THE COMPLETE PACIFIST

My Quest For Peace. By George Lansbury. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 63.) MR. LANSBURY is only months short of his eightieth birthday. A few years ago, a severe fall kept him for months in hospital, helpless on his back. Yet this latest book of his records journey- ings costing great fatigue in execution, and immense courage in conception. He visited the dictators in their dens ; he crossed the Atlantic and, in the United States, travelled and

spoke on a programme exhausting even to read about. The vigorous writing of the description of his quest is evidence of a faith and an energy which years have strengthened rather than dimmed. Any commonplace " realist " may well rise from these pages with a sense almost of shame.

With notable and fine candour, he admits that, during his long life, there have been moments of relative weakness. They were never much more than moments.

"Sometimes, for short periods, my mind has been a little doubtful of my position, and I have found myself tempted to follow the crowd. But it has always been my good fortune to pull myself up with a mental jerk and restore sanity to my thoughts and actions."

The period of most acute difficulty, to which he more than once refers, was that when, as leader of the Labour Party after the debeicle of 1931, he realised that support of the League must logically involve a readiness to put collective force behind collective security ; he was, then, in a false position, out of which he had got to " jerk " himself. He did so in 1935, and resumed the full, absolutist pacifist platform to whose exposition the greater part of this book is devoted. It is here that its most substantial and lasting interest resides.

True, the " spectacular " chapters are those in which he records his interviews with Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini, and recalls that earlier interview with Lenin, when, after hours of argument, "Lenin did not scoff at me, but quietly told me to go home and convert the Christians." He got no remark as profound as this from any of his more recent interlocutors ; nor are his impressions of them particularly illuminating. Hitler he puts down as one of the great men of our time. Two things puzzled him—one, "his hatred of the Jewish race " ; the other, "the attitude shown by Nazi Germany, and Herr Hitler in particular, towards Christianity." Nevertheless, his feeling is that peace can be made ; he believes (even after the Austrian action, to which he refers) that personal contact between leaders could, even now, achieve a peaceful mutual understanding, on a basis of live and let live.

"I would give whatever I possess, which is not very much, if I could arrange a meeting between Stalin' Mussolini and Hitler, with somebody as chairman with a sense of humour."

He has certainly done all that one man can to bring such a result about—that was, indeed, the whole purpose of his journeyings.

His own attitude is, of course, the pure Christian doctrine of non-resistance to evil, and its confrontation by the gospel of love.

"There is no possible compromise on this. I am, and always

have been, a passive resister. If the masses in all lands would refuse to manufacture armaments, there would be no war."

Here one is, at once, up against the difficulties which have got to be faced by those who are not, by nature, endowed with the great powers of elimination possessed by the black-and-white mind. They spring at one, in this sentence about refusing to manufacture armaments. What, today, are armaments ? Nearly every product of the chemical, metallurgical and transport industries, to name only these, is, today, potential armament material. So the suggestion amounts to no more than the old General Strike. At that, too, it leaves out of account the

genuine, if regrettable, nationalist feelings that animate the masses, in the same degree as they do the classes. No figure in that provocative play, Idiot's Delight, is, unhappily, more

convincing than the Marxian world-revolutionary who dies with the words "La France ! " on his lips. He is a fact. So are the national Christians in every land, who, in Lenin's stern phrase, need converting. Mr. Lansbury says, frankly, "Gandhi has staked out a road which, if followed, would free mankind from the curse of war ; but his policy must be accepted without compromise."

For himself, he does accept it without compromise. He has devoted a long and arduous life to the effort of conversion. As to the extent of his success, he is under no illusion. He sees the pagan belief in force and in the separating ties of" blood " stronger than it has ever been. But this, for him, is reason only for harder efforts at persuasion and the awakening of the other aspect of mixed human nature. In his simplicity, there is, undoubtedly, an clement of enormous strength. One lays down his book with envy ; if also with a sigh.

MARY AGNES HAMILTON.