MR ARTHUR HENDERSON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22708, 22 October 1935, Page 8

MR ARTHUR HENDERSON

The death is announced by cable of Mr Arthur Henderson, who was a member of both Labour Governments in the United Kingdom and also, for a time, of the War Government. Though he was one of the “ Big Five ” of the political Labour movement at the period when his party first succeeded to an always precarious tenure of office, it cannot be said that he enjoyed the full confidence of its members. He was not surpassed in ability by more than a few of his colleagues, but he lacked the industry that most of them possessed and, more damaging than all, his consistency in action was not dependable. One striking illustration of this was afforded at the beginning of the Great War. He was then secretary of the British section of the International Bureau, and in that capacity he signed, on July 31, 1914, an impassioned appeal to the British working class to compel the Government from participating in the war. Within a week or two of the issue of this appeal, Mr Henderson was, Lord Snowden comments bitterly, “ doing his best within his limited gifts of eloquence to emulate Mr Lloyd George in appealing to the youth of the nation to come forward to fight in this ‘ holy war.’ ” In his acceptance of a seat in the War Cabinet he defied the decision to the contrary on the part of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and Lord Snowden contrasts Mr Henderson’s support of conscription, while he was a member of the Government, with the strong opposition which he had repeatedly expressed in public speeches against any measure of the kind. There is, of course, another side to Mr Henderson’s action in this respect from that which Lord Snowden presents. No member of the Government could possibly be unaware of the severity of the task to which the nation was committed or of the need, in the interests of the nation and of the Empire, of utilising in the fullest degree the man-power of the country. Mr Henderson’s retirement from the Cabinet was due to circumstances which were not creditable to himself since they involved an act of disloyalty to the Government. In spite of the knowledge that the Government was opposed to his doing so, he attended a Socialist conference in Paris to discuss proposals to produce a peace by negotiation and to plan a later conference at Stockholm at which delegates from the other belligerent nations would be present. Mr Henderson lost his seat in Parliament in the Labour debacle of 1931, and, though he later secured election for another constituency, he did not, after the resignation of the second Labour Government, take any active part in British politics. Instead, he applied himself with laudable devotion to the prosecution of the duties that devolved on him in the honourable office of president of the World Disarmament Conference. It is impossible, in the light of recent events, to hold that his labours were attended with a very great deal of success, but the singleness of purpose that animated him and the tremendous importance of the ideal to which the Conference has directed its efforts merit the ■warmest recognition.