In The Fourth Year - Anticipations of a World Peace (1918) | Page 8

hole-and-corner bargainings between
the officials or politicians who happen to be at the head of this or that
nation for the time being. Our Labour people will not stand this sort of
thing and they will not be bound by it. There will be the plain danger of
repudiation for all arrangements made in that fashion. A gathering of
somebody or other approved by the British Foreign Office and of
somebody or other approved by the French Foreign Office, of
somebody with vague powers from America, and so on and so on, will
be an entirely ineffective gathering. But that is the sort of gathering of
the Allies we have been having hitherto, and that is the sort of
gathering that is likely to continue unless there is a considerable
expression of opinion in favour of something more representative and
responsible.
Even our Foreign Office must be aware that in every country in the
world there is now bitter suspicion of and keen hostility towards merely
diplomatic representatives. One of the most significant features of the
time is the evident desire of the Labour movement in every European
country to take part in a collateral conference of Labour that shall meet
when and where the Peace Congress does and deliberate and comment
on its proceedings. For a year now the demand of the masses for such a
Labour conference has been growing. It marks a distrust of officialdom
whose intensity officialdom would do well to ponder. But it is the
natural consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a corrective to, the
aloofness and obscurity that have hitherto been so evil a characteristic
of international negotiations. I do not think Labour and intelligent
people anywhere are going to be fobbed off with an old-fashioned
diplomatic gathering as being that League of Free Nations they

demand.
On the other hand, I do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference
with the diplomatists trying to best and humbug the Labour people as
well as each other and the Labour people getting more and more
irritated, suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. The Allied
countries must go into the conference _solid_, and they can only hope
to do that by heeding and incorporating Labour ideas before they come
to the conference. The only alternative that I can see to this
unsatisfactory prospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side with a
dissentient and probably revolutionary Labour and Socialist
convention--both gatherings with unsatisfactory credentials
contradicting one another and drifting to opposite extremes--is that the
delegates the Allied Powers send to the Peace Conference (the same
delegates which, if they are wise, they will have previously sent to a
preliminary League of Allied Nations to discuss their common action at
the Peace Congress), should be elected ad hoc upon democratic lines.
I know that this will be a very shocking proposal to all our able
specialists in foreign policy. They will talk at once about the
"ignorance" of people like the Labour leaders and myself about such
matters, and so on. What do we know of the treaty of so-and-so that
was signed in the year seventeen something?--and so on. To which the
answer is that we ought not to have been kept ignorant of these things.
A day will come when the Foreign Offices of all countries will have to
recognize that what the people do not know of international agreements
"ain't facts." A secret treaty is only binding upon the persons in the
secret. But what I, as a sample common person, am not ignorant of is
this: that the business that goes on at the Peace Congress will either
make or mar the lives of everyone I care for in the world, and that
somehow, by representative or what not, I have to be there. The Peace
Congress deals with the blood and happiness of my children and the
future of my world. Speaking as one of the hundreds of millions of
"rank outsiders" in public affairs, I do not mean to respect any peace
treaty that may end this war unless I am honestly represented at its
making. I think everywhere there is a tendency in people to follow the
Russian example to this extent and to repudiate bargains in which they
have had no voice.
I do not see that any genuine realization of the hopes with which all this

talk about the League of Nations is charged can be possible, unless the
two bodies which should naturally lead up to the League of
Nations--that is to say, firstly, the Conference of the Allies, and then
the Peace Congress--are elected bodies, speaking confidently for the
whole mass of the peoples behind them. It may be a troublesome thing
to elect them, but it will involve much more troublesome consequences
if they