Immediately after reaching Geneva in March 1915 I had, indeed, given each colony instructions and sent it a statement of our aims.
Our colonies consisted mainly of workmen most of whom had left home in search of bread though many had gone to escape military service. In America and in Russia there were tradesmen, engineers and contractors among them, as well as agricultural labourers. Our more educated emigrants were not always of the best quality, and in our journalists the bulk of our people felt too little confidence. Yet in America and Russia an educated class grew up within the colonies. It included lawyers, doctors, merchants and bankers. To some extent this younger generation had found its way into American or Russian society, at the cost of becoming assimilated; but, on the whole, each colony was a little world by itself. Though its numbers grew with the coming of fresh emigrants from home, it remained unknown to the people among whom it lived. Even its knowledge of things at home—drawn from newspaper reading—was inadequate. Our work during the war did our colonies good, especially in America, inasmuch as it drew the attention of their countries of adoption to them.
We were chiefly concerned with three colonies, those in America, in Russia and in Paris. The Paris colony I have mentioned already. Its numbers were not large, but it was politically lively and excitable. In America, the tendencies of the leading section of our people were Radical—a Radicalism derived politically from the old Liberalism of the ’sixties which had survived in isolation and had been influenced by American democratic ideas and institutions. Here and there this Radicalism tended to become Socialism and even Anarchism. albeit a Socialism of the American sort. To the Radicals our Catholics and Protestants were opposed, the Catholics more sharply than the Protestants.
It is needless to refer fully to the dissensions in our various colonies. They were mainly local and personal; and, in America and Russia, centres like New York, Chicago and Cleveland, or St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kieff were so distant from each other that there could be no real unity. Nor, in the absence of instructions from Prague, could they possess, at first, a single plan of action. Instinctively they had all ranged themselves against Austria, but I found it necessary to remind their leaders more than once that the final political decision lay with Prague; for there was no lack of hot-headed fellows who claimed for themselves the right of decision and of leader-
