WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

STOCKHOLM AND MR. ARTHUR HENDERSON 153
at Paris, where he had met with considerable opposition,
but had eventually induced the Conference to take the view
which he shared with the British Government in regard to
the prosecution of the War. Further, he could point out that
members of the French and other Allied Governments occupied
a position similar to his own. On balance, therefore,
the dual nature of his position had been an advantage.
We recognised that the House of Commons was less
concerned at the moment about Stockholm than with the
fact that Mr. Henderson, a Member of the War Cabinet,
had gone off to this Paris meeting in company with Mr.
Ramsay MacDonald, who only a day or two earlier had
been making himself conspicuous as the leader of the pacifists
in a debate on war aims in the House of Commons and who,
in the Manifesto of Aims of the Leeds Conference, which
he had a leading part in summoning, had declared that its
purpose was to make this country like Russia. But we suggested
that Mr. Henderson could remind Parliament that this
was not the first conference to which he had gone in Mac-
Donald's company. Their association on such occasions was
inevitable, since one was Secretary and the other Treasurer
of the British Labour Party. If he also reaffirmed his war
attitude on the lines of some of his recent speeches, he
should satisfy the House.
Mr. Henderson had to face a rather unfriendly Chamber
that evening, when on the motion for the adjournment he
was called to give an account of his conduct to the House
of Commons. In his defence he urged that one important
part of his Paris visit had been to make arrangements for
an Inter-Allied Socialist Conference; that, as to the Stockholm
proposal, he had found, when in Russia, that the Russians
were strongly in favour of it, so he had willingly accepted
the invitation of the Labour Party to be a member of
the Delegation to Paris to make arrangements for it; that