LAJNU & WATER 
August ID, 1917 
delivery ^i .-.a li and such territory, tJie imposition of such 
and siich ctmpcnsations which last, may, upon an exact 
balanc^, cancel out so that peaci corner apparently with no 
resuh to cither party, and the war has seemed a sterile fraud. 
But the ultimate result is the preponderance of one spirit 
against another. You may say that the Thirty Years War 
was a draw. The Empire and the South had won ; , France 
turned the scale in favour of the Northern and Protestant 
Princes. The conqueror was content to negotiate. The 
party at lirst defeated was allowed to live. Was there, 
therefore, no lonsequence in history ? There was a vast 
consequence. Northern (ieimany gradually acquired the 
preponderance. It drew ahead. A handicap had been im- 
posed, and of the two competitors that which at first had the 
best chance, was, in the long run, surpassed. 
The Civil Wars in this country resulted in a compromise 
which maintained and actually restored the Crown. Sharp 
sanctions appeared to reaffirm its ancient power ; but the 
negotiation and the truce bore their fruit, and modern Eng- 
land derived not from the restored monarchy, but from the 
Parliament of the merchants and the squires. 
There is no Peace in history, no termination of a conflict 
between opposing ideals of wliich it can ever be said that each 
lias retired to its own boundaries and left the future un- 
affected- There is always and there must necessarily be a 
victor and a vanquished. Perhaps in the processes of history 
these struggles which have lasted longest and have ended by 
the most apparent compromise, are those which have most 
strongly emphasised in the long run the victory of the one 
paity over the other. 
A negotiated peace at the present moment means this : 
That a Power armed in Europe, its armament supported 
enthusiastically by all its nationals, could violate treaties, 
could introduce into war horrors hitherto unknown, could 
enslave Europeans, could massacre and could yet remain 
strong, and unpunished. It would mean that this country, 
having drawn the sword, not only with a fighting object 
in view, but after puWic reiteration of that object, sheathed 
it again with an apology, and a confessi( n that it had not the 
strength to attain the goal for which it had set out. It would 
mean that the various Allies, and in particular the two 
principal Alliesi, the French and the English, would enter a 
future in whicli each was conscious of defedt and each at 
heart would be blam'ng his partner and what is worse, 
himself : For men and nations when they are afflicted with 
bitterness suffer this double evil of eating into themselves 
and losing their friends. 
It would mean that thegreaterpart of European civilisation 
would look back to the Geimun defence and its success as the 
capital military event of the mr)dern world and would see in 
the armed power of Central Europe (which you may amuse 
yourself by calling an autocracy or a democracy or what you 
will), the one foundation upon wliich it could repose. 
It would mean, without a shadow of doubt, the control 
of the Near East ; of the Polish people, of the Baltic and the 
Black Sea and their twin Straits, by those who are now our 
enemies. No ink and paper nor solemn signatures at a green 
table could prevent that. It would, therefore, mean the 
permanent and perhaps rapid decline of Western civilisation, 
and in particular of this country. 
It might mean, if the West remain sufficiently strong, a 
cycle of wars. It might mean, and would perhaps more 
probably mean, a peace of deeper and deeper humiliation 
The only alternative is victory. If y<ju say with the enemy 
pmned upon the West, suffering passively blow upon blow 
and never able to restore himself alter each blow, or to recover 
what he has lost ; with his territory blockaded ; his youngest 
boys drawn into the struggle, that your victory is impossible • 
if you say this in the teeth of what your son can tell you 
returning from the front, and what, if you visit the front you 
will see with your own eyes, then confess yourself the citizen 
of a defeated nation and enjoy during what is left of your life 
the fruits of that confession. But if you think things have 
not yet reached that pass, and if you think there are still 
powerful armies in the field, and that their action has not 
been vain, then persevere. H Belloc 
Consultative Treason 
By H. M. Hyndman 
IT is already quite impossible to take the vote of the 
Labour Party Conference seriously. But the absurd 
muddle of the whole affair ; the acceptance by a 
large majority of the proposal that forty-four British 
Labour delegates should meet in fraternal harmony, those 
corrupt fuglemen of atrocities, Scheidemann, Sudekum, 
Ebert and Co., as well as the minority Social-Democrats, who 
practically support the same Imperial programme ; Mr. 
Arthur Henderson's strange speech and still stranger suppres- 
sion of the official cablegram from the Russian Government, 
disclaiming formally any sympathy with the Stockholm 
Conference ; Mr. Ramsay Macdonald's reference, on behalf 
of the pacifist section, to our infamous German enemies as 
"our German friends "—all these things have done the 
Labour Party, as at present organised, incalculable mischief. 
There are, indeed, elements of the ludicrous in the entire 
conference. 
The Russian Workers' and Soldiers' Committee, possessed 
of no International Socialist or Labour authority whatever, 
takes upon itself to call an International Socialist and I,abour 
Conference at Stockholm, to consider the terms of peace with 
the German Powers and their confederates, on the basis of 
" no annexations and no indemnities." This programme is 
already vague, inconclusive and irregular enough. But the 
conclusions arrived at were nevertheless to be binding on all 
sections represented 1 Our British Labour Delegates 
assembled, in their collective wisdom decide, under the direc- 
tion of a member of the War Cabinet and the Secretary of 
the Labour Party, Mr. Arthur Henderson, to wit (just back 
from acting as Special Government Envoy and Plenipotentiary 
.to Petrograd), that they entirely decline the Russian invita"- 
tion as it stands. They will have nothing to do with dis- 
cussing the peace which the Petrograd Committee is so eager 
to promote, virtually in the German interest ; but they will 
despatch their chosen forty-four missioners of brotherhood 
to Stockholm, for purely consultative purposes, which shall 
bind nobody to anything. Shall bind nobody to anything— 
except to meet and consult with the bitter enemies of our 
country ! But for this item in the programme, men who 
know their own minds about the situation would laugh 
heartily at the hopeless incon.sequence of the arrangement. 
That decision, however, to meet the German Kaiserists, is 
so disgraceful that I do not believe the delegates themselves 
fully understood what they were voting for. 
For consider. Great Britain and her Colonies have been 
engaged for more than three years upon by far the most 
desperate and dangerous war ever waged. That is nowadays 
a platitude, universally accepted as the baldest possible state- 
ment of the truth. Hundreds of thousands of men of the 
same class as the delegates, and thousands of millions sterhng 
ot the wealth which they themselves create, have been 
sacrificed, in order to defeat an unprovoked attack by the most 
formidable aggressive militarism of modern times on all its 
neighbours. Prussian militarism, controlling the entire forces 
of Central Europe, meant and means to crush us and all our 
Alhes, if it possibly can, to bleed us white in the event of 
victory, and at last to secure its domination first over 
Europe and then over the civihsed world. Nobody who has 
studied German military pronouncements, or has carefully 
followed the course of the war, can honestly deny this. More- 
over, there is nothing whatever to show that this vast policy 
of Imperial expansion has been abandoned, or that Geimany 
has given up her attempt to establish herself as the supreme 
power — Germany over all. 
To talk, therefore, of " the democratisation " of the Father- 
land at this juncture is preposterous. The whole nation 
with a very very few honourable exceptions, is at one 
Bethmann-Hollweg was in fact, turned out, and Michaehs 
w^s put in his place, because Junkerdom and pan-Germanism 
are as strong to-day in Germany as ever they were. All the 
peace babble in the Reichstag "and the criticism of the so- 
called minority Social-Democrats (who also voted the war 
credits after having solemnly pledged themselves to Belgium 
and trance not to do so) only mean, so far, that the war has 
been much less successful than they aU expected ; that the 
Joss of men and the high price of food are rousing some dis- 
content with the management of the glorious national endea- 
vour by the Kaiser and his generals ; and that consequently 
a German peace would be generally welcome. But no terms 
of peace of any kind have ever been formulated by the German 
Government, wth whom alone it is possible to negotiate 
unless or until a revolution has taken place. 
Ihat revolution, those who -know Germany best are 
confident will not occur until after the war, if then. There 
IS as little hope of it now as there was in July 1014 The 
Germans we have all known and know, are still one solid body 
m their determination to fight for victory. But they arc holding 
on to every bit of the territory seized, in order, should aattcrs 
