NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

Evening Star, Issue 21900, 11 December 1934, Page 9

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

AWARDS ANNOUNCED SIR NODMAM AHCELL AND MR HENDERSON Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright OSLO, December 10. (Received December 11, at 10 a.m.) Sir Norman Angell has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1933 and Mr Arthur Henderson for 1934. MR A. HENDERSON Among those who have played an important role in the solution of Europe’s problems—debts and disarmament—is Mr Arthur Henderson, president of the Disarmament Conference. Mr Henderson is the organising genius of the Labour Party; is affectionately known to the members of the movement as “ Undo Arthur.” He was horn in 1863 in a humble district in Glasgow, but his family left there for Newcastle when he was a boy, and when he left school he. became a moulder in the great works of Robert Stephenson. Ho first made his reputation as a platform speaker as a Wesleyan lay preacher, and was an active

trade unionist at the same time. He was a member of the City Council, and became Mayor of Darlington in 1903, and later a magistrate in tho County of Durham. His first appearance on the political horizon was when he was chosen as colleague for John Morley at Newcastle in 1895. He was a Radical in those days, but he withdrew in favour of another candidate who was a friend of his. His career is an example of true Scottish doumess and doggedness. The element of luck, however, would seem to have played no small part in his career, because two or three times he has been ousted from a fairly safe seat and had to wait for a byelection before he was returned. He was chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party as far back as 1910, and under the Coalition Government he was President of the Board of Education (1915-16), Postmaster-General, and Labour Adviser to tho Government in 1916, and as a member of the War Cabinet (Minister of Health portfolio) he went on a Government mission to Russia in 1917. It was on his return that there occurred the notorious historical incident when he was left on the mat; in other words, Mr Lloyd George had kept him standing outside the Cabinet room while his colleagues were discussing the frank and honest findings he had expressed in favour of Russia to the chagrin of Mr Lloyd George and his fellow-Ministers.

If all stories are true, Mr Henderson has never forgiven Mr Lloyd George for that incident. Mr Henderson was Home Secretary in the Labour Government in 1924. He served several years as Chief Whip, and took that post again after the fall of the Labour Government and the Zinovieff letter election. He later held the important post of Minister of Foreign Affairs. A man of medium height, Mr Henderson is stout and impressive, but he has not a brilliant personality. As a speaker he has qualities as an expounder and as a rhetorician. He speaks with an impassioned voice, and is respected and almost feared by his own supporters. He would be the last to claim personal popularity, but it is safe to say that there is no one on whom more reliance is placed than on Mr Henderson, and he is certainly the most distinguished of at least a dozen men who have found their way to Parliament, partly at least as the result of their experience as lay preachers or evangelists. SIR NORMAN ANGELL Anyone who has heard of ‘ The Great Illusion ’ knows of Sir Norman Angell, who was knighted by the last Labour Government, and who was the man to explode the theory that any nation could hope to make material gains from modern warfare. Norman Angell was born in 1874, his father being the late Thomas Angell Lane, J.P., of Mansion House, Holbeach. The boy was educated privately and at the Lycee de St. Omer, France, and ho led a varied life in the United States of America, first ranching and later prospecting, from which employment ho turned to newspaper work. In 1898, at the age of twenty-four, he returned to Europe as correspondent for various American newspapers. The following year he became editor of Galagnani’s ‘ Messenger,’ a post which he held for four years, and then passed to the .staff of the ‘ Eclair de Paris.’ Two years later he was appointed Paris manager of the ‘ Daily Mail,’ and that employment he held until 1914. In later years he has been n frequent contributor to the world’s Press, a lecturer at various universities, and after the death of Mr E. D. Morel he became editor of ‘ Foreign Affairs.’ i’m 1929 he also entered Parliament for North Bradford. He lias always taken a keen interest in politics and economics, and it was therefore no surprise that lie should advocate the stabilisation of the pound and the dollar. He is best known for his campaign against war, however, the succeeding book to ‘ The Great Illusion ’ being ‘ The Fruits of Victory.’ “ Man,” say the militarists, “ is innately pugnacious, quarrelsome ; fight is in his bone and blood ” (he wrote recently). “ And that,” replies the pacifist, “ is precisely why we must have a League of Nations, an international Constitution; the only reason. For if man were not like that, if he were hy nature peaceful, able always to see the other’s' point of view, never lost his temper, and called it patriotism, a League would be quite without meaning and

the efforts to create it quite unnecessary. We should not need an international Constitution. But neitlv should we need national constitutions, legislatures, laws, courts, police, churches, Ten Commandments. These are all conscious efforts to deal with the social shortcomings of human nature. With the shrinkage of the world the time has come to add to these traffic rules on humanity’s highway.” What the militarist deems the fundamental argument ageist pacifism is the fundamental argument for it. I for one am a pacifist, not because I think war unlikely and men naturally peaceful, but because I believe men to be naturally quarrelsome and war extremely likely. The militarist argument runs; Men like to drive their motor cars as tho mood takes them; therefore we must not have traffic rules. The pacifist argument runs: Men like to drive as the mood takes them ; that is why we must have traffic rules. This is the pons asinorum of the militarist.