My views may not differ materially from those held by members of the I.L.P., I do not desire to give myself any fresh political label. Though the formation of the Union of Democratic Control it has been possible for me to work in close co-operation with several of your leaders and this joint effort on the part of the Labour members and radicals is having I think a very beneficial effect. I do not desire to alienate myself from any of my former political associates but rather to endeavour to urge them along the same path which I myself am treading.

People must never be allowed to become despondent; so victories must be exaggerated and defeats, if not concealed, at any rate minimized, and the stimulus of indignation, horror and hatred must be assiduously and continuously pumped into the public minds of 'propaganda'.

It was a sign of the failure of all the pacifist societies to make any real impact on the public mind in the decade following the worst war in history that the most enterprising attempt to promote absolute pacifism as a distinct alternative to pacificist half-measures was a personal initiative outside the framework of organized pacifism. This was the campaign launched in 1925 by the courtier's son and former diplomat turned Radical politician, Arthur Ponsonby (1871-1946), whose switch of allegiance from Liberal to Labour immediately after the war had been followed by what was, in effect a conversion from pacificism to pacifism. In 1925 he published a statement of his beliefs, Now is the Time, and launched his ambitious Peace Letter - a petition committing its signatories to "refuse to support or render war service to any Government which resorts to arms". After two years he was able, in a deputation to Stanley Baldwin in December 1927, to present 128,770 signatures - a total impressively near the P.P.U.'s peak membership of 136,000. The reason for Ponsonby's sudden emergence as the leading British pacifist of the later twenties and early thirties was his belief that he had discovered a new type of pacifism which was both commonsensical in outlook and irrefutable in inspiration. Throughout what proved a long pacifist career he was concerned to stress that he had no eccentric objection to physical force used by individuals in self-defence or for the protection of the weak; indeed, when assaulted in the course of addressing U.D.C. meetings during the Great War, he had been known to punch his assailant in the face. The basis of his pacifism was his "discovery" - perhaps influenced by the growing awareness of the extent of the economic dislocation caused by the Great War - that war could be objected to, not just on religious, moral, humane or political grounds, but on the grounds of "its failure to achieve a single desirable object, whatever the gigantic cost may be".

Ponsonby appeared to believe that this amounted to a new and "objective" inspiration for pacifism - one which, unlike all previous inspirations, did not depend on prior religious or political assumptions. He seemed to assume, moreover, that on any simple utilitarian calculation the unhappiness and destruction caused by war would invariably be seen to outweigh its benefits: hence, pacifism was proved to be always the best policy. This "utilitarian" pacifism is, it must be recognized, worthy of attention as the first attempt to adapt pacifist inspirations to take account of both the increased suffering and destruction, and the dislocating side-effects, produced by modern war, which made any net benefit from fighting undeniably harder to justify. But it was not the value-neutral justification for pacifism its adherents hoped it to be. For reasons already discussed, "utilitarian" pacifism proved to be a form of what is here classified as the humanitarian inspiration for pacifism.

Humanitarian pacifism was, in fact, to prove the major pacifist innovation of the inter-war period, though it was not to come into its own until the thirties when the imminence of aerial holocausts focused attention on the pain and suffering to be expected in the next war. During the twenties attempts to calculate the relative costs of settling a dispute by war or adopting a peaceful settlement at any price were characterized less by preoccupation with the high price of the former than by complacency about the assumed low cost of the latter.