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Ebook has 1833 lines and 70184 words, and 37 pages

INTRODUCTION ix

CONCLUSION 271

INDEX 275

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.

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

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!"

"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. hty fine things about you three space bongos, Tommy. It's a wonder the Solar Guard didn't give you a unit citation for aiding in the capture of Coxine, the pirate!"

"Thanks, Mike. Coming from you that compliment really means something!"

"Just be sure you keep those two space lunatics in their proper cages," said Mike, indicating Roger and Astro, who at the moment were racing back and forth along the slidewalk bumping passengers left and right, "and you'll all be heroes someday."

"Yes, sir," said Tom. He glanced up, and noticing that he was in front of the Tower building, hopped to the walkway, waving a cheery good-by to Mike. "Blast over to our mess and have dinner with us some night, Mike!" he yelled to the departing figure.

"And interrupt the happiest hours in Astro's life?" bawled Mike. "No thank you!"

Tom laughed and turned to the huge open doorway of the Tower where Roger and Astro waited for him impatiently. In a few moments the three were being carried to the upper floors of the crystal structure by a spiraling band of moving plastic that stretched from the top of the Tower to the many floors below surface level. Tom glanced at his wrist chronograph as they stepped off the slidestairs and headed for Captain Strong's quarters.

"We're about twenty minutes late," he said to Roger and Astro. "Hope Captain Strong's in good spirits!"

"If he isn't," said Roger, "we can--"

"Don't say it," protested Astro. "I only just finished working off my last bunch of galley demerits."

Strong snapped a return salute and walked to the front of his desk. "Getting pretty big for your britches, aren't you?" he growled. "I've been watching you from this window. I saw the messenger deliver my orders to you, and then, I saw you return to your game and finish it, apparently deciding that the business of the Solar Guard can wait!"

"But, sir--" Roger started to say.

"Close your exhaust, Manning!" snapped Strong. "I'm doing the talking!"

"Yes, sir," stammered the blond-haired cadet.

"Then blast out of here and report to Commander Walters for your assignments. Tell him I'll be there in a few minutes."

"Yes, sir!" said Tom, and the three cadets saluted sharply.

Outside in the hall once more, the three cadets wiped their faces.

"Captain Strong definitely was not in a good mood!" commented Roger.

"I've never seen him so angry!" said Tom. "Wonder why."

"Think it might be something to do with our assignments?" asked Astro.

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