Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [157]
Mr. Balfour, the acting Foreign Secretary for Lord Salisbury, was not an entirely suitable victim for Bülow’s manipulations. However skeptical of results, the British Government, unlike the German, did not feel threatened by an international conference and did not intend to bear the brunt of wrecking it. Moreover, public enthusiasm could not be flouted in England. In the four months following the Czar’s manifesto, over 750 resolutions from public groups reached the Foreign Office welcoming the idea of an international conference and expressing the “earnest hope,” in the words of one of them, that Her Majesty’s Government would exert their influence to ensure its success “so that something practical may result.” The resolutions came not only from established peace societies and religious congregations but from town and shire meetings, rural district committees, and county councils, were signed by the Mayor, stamped with the county seal, forwarded by the Lord Lieutenant. Some without benefit of official bodies came simply from the “People of Bedford,” “Rotherhead Residents” or “Public Meeting at Bath.” Many came from local committees of the Liberal party, although Conservative groups were conspicuously absent, as were Church of England congregations. All the Nonconformist sects were represented: Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Christian Endeavor, Welsh Nonconformists, Irish Evangelicals. The Society of Friends collected petitions with a total of 16,000 signatures. Bible associations, adult schools, women’s schools, the National British Women’s Temperance Association, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, the West of Scotland Peace and Arbitration Association, the Humanitarian League, the Oxford Women’s Liberal Association, the General Board of Protestant Dissenters, the Mayor of Leicester, the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, the Town Clerk of Poole, were among the signatories.
Bound volumes of the resolutions signed with a shaky “S.” indicated that Lord Salisbury was keeping track of public opinion. A deputation representing the International Crusade of Peace headed by the Earl of Aberdeen and the Bishop of London visited Mr. Balfour, who received them with a graceful speech taking “a sanguine view of the diminution, I will not say the extinction, but the diminution of war in the future” and looking forward to the coming conference as a “great landmark in the progress of mankind,” whether or not, he added, it produced any practical results. This was not altogether what Bülow had hoped for.
The epitome of the peace movement was the most ebullient and prolific journalist of an age rich in his kind, William T. Stead, founder and editor of the Review of Reviews. Stead was a human torrent of enthusiasm for good causes. His energy was limitless, his optimism unending, his egotism gigantic. As the self-estimated pope of journalism his registered telegraph address was “Vatican, London.” During the eighties he had edited the Liberal daily, the Pall Mall Gazette, in a series of explosions that made it required reading in public life. “You are too strenuous, too uniformly strenuous,” pronounced the Prince of Wales who read it regularly. Stead waded recklessly into crusades ranging from protection of prostitutes to a “Sane Imperialism.” They included campaigns against Bulgarian atrocities, Siberian convict life, the desertion of General Gordon at Khartoum, Congo slavery, the labour victims of “Bloody Sunday” in Trafalgar Square, and for baby adoption, village libraries, Esperanto, international scholars’ correspondence, and housing for the poor. His most notorious effort, published under the title “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” described his personal purchase of a thirteen-year-old girl for £5 as a means of dramatizing the procurement of child virgins for prostitution. The articles made a world sensation, and besides causing Stead’s trial and imprisonment on a charge of abduction, succeeded in forcing an amendment raising the age of consent from