• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As 1917 wore on, antiwar rallies drew larger crowds. Charlotte Despard and several other women formed a new organization, the Women's Peace Crusade. "I should like the words 'alien' and 'foreigner' to be banished from the language," she said in one speech. "We are all members of the same family." Despard traveled the country speaking and visiting the families of COs to keep their spirits up. One hundred thousand readers bought copies of a peace pamphlet she wrote.

Christabel Pankhurst was horrified. "I consider the Pacifists a disease ... a very deadly disease," she declared in Britannia this summer, "which you will find has afflicted every dead nation of the past." The spectacle of British labor unions daring to strike in wartime laid bare her authoritarianism: "Could you listen to an orchestra in which each person played according to his own ideas or the ideas of a committee instead of answering to the beat of the conductor?" she thundered in a speech. "Well, it is just the same in industry. There must be authority, control, discipline."

Where Pankhurst could only bluster about control, Milner made sure action was taken. Every working-class gathering should be monitored, he wrote in August to the home secretary, who was in charge of police and prisons, lest it "turn into a pacifist and revolutionary meeting." Within the next several months, the police staged some 30 raids on pacifist and socialist groups, seizing files, printing equipment, and crates of pamphlets, and sabotaging those printing presses they left behind. The government opened the mail of antiwar dissidents and quietly made sure that prowar publications and the printers of officially approved propaganda received almost all of the tightening supply of newsprint.

With some exceptions, however, the authorities did not jail people speaking out against the war or ban meetings. Seldom, points out the historian Brock Millman, "did the government prohibit, where it could discourage, or discourage where it was safe or politic to ignore." When some officials were considering prosecuting George Bernard Shaw for an antiwar article he had written, the home secretary successfully argued against it: "Shaw will make the most [of it] both here and in America.... But the very fact that we allow such matter to emanate from England would be proof of the lightness of our censorship and an indication of ... strength."

And strength, in the end, was what the prowar forces had. Despite the heady resolutions at Leeds, efforts to organize workers' and soldiers' soviets came to naught. When Bertrand Russell led a meeting to form a soviet in London, Basil Thomson asked the jingoistic Daily Express to print the address. Several hundred hostile demonstrators, singing "Rule Britannia," stormed into the Congregational church where the "soviet" was meeting. The crowd broke down a door, shattered windows, ripped out the church's gas and water pipes, and left several delegates injured. It was only when someone told the police that Russell was the brother of an earl that they rushed to protect him from women waving boards studded with rusty nails. "The mob is a terrible thing when it wants blood," Russell wrote that day. Despard had no better luck with the workers' and soldiers' soviet she tried to convene at Newcastle. The only visible soldiers were rowdy off-duty ones who broke up the gathering with their fists.

Critics could point out, of course, that Despard and Russell were quite far from being either workers or soldiers. But the real cause of their failure was that Britain was a democracy, however imperfect a one. Unlike Russia, there was little pent-up popular hunger for revolution, and the government waging the war had been elected. The radical Leeds conference made the headlines, but a more accurate gauge of British working-class feeling was to be found at a meeting in Manchester this same year where delegates representing nearly two million union members voted