Item 36 - Notes for a speech by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence at Manchester on behalf of the Peace Pledge Union

6 single sheets

(Carbon copy, with a handwritten correction. Undated.)

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Transcript

Recall the last occasion of visit to Manchester, two or three weeks after the Armistice in November 1918. Feeling in the country was intensely bitter and had been worked up by an intensive propaganda based on such slogans as “Make Germany and the Kaiser Pay”. The electors had been urged to “do their bit”. To go over the top and help to defeat for ever the enemy that had been conquered by their husbands and brothers.

After a fortnight of open-air and indoor meetings the election day came. The women, who used their vote for the first time, turned out to vote against me. (But the soldiers vote, announced a fortnight afterwards was cast on my behalf.) Mr. Plowman and I shall never forget that day. We said to one another “the people of this country though they do not know it, have voted to-day for another European war”.

I return to Manchester to speak at my first public meeting since I signed the Peace Pledge. It is fitting that I should take the opportunity of explaining why I have signed the pledge which I realise has very serious consequences, and also why I did not sign it before.

The last point first. I hesitated for a long while because I realise that it puts me outside the political pale for effective political action.

(Reminder of part taken to get votes for women).

It had been the dream of my life that men and women should work together in a political world and take joint political action.

During the twenty years since the 1918 election the international situation has gone from bad to worse. Many opportunities have occurred to bring appeasement by political means ——— (the pledge that the allies would gradually disarm; the Disarmament Conference) ——— but always the moment of grace was allowed to go by.

(Pact of Paris:

Collective Security through the League of Nations:

There never was a more simple case of collective security than Abyssinia:

The speech by Sir Samuel Hoare:

The Peace Ballot:

The General Election:

Abyssinia abandoned:

The electorate betrayed.)

Since that time blow after blow has been dealt at the League of Nations. Collective security has become a smokescreen behind which Governments re-arm with alarming intensity[.]

We have come full circle.

The Treaty of Versailles with Nemisis† within it has been torn to pieces by the penalized nations who have grown strong in military power.

I for one have come to the conclusion that appeasement cannot be won by political means in the political sphere. It can only come about by the re-birth of the idea that the human race is one body and that as individuals and nations we are members of one another. If we are one body it follows that war is self-mutilation and self-destruction. In that truth of oneness I have found at last solid ground. Because I believe with my whole being in the oneness of humanity and the oneness of the universe with its divine source of love; and because I can no longer separate that belief from personal action I have signed the Peace Pledge and am now united with all the others who have signed it in the effort to bring this truth to re-birth in the physical plane. Birth is sometimes won at the cost of life. But the cost is realised in advance and the risk is deliberately undertaken.

In the beginning was the Word, the Idea, the Thought and thereby the physical world was brought into being. My oneness with all living things is the thought that shared by others can create a social world where war is unthinkable.

Many objections are brought against the attitude which I have now deliberately taken. People are very puzzled and they feel torn in two by conflicting demands. In short they are to-day where I was only a few months ago. “Is it not cowardly” they say “to cut yourself off from the problems of the world that demand solution from day to day?” “Can you give carte blanche to any band of brigands who hold that right is might {1} to have their way in the world?” But these objectors think as if there was a world Government in being, capable of exercising legitimate and unlimited forces of restraint over all evil-doers. But there is no such authority. It is impossible to point to a single nation which has not acted on occasion on the conception that might is right. So the position is that one band of brigands goes to war with another. The result is not determined by justice or by right. Both bands use the same methods and bring destruction and death of millions of helpless people. There is no guarantee that right will win. The issue is decided by the relative weight of metal that one side or the other can draft into action.

“But we are living in a practical world. You cannot retire into a monastery and wash your hands of the immediate problems that the rest of the world has to face.” Is war a practical proposition then? We have only to look at the results from the last great war. It was fought by this country as a war to end war. A war to make the world safe for democracy. A war to secure liberty for small nations. Has it delivered the goods? Has it accomplished any single thing?

As for retiring to a monastery—well monasteries saved much that was worth while from destruction in the middle ages[.] But it is no monastery that we have retired into. Ask Mr. Plowman if the headquarters of the Peace Pledge Union resembles a monastery. No. We have put our hands to a task more onerous thatn that of the War Office. Did Edith Cavell contemplate retiring into a monastery when she said: “Patriotism is not enough: there must be no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”. She went forthwith to face the firing squad.

The signing of this pledge is so dangerous that I agree with the beloved founder of this movement Canon Dick Sheppard that no individual must ever be urged to sign it. It should be signed only by those who feel like Martin Luther that they “can do no other”. I would go even further than that and say it ought not to be signed by any person who feels that he is able at present to mould the policy of his political party effectively for peace. It is only for those who feel that there is no other way left to them whereby they can set in motion forces that can create a new world. We do not imagine that we can prevent the war when destructive forces may at any moment spring upon the world. But if the war comes it will not be the end of everything. The world will have to build itself up again. We believe that it can only be built up by the creative forces of love and unity. It can only survive by the triumph of the idea which we are striving to bring to re-birth in the physical world, the idea of the oneness of the human race, the brotherhood of all people and the Fatherhood of God.

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At the top of the first sheet is written the file number ‘2069’.

{1} Probably a slip for ‘might is right’.

† Sic.

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.