Mr. G. N. Barnes was one of the best examples—and
one of the last—of the old type of Labour leader, prudent, con- ciliatory, but quite ready when necessary to show courage :n a fight for his union or his cause. He came to the front politically when he joined Mr. Lloyd George's War Cabinet )/1 Mr. Henderson's resignation in 1917. He was one of he five British delegates at the Peace Conference, concerned 'here primarily with laying the foundations of the Inter- aational Labour Organisation, and, like Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, who died only three days before him, he was a member of the British Delegation at the First Assembly of the League of Nations in 1920. Few of those of us who heard it will forget the impressive passage in one of George Barnes's speeches to the Assembly, in which he referred to the cere- mony of the burial of the Unknown Soldier, which had taken place only a few days earlier, and asked: "What would our dead comrade say if from the shadows he could speak to us? . . . He won freedom for us and death for himself, and were he here now I am sure what he would say would be, 'I have done my part. Now do yours. Let there be no more wars.'" Barnes had lost his own son in the war.
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