During the war many of us had come to look on the Labour party as a sort of fairy godmother. Labour was the only party that had included in its programme a ruthless avoidance of war. And, as the man who is hungry can think only of food, so in 1917 it had seemed to us that the avoidance of war was the one thing that mattered. We expected great things of the _Daily Herald_. But long before the end of 1919 we had realised that no more bellicose production had been ever presented in large quantities to the public. It had substituted one form of war for another. Nations were not to fight each other, but classes were. The proletariat of the world, with the possible exception of the French, was to ride triumphantly over the mangled remains of the idle and blood-sucking rich. It was to be war to the death. Prizes were offered for the best slogan. The people who had clamoured in 1916 for arbitration and compromise between the demands of Germany and those of the Allies, would not listen to arbitration and compromise when the Tynesider demanded another shilling a day from his employer. The _Herald_ became the champion of every trade dispute, and some of us began to wonder. Was this international peace, we asked ourselves, worth the purchase at such a price? If it came to a fight, would we rather fight beside English navvies and English ploughmen against the navvies and ploughmen of Germany and Russia; or would we rather fight beside English, Russian, French, Belgian, German, and Swedish ploughmen against Russian, English, French, German and Swedish aristocrats, or _vice versa_? Of two wars, which was the less pernicious? And we began to think that class is a habit that can be changed in half a generation; a man who is a newsboy at seventeen may be a baronet at fifty and a viscount at seventy; but race is a tree planted deeply in firm soil. We can change our class as easily as we can change our clothes; but English blood is English blood in the pit, in Mayfair, in the shires; and we should have no sympathy with that party that strove to divide a people against itself. Indeed, we were sick of party politics: we were in search of some league of international co-operation of the young people of Europe, which should have the right to direct our destinies. “It had been our war,” we said, “it was going to be our peace.” It sounds foolish now, no doubt, at this distant date, but we believed in it then; we were sincere in our desire for it. They offered us “The League of Youth.”