ABSTRACT
‘Comrades of the Labour movement’, Sidney beseeched the readers of the War on War Gazette in September 1914. ‘Has your internationalism, your fraternity … been all cant and humbug … Are you racialists first, and Socialists second?’ His politics were secular, his discourse biblical: ‘Remember the voice crying in the wilderness … Think of the grain of mustard seed.’ The power of their collective will could effect change. ‘War, the greatest specific crime of modern times, is preventible, even after it has broken out: a determined people on either side can stop it’. Once they joined the crusade against war, they would soon find, Sidney echoed his favourite poet, Robert Browning, ‘That rage was right i th’main, That acquiescence vain’. 1
