant primarily to minister to the social and intellectual needs of the crowds of immigrant citizens flowing continually into the city. It comprises club houses for both sexes and all ages, a restaurant, a hospital, a gymnasium, baths, workrooms, library—everything, in short, which is necessary to make life tolerable in a dreary neighbourhood devoid of any of the amenities and most of the decencies of ordinary civilization.

The district round Hull House is filled with Greeks, Italians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians—a little Europe. Most of these people speak no English when they arrive. The young ones learn it quickly; the old ones slowly, or not at all. The young ones adopt American clothes, American manners, American slang; the old folk, particularly the women, keep as long as they can to their picturesque native dress. The young people turn up their noses at the old folk; the old people are lonely and miserable. Family life becomes threatened in many a home. Miss Addams noticed this. She established a workroom with primitive spinning wheels and weaving frames. She gathered the old people into this room to work at their native craft. She praised their work. She sold it for good prices. She brought rich citizens of Chicago to look at the work and admire it. The old people recovered their self-respect. The young people became subdued. Good feeling was restored and many a family made happy again. By such simple devices did Jane Addams make herself beloved of the poor and her international work of real account.

Miss Addams is, I am told, of Quaker ancestry, highly educated, and the friend of the élite of America. During the war she shared with others the pain of misunderstanding and abuse. I caught a glimpse of her suffering at the Kingsway Hall when she told of her work in Chicago in the early days of the war—five hundred bright Italian boys marching past Hull House to entrain for the war, followed by an equal number of young Bulgarians on the same errand, friends and brothers of the Settlement, soon to fall before one another’s fire in a war for which they were in no way responsible, and for reasons which they could not understand. Jane Addams’s mission of peace to many of the Courts of Europe was the outcome of a deep compassion for the young victims of war based upon experiences like this.

Her association with the peace ship was unfortunate, and her general attitude to the war caused her to suffer the unpopularity which all nonconformists must endure. But history will right her and them.

It was felt desirable after the Armistice to hold a second conference of the League in order to gather up the broken strands of international friendship and activity. During the League of Nations Conference in Berne a joint meeting of the women delegates and the officers of the Swiss branch of the Women’s International League was held to discuss the possibility of holding the Conference in Switzerland. The Swiss women were willing if the Swiss authorities would permit it and if help could be given them with the organization. I wired to Mrs. Swanwick, the British President, and satisfactory promises of help having been received, it was agreed that the Conference should be held in Zurich in June of 1919. All Europe was despairing of the Peace Treaty not yet published, and the delays were felt increasingly to be full of bad omen. Our Conference opened in brilliant sunshine amidst the gloomiest of fears.

Zurich is, like all Swiss cities, a model of bright cleanliness, its streets filled with flowers in the summer, its surroundings of wood and mountains a physical glory and a spiritual delight. And to add to it all there is the wonderful lake—truly a city for inspiration, if inspiration is anywhere to be felt in times like these.

I travelled in advance of my fellow-delegates, having preliminary business in Berne. During the previous Conference many lonely people, unable to reach their friends, had given me commissions in Paris and London, and I felt obliged to return to report the results. For example: I was writing a letter in the lounge of the Belle Vue Hotel when a beautiful little girl of twelve, with long fair hair and pink cheeks, came and spoke to me in perfect English. I was informed that she was a German child and that she enjoyed a distinguished name—von Kleist. I discovered later that she had a beautiful American mother, which accounted for her English, and that her father, Major von Kleist, was a prisoner of war in England. In reply to a wistful question I offered to see the father and convey greetings from the mother and child. The British authorities at home were as reasonable and generous as I have usually found them in all personal relationships, and I received permission to visit Major von Kleist in Skipton internment camp. He was glad to see someone who had so recently seen his wife and daughter, and who could testify from sight to their health and well-being.

On another occasion came two cultivated Jews from Czernowitz who had a mission to the Jewish Commissioners to the Paris Peace Conference. They could not get their visa and were in great trouble. The Zionist case would suffer if its supporters could not be heard. Would I help them by conveying their written statement to Paris? I knew Rabbi Wise, the Chief Commissioner, and engaged to take these papers to him. On reaching Paris I discovered that Rabbi Wise had returned to America, but delivered the document to his able substitute.

Then there were those who were working for the Siberian prisoners. Terrible stories were told of the sufferings of these wretched men—become nobody’s concern with the withdrawal of Russia from the war and the anarchy consequent upon the Revolution there. No fewer than a quarter of a million, chiefly Austrians and Hungarians, were left to starve and die in internment camps in conditions which beggar description. Some joined the Bolsheviks. Some escaped and died on the way home. Some were told to go, and fought, begged, stole their way to the Polish frontier, only to be told they could go no farther. A few, of a stronger breed, reached home in rags, to tell harrowing stories of incredible suffering. The Allies were petitioned to help with money and ships. They were begged to intercede with the Poles to allow the wretched men under proper control to cross the frontier. It was sought to get ships at Vladivostock to take them round the other way. The Hungarian Red Cross had a petition for President Wilson. Would I take it? I agreed to do so, and placed it in the hands of Colonel House. The men left alive have since been repatriated by the League of Nations, through the efforts of Dr. Nansen.

There were other and less important matters to report: The delivery of letters from Baron Szilassy and his sister to their friends in Huddersfield. Baron Szilassy was the newly appointed Hungarian Minister in Berne, and his sister is a fresh, good-natured girl, English in type. Both spoke excellent English.

So I travelled by Berne en route for Zurich, happy to be the bearer of many kind messages to lonely and miserable people. When I arrived in Zurich most of the British delegates had not arrived owing to passport troubles; but they appeared before the Conference began.

Mrs. Swanwick, the President of the British branch of the Women’s International League, is one of the most commanding personalities of the women’s movement. She is slender and fair, with a delightful boyish mop of pale gold hair which curls up at the ends, and sky blue eyes. She is a person of quite extraordinary intellectual power, a little lacking in tenderness to those of lesser calibre. She finds it extremely difficult to obey the scriptural injunction to “suffer fools gladly.” She is apt to take strong prejudices against people, which is annoying to herself, since it is inconsistent with her own standard of intellect and the conduct she demands of other people; but she has very good judgment in most affairs, and I should not be surprised to discover that in her prejudices she is generally right. Her courage, both physical and moral, is of the very first order and beyond all praise. She is very delicate and yet contrives to do the work of three people. And like many another, she staked everything except her self-respect when she took a public stand against the ignorant hatreds of the war. She is full of artistic appreciation, hates cant and humbug, and is devoted to practical things and persons. She is a very consistent and intrepid feminist, but happily devoid of the anti-man bias which is the mark of the feminist fool!

At the first session of the Conference, tender-hearted Isabella Ford flitted from one woman to another, busying herself in particular with the frail and underfed women from the ex-enemy lands, saying here and there the comforting helpful word to lonely souls inclined to a half-bitterness. There was one pathetic little creature from Vienna, since dead from privation, whose poor hands and face were a mass of festering sores left by the cold and under-nourishment of the previous winter. She was so happy to be there, and, like a little bird, hopped cheerily about the room, revelling in her reunion with old friends; but I heard privately that even in Switzerland, where food abounded, she was not getting enough to eat. The exchange told so heavily against her that practically all her money went to pay for her room and the morning coffee, and she was sitting all day without food. I engaged the interest of some of the more prosperous women, and believe that they were able by the exercise of tact to improve the circumstances of this brave little woman.

Isabella came to me the second morning with her eyes full of tears. “Dear Isabella, what is the matter?” I inquired. She showed me a telegram just received by her German neighbour announcing the death of her only daughter. “She is heart-broken,” said my friend. “She was an only child. And it was through hunger that the decline set in. She cannot speak to us this morning. And I do not wonder.”

Two ladies from Munich were the most vigorous speakers on the German side, and were immensely popular. One was Dr. Anita Augspurg, the other Fräulein L. G. Hyman. They live together in Munich, and were as inseparable at the Conference as the Siamese twins. Dr. Augspurg suggests a Franciscan monk in appearance. She wears her grey hair short. Her strong pleasant face has the expression of the religious fanatic whose conviction is founded upon reason, a rare phenomenon in any country, but a type frequently met in the Russian Socialist Movement. In addition, to help the illusion, she wears a severe and loose style of dress suggestive of the robe of a priest. She is kind austerity embodied, simple and dignified. Her intimate friend is more emotional, full of quick passion and, I should imagine, quicker prejudices. Like Dr. Augspurg she is a pacifist and an excellent advocate. Her voice is of masculine timbre, and she has a vigorous and compelling gesture. Both these ladies are extravagant anti-Prussians eager to secure for Bavaria its independence of Berlin. Their account of the revolution in Bavaria was intensely interesting and amusing, and perhaps a few words may be told here quite appropriately.

I have already mentioned Kurt Eisner, the long-haired delegate who met us at Berne railway station on our way to the International. Kurt Eisner was the leader of the Bavarian Revolution, and until his assassination was President-Prime Minister of the Bavarian Republic. For many years this very able Prussian Jew had been the dramatic critic of the German Socialist newspaper Vorwärts. He was a witty and brilliant writer, and was considered by æsthetic Berlin one of her greatest living authorities. Up to the time of the outbreak of war he had barely touched practical politics. His Socialism was the idealistic theorizing of the café habitué, or at best the philosophic conclusion of the amiable and able dreamer of dreams which ought to come true, but do not in a lifetime. When the war broke out he violently opposed the war policy of the German Government. His articles were censored; he was thrown into prison. He was living in Munich at this time. The downfall of the military power in Germany set him free. Having suffered for his faith, he was acclaimed by the leaderless Socialist Movement of Munich one of the martyrs of militarism and the predestined chief of the pacifist Socialist Movement of Bavaria.

The young intellectuals of Munich were yelling all the time “Down with militarism,” but nobody quite knew how it was to be “downed.” The idea occurred to Eisner to march to the palace with a dozen men and demand the abdication of the king. They carried with them a strongly worded manifesto expressing in beautiful language their fine ideals, and marched up to the door of the palace in truculent mood prepared for the worst, hoping for the best. The best was realized. The royal forces offered no resistance. All they asked was that the king might retire unmolested. This was granted. Eisner was set up in the king’s place, head of the new Republic. In a quarter of an hour, without the firing of a shot, the dynasty which had ruled for centuries was suspended, and a member of the despised race, a Jew, and a hated Prussian, was elevated in its stead.

It was a revolution made inevitable by the defeat of the militarists of Germany; but it might have been lasting if the militarists of the Allies had gone the same way. As it is, the peace has made that impossible. The present reaction in Bavaria, the general restoration in Central Europe of a belief in the power of the sword, is due to the revelation of the fact contained in the various Peace Treaties that the power of the sword is the power in which the Allies also trust. It would have been better for the revolution in Bavaria if Kurt Eisner had declined to be the symbol of the new order, for a Prime Minister of the race of the Jews was intolerable to aristocrat and peasant alike.

Kurt Eisner was not a politician, as I have already said. He was an artist in words. He was a Bohemian in habits. He loved to frequent the cafés. He could not in his new office drop at once the habits and interests of a lifetime. Infinitely illuminating of the man’s tastes and political judgment is his first act after taking office. It was the reorganization of the theatre of Munich! He was not able to keep separate the two sides of his life, the social and the political, as wiser men would have done. He mixed the beer and tobacco and gossip of the café with the work, organization and government of the council chamber. Many of his followers and helpers copied his ways. The young men who served him ought to have been allowed to continue playing billiards in the Café Stéfanie. Most of them were unfit for the great responsibilities so suddenly thrust upon them. Similar to the experience of Lenin and of most of the other Socialist leaders who had power suddenly thrust upon them was that of Kurt Eisner, who became the prey of revolution-profiteers, place-hunters, adventurers, insincere men and women who professed the new political creed as eagerly as they held the old. “This sort of thing,” said the great Lincoln solemnly, “will ultimately test the strength of our democratic institutions.” It has tainted their reputation already.

At the International Kurt Eisner was prime favourite with the French delegates because he was so bitter and unsparing in his attacks on Imperial Germany. He was not a great orator, but he impressed his audience with the passionate sincerity of every word he spoke. It was one of his speeches in Berne which was said to have determined his murderer, the young Count Arco, to kill him. It concerned the German prisoners of war who were then, four months after the war, still held back in France. Eisner tried to explain the French point of view in the matter. He was represented in Germany as having approved of it. It was felt to be intolerable. He was shot dead. And the shot made a martyr of a man, amiable, kind, gifted, slovenly in dress and habit, who had already outlived his usefulness to the Revolution and was about to resign, and who might have retired to some café and talked and smoked his life away to its happy and unimportant end. For me he is an interesting memory; but I have to confess to the faint lingering of a feeling of resentment, the feeling I have always been unable to conquer for that type of pacifist, to be found in every country, who tries to absorb for his own government the entire responsibility for the war.

It is impossible to name all the brilliant and capable women who attended this Conference. Amongst them was Miss Crystal Macmillan, tall and “bonny” and Scottish, the lawyer of the Conference, born to confound the illogical male; Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, vivacious, eloquent and warm; Frau Herzka of the mischievous smile and the everlasting cigarette; Mademoiselle Gobat, the gifted daughter of the renowned Swiss pacifist; Mademoiselle Melan from France, whose wonderful speech electrified the assembly and melted to tears the hardest pro-Ally and to softness the bitterest pro-German; and a host of others from the four corners of the earth, women whose names are household words in their respective countries. It was a good Conference, and gave direction to the thoughts and impulses of many who would otherwise have struggled in vain against the national psychology, and beaten their idealism to death against the almost indestructible barbed wires of national hates and prejudices.