PACIFICISM IN BRITAIN

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 68, 13 December 1938, Page 3

PACIFICISM IN BRITAIN

Peace Pledge League

A GROWING MOVEMENT

London is not Great Britain, says Harold Hobson. It Is the seat of Government. It has a population of nearly 10,000,000. It covers an area of hundreds of square miles, and sprawls into half a dozen counties. It has three daily newspapers which enjoy a circulation of nearly 6.000,000 copies among them. It is the headquarters of the English world of sport and entertainment. But observers who are dazzled by these facts into believing that everything important in Great Britain is written large in London make a serious error. London is not the centre of those vast industries on which the economic prosperity of Britain depends. It is not the capital of Britain’s world of learning. One can live in London, in the very heart of its multifarious activities, for quite a long time, and never realize the potential strength of the pacifist movement in Britain, even though its headquarters are to be found in Regent Street. My own personal impression, until one week-end recently I went down to Penzance. was that pacifism in England was of little practical account, I thought that it was confined to a handful of enthusiastic clergymen and a few sincere and simple-hearted people who counted for scarcely anything in (he moulding of public opinion. But in Penzance one got a rather different view.

This small seaside town is in the extreme south-west of England, not more than a dozen miles'from Ijiind s End. It has a population of about 12,000, a couple of theatres, a long foreshore with a magnificent view of St. Michael's Mount, with its eastle, dominating the bay. and a cinema. It has. therefore, especially on a fine spring evening, no lack of amusement and occupations. On this occasion, however, I here wa s a pacifist meeting in one of the largest buildings in the town.

I was somewhat surprised to find, when I arrived, a quarter of an hour before the advertised time of starting, that, although Ihe biggest ball in the building had been engaged, there were no seats left. Font* hundred people were already inside, and more were crowding in every moment. Great quantities of additional chairs and benches had to be hurriedly sent for. ’Phis, surely, was a significant sight. If half a thousand people could be gathered on a pleasant evening, in spite of several oilier attractions, in a town hardly bigger than a village, far from the points of potential danger in the event of war. to hear an exposition of the fundamentals of pacifism, it is clear that there exists in Britain a strong body of feeling that is at any rate prepared favourably to consider the claims of this particular attitude toward the problems of today.

Canon Smart Morris and the Revcrend Donald Soper put forward the outlines of the pacifist c.'ise, AA'ar. they maintained, never solved any problem in the past. War. by its very nature, destroys the principles in defence of which a nation goes to war. For in a war one cannot tell the truth, and is compelled to kill and to hate. AVar is wrong. Constructive Side. On the constructive side it was urged that Imperialism should h abandoned, and that the German claim to colonies should be met with an offer from Great Britain to bold her Empire only under mandate. The meeting received the addresses

with approval, though allowance should perhaps be made for the fact that both speakers were orators of considerable force and power. But in any case one could not fail to perceive the significance of the circumstance that meetings of this nature are now taking place up and down the country, everywhere attracting a small but increasing body of earnest and sincere adherents pledged not to resort to war in any event whatever. I learned from Canon Morris in London a few days later that the number of those who have formally taken this pledge is now roughly 120,000. Each week about 200 new members of the Peace Pledge Union, as the movement in various parts of the United Kingdom, upwards of eight hundred subsidiary groups. Its organisation is sufficiently widespread for it to publish an official paper, called “Peace News.”

The Peace Pledge Union developed out of a letter that the late Canon Dick Sheppard wrote to “The Times” in 1934. Canon Sheppard asked all men and women who agreed with him to affirm: “AVe renounce war. and never again, directly or indirectly, will we support or sanction another.” Out of the response to that letter came the Peace Pledge Union, sponsored by such people as Aliss A'era Brittain, Air. Aldous Huxley, Aliss Rose Macaulay, Lord Ponsonby. Air. Bertrand Russell. Air. Siegfried Sassoon. Air. Sopor and Canon Alorris.

In reckoning up the forces that make British opinion today, the Peace Pledge not, is a power not to be ignored.