Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/239

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The Political Situation

most contradictory views would meet in a confused mêlée, to become a Court of Justice and a Grand Jury.

Just after the Conference of the Socialists of the Allied countries in London (August 28, 1917), Arthur Henderson, whose great influence had some weeks before carried the decision of the Labour Party in favour of Stockholm, said in an interview:

"The inability of the inter-Allied Conference of last week to come to any even approximate agreement forces us to examine the whole situation anew.

"The International Conference, by reason of the great divergence of views that have been expressed in the inter-Allied Conference, would be not merely harmful, but disastrous.

"We cannot meet in an International Conference so long as no common ground of understanding between the working classes of the Allied nations has been discovered."

Such has always been our own view, and it is in the first place for this reason that we have never ceased to exact for any reunion or reconstruction of the

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