Page:A Political Pilgrim in Europe - Snowden - 1921.djvu/19



"How infinitely little is the best that we can do, and how infinitely important it is that we should do it!"

To begin a new book with an old quotation is bad; but it must be forgiven because it expresses in a phrase the sentiment upon which the whole of my public life has been built, and it explains in a sentence the object and purpose of those wanderings in many lands of my colleagues and myself about which I have engaged to write.

Nothing less than a clear understanding on the part of the critical observer that they held very strongly the belief, old-fashioned it may be, that "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" is strength ordained, can save from the charge of madness or of folly the plunge of twelve members of the British Labour Movement, with a bright hope in their hearts, into the maelstrom of Europe and of European politics in January of 1919.

Mr. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Secretary of the National Labour Party, had made strenuous efforts during the later days of the war, and after his return from Russia, to open a door to international understanding and possible reconciliation by trying to obtain from the British Government permission for representatives of British Labour to attend an international Socialist conference 1