494 THE CLASS STRUGGLE EDITORIALS 495 creating an appropriate ideology to carry on. Great Britain, France and Italy are not offering their own people, and the world, a definite program on peace, because they, as much as Germany, realize that the final terms will be determined on a military basis.
No real attitude of the governments of Great Britain, France and Italy toward President Wilson aspirations on peace may be said to have been expressed recently by Lord Lansdowne. Speaking particularly of the president July 4th address, Lord Lansdowne said: It is a picture drawn by a great master of the golden age. The speech is, however, not an outline of peace terms, but a very nobly worded description of the things for which the associated people of the world are fighting for.
Great Britain, France and Italy may easily accept the ideology of the president, since they realize that ideology will not determine the conditions of peace, and that it commits them in practice to nothing. Definite terms openly declared now, might prove very inconvenient at the final settlement.
The Russian Revolution was the test of the peace policy of the Allies not the proletarian revolution alone, since that may be considered much too bitter a medicine to swallow, but the bourgeois revolution expressed in the bourgeois republic of the Provisional Government, of Kerensky. The relations of this republic and the Allies were of bourgeois government to bourgeois government. This republic repeatedly, and often imploringly, asked that war aims and peace terms be revised and re stated.
This was brusquely refused, since it meant actual concessions to democracy, the abandonment of cherished, if secret, imperialistic aims. The New York Tribune, in an editorial in its issue of August 4, touches upor: this very point. The performance of the two representatives of British labor who went to Russia to explain that the English and Russians were meant to be great friends, and that the Russians therefore must go on with the war, the Tribune characterizes as naive and profitless, and continues: luge it would be necessary to save Kerensky, and that to save Kerensky it would be necessary for the Allies to make certain difficult political adjustments to sentiments then rising and about to become uncontrollable in Russia. But his own government treated his proposals as if they had emanated from an irresponsible mind, whereupon he returned and resigned from the War Cabinet and viewed from his retirement the fall of Kerensky and the rise of Lenine and Trotzky Bolshevism. On the report of Great Britain plenipotentiary it would have been possible for the Allies to have evolved a policy. Not only was there never any Allied policy, but the first question was never even proposed. That question was: Shall we pay what Arthur Henderson finds it will cost to sustain Kerensky and keep Russia in the war? The price might have been thought prohibitive. It would have included the abandonment of certain territorial intentions; it would have included, perhaps, the Stockholm conference. Nevertheless, it was a question to be answered. If answered in the negative, then another immediately presented itself, namely, When we refuse what will happen, and what line of policy shall we pursue? But, the first being unasked, the second was never suggested. My italics. The opportunity for peace, or at least peace negotiations, during 1917 was not offered simply by revolutionary Russia, although that was the finest of all; and it would have been used if Allied practice had been in accord with Allied claims. There was the opportunity offered by Austria, the Emperor letter to President Poincare forwarded through Prince Sixtus. The offer was rejected because Poincare and Premier Ribot insisted upon France annexing the west bank of the Rhine. There were during this year, according to Mr. Robert Dell, Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, three more opportunities that the Allies might have used for opening peace discussions. Each and every opportunity was unceremoniously rejected. Tis is Mr. Dell story, in the London Nation: While Russia was pleading for a revision of war aims, trying to impose the formula of a democratic peace upon the Allies. Next went Arthur Henderson, a member of the War Cabinet, who was to straighten them out. He saw that to postpone the de