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

“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 crit

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

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

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 Pol

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 prov

It was not the full International, but the special Council appointed by it which met at Lucerne in July of 1919. This time my position was that of a representative of the Press, and not a delegate. I had an honorary commission from a London daily newspaper to report the proceedings of the Conference. I am afraid my report was not too sympathetic. Everybody felt the same thing in some degree. Far too much time was wasted on petty national squabbles. The old fight on responsibility for the war was

After spending two weeks at the mountain hotel in Berne I succeeded in getting a passport for Vienna in August, 1919; but it was an Austrian passport. A certain relaxation of the rules of the British Foreign Office in favour of the representatives of the Press wishing to travel in Austria was made in July of that year. For the future such people were not required to have a British visum for a journey to Vienna. So I was informed by several returned newspaper men who had taken no trouble of this

At the first meeting of the International in Berne in 1919 I was very much interested in a lively little man from Alsace-Lorraine. His name was Grumbach, and he had a house in Berne, and a handsome wife with bright hair and a plump figure. In appearance he reminded me a little of an English coachman. He was smooth-shaven, with a bit of hair left on either cheek in the old-fashioned way. His face was round, and he had a sweet and rather childlike mouth. His eyes were very merry, and his manner ki

I have told the story of my visit to Russia in a separate volume. A reference to the last chapter of “Through Bolshevik Russia” would help towards a clearer understanding of the few additional pages upon Russia which are all that can be spared to it in this book. That chapter speculates upon the future of Soviet Russia. I have seen no reason since writing that book to revise in the slightest degree the judgment of Bolshevism there expressed. One of the points of criticism levelled against it by

On our way from Saratov on the Volga, to Reval, the interesting old capital of Esthonia, my colleagues and I discussed the possibility of returning to London via Berlin. Dr. Haden Guest and I were especially interested in the condition of child-life in the German cities, he from the point of view of a humane medical man, I as a member of the Executive Committee of the Save the Children Fund, charged with the administration of large sums of money for the relief of the suffering children of Europe

“I hear you are going to Georgia,” said Mr. Macdonald to me as we sipped our coffee in the hotel breakfast room one morning in Geneva. I had heard nothing about an expedition to Georgia and expressed my surprise. “Well, I happen to know that arrangements are on foot for a delegation from the Second International to visit that country and that we shall be amongst those invited to go. Will you accept?” he continued, lighting his pipe and rising to go. My first impulse was to say no. I had been hom

M. Camille Huysmans persuaded me to accept the Georgian invitation. “The Georgians want you to come very particularly because you were in Russia recently. They want someone who can make comparisons between the Bolshevik Government of Russia and the Social Democratic Government of their own country. It would be helpful to them, and would be interesting and useful to you.” The delegation was selected from the Second International. Besides myself, Mr. J. R. Macdonald and Mr. Tom Shaw were invited f

After three interesting and informing days spent in Tiflis, a city beautifully situated upon many hills, we left for a ten days’ excursion into various parts of the country. The first trip was to Kasbec in the Caucasus Mountains. Eight automobiles, with a complete camera and moving-picture equipment and a couple of newspaper men, drew up in front of our door at 7 o’clock one morning. The rain poured in torrents. The air was hot and sultry. We were advised, none the less, to take with us the warm

After a very happy two weeks in Georgia, we left for the homeward trip. The special train brought us to Batoum overnight. The day we spent in wandering about the city’s bazaars. Everything was ridiculously cheap for those possessed of English money, though for some curious reason which I never explored the Turks and Armenians whose shops we visited were forbidden to accept English pounds. Some did accept them on the guarantee of our guide, an English-speaking Georgian, that no evil would come to

Late one evening I was returning home from a Fabian lecture when a tall, middle-aged man, with slightly wavy hair and a pair of merry blue eyes, accosted me. He carried under his arm a large and rather untidy brown-paper parcel, which looked as though it might contain groceries and gave him the appearance of the middle-class father of a family. His voice was soft and pleasant, his accent unmistakably Irish. “Pardon me, madam, but are you an Irishwoman?” he asked interestedly. “No,” I replied. “I

It is, of course, as difficult as most such things to measure, but in the course of my travels and talks, I received the impression that there is less of religious intolerance amongst the Catholics than amongst the Protestants; at any rate in the South. The faith of the minority there appears to be treated with greater respect than the faith of the minority in Ulster. I came across numerous instances in the country between Dublin and Cork of a violent distaste for the provocative behaviour of bi

And the fruits of these wanderings abroad are—what? For two hours I sat in the old-world garden of an English manor house pondering the answer to that question. Old-fashioned and variegated flowers in every colour of the rainbow massed themselves around the moss-covered rocks, climbed the walls, and peeped out of the crevices and corners, throwing out strong, sweet scents of the wallflower and the jasmine. The shadow on the sundial crept slowly round its withered face. Tall elm trees sheltered t