Even our Foreign Office must be aware that in every country in the world
there is now bitter suspicion of and keen hostility towards merely
diplomatic representatives. One of the most significant features of the
time is the evident desire of the Labour movement in every European
country to take part in a collateral conference of Labour that shall
meet when and where the Peace Congress does and deliberate and comment
on its proceedings. For a year now the demand of the masses for such a
Labour conference has been growing. It marks a distrust of officialdom
whose intensity officialdom would do well to ponder. But it is the
natural consequence of, it is the popular attempt at a corrective to,
the aloofness and obscurity that have hitherto been so evil a
characteristic of international negotiations. I do not think Labour and
intelligent people anywhere are going to be fobbed off with an
old-fashioned diplomatic gathering as being that League of Free Nations
they demand.

On the other hand, I do not contemplate this bi-cameral conference with
the diplomatists trying to best and humbug the Labour people as well as
each other and the Labour people getting more and more irritated,
suspicious, and extremist, with anything but dread. The Allied countries
must go into the conference _solid_, and they can only hope to do that
by heeding and incorporating Labour ideas before they come to the
conference. The only alternative that I can see to this unsatisfactory
prospect of a Peace Congress sitting side by side with a dissentient and
probably revolutionary Labour and Socialist convention--both gatherings
with unsatisfactory credentials contradicting one another and drifting
to opposite extremes--is that the delegates the Allied Powers send to
the Peace Conference (the same delegates which, if they are wise, they
will have previously sent to a preliminary League of Allied Nations to