WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

STOCKHOLM AND MR. ARTHUR HENDERSON 137
the Socialist parties of the world to attend an international
Socialist Conference at Stockholm to discuss ways and means
of bringing about peace.
The proposal was not one likely to find wide acceptance.
Belligerent governments would clearly refuse to have terms
of peace dictated to them by a Party Conference. The same
observation would apply if the international conference had
been Liberal or Conservative. Most of the Socialists in the
belligerent countries supported their governments in carrying
on the War. The Executive of the French Socialist Party
decided at the end of April by thirteen votes to eleven not
to go to Stockholm, while the Russian extremists led by
Lenin reached a similar decision for opposite motives, being
contemptuous of the bourgeois mentality of the Second International.
On May 11th, Mr. Henderson reported to the
War Cabinet that the Executive of the British Labour Party
had decided not to take part in the Stockholm Conference.
The proposal therefore seemed dead. But it was known
that in Russia there was considerable division of opinion
among the Socialists about the issue of continuing the War
or trying to make a separate peace, and Mr. Henderson told
us that the British Labour Party Executive proposed to send
a Mission to Petrograd, consisting of himself, Mr. G. Roberts,
M.P., and Mr. Purdy, to strengthen the war purpose of the
Russian Socialists. We decided that in view of industrial conditions
here, it would be better for Mr. Henderson not to go,
but we were willing for Mr. Roberts to be given permission
to join such a deputation. At that time Russia was being
administered by a provisional government based on the
Duma. But much of the real power was in the hands of the
Petrograd Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates —
the Soviet. This body decided to invite representatives of
both the majority and the minority Socialist movements in
the Allied countries to come and discuss the situation with