My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyPlace in the morning and most evenings during the week to Parliament as well.Cimmie about the same time became active in the affairs of the English-SpeakingUnion. It was a happy summer.I was attracted to Lord Robert Cecil by his fine character and by a rare combination ofthe practical and the ideal in his thinking. The concept of the League of Nations waswell thought out. It sought peace by practical means, without any impairment of thenational sovereignties which were still dominant, and provided a machinery not onlyto maintain peace but if necessary to enforce it. In addition to all the mechanism ofconciliation and arbitration which could anticipate grave disputes and attemptsettlement in the early stages, the decisive Article 16 provided very effective meansfor international action against any deliberate aggressor. The League of Nations wasthen not only a homogeneous body but also rested on the reality that every memberwas an established and a considerable country. Like all good ideas it could, of course,be made ridiculous by exaggeration to the point of absurdity, as we have seen after theSecond World War in the United Nations, which in the General Assembly accords toa barbarous new country with a few hundred thousand inhabitants equal weight withBritain, France, America or Russia. The veto of the great countries in the SecurityCouncil is a purely negative power.It is curious how many of the best ideas of the 1920s meet their reductio ad absurdumin the 1960s. This is perhaps characteristic of one of those recurrent periods ofdecadence from which happily the great peoples of Europe have always shown astriking capacity suddenly to recover in response to the challenge of necessity. In allthings there is a just mean, and the League of Nations at that time held a fairequilibrium between falling into the dictatorship of a few great powers and the presentrelapse into a modern tower of Babel. It was a well-devised piece of machinery, butlike all other mechanism depended on human operation. The essential ingredient ofwill in statesmanship was lacking from the League of Nations.The League was eventually wrecked for all practical purposes in 1923 by Mussolini,who had a dangerous surplus of the quality which was so deficient in other statesmen.I remember then making an angry and most offensive speech about him to the effectthat he had triumphed like a drunken motor-car driver, not by reason of his own skillbut because all sober people had been concerned to get out of his way. In fact thisbellicose utterance covered the retreat of pusillanimous supporters of the League. Ihad been all for action, and so to do him justice was Lord Robert Cecil. I do not knowif Mussolini was aware of that speech at the time, as he followed debates in othercountries fairly closely, but he was probably unaware of the action I desired to take,and we never discussed it when I subsequently knew him; by that time in any case itwas an old story. To tell it we must again anticipate events a little. The considerationof subject is sometimes in conflict with strict chronology, but all these incidentshappened within the first lustrum of the twenties.After the election of 1922, when Lord Robert and I had parted, he to re-enter theConservative Government and I to continue in opposition after refusing to accompanyhim, I remained on good terms with him and had some part in the remarkable eventswhich virtually destroyed the League of Nations. It was in the summer of 1923 thatMussolini took a risk, when he had not the power to blow over a house of cards. Hegot away with it because those who had the power lacked courage. Mussolini shelled118 of 424