When Leonard returned to London from Ceylon in June 1911, there was every expectation that he would resume his duties in Hambantota at the end of his year’s leave. While his misgivings about imperialism were increasing, he was acknowledged as an unusually competent and rigorous administrator who had been promoted rapidly, becoming the youngest Assistant Government Agent in the colony. He fantasized about returning to make Hambantota the most efficiently run district in Asia, capping his career with a governorship and a knighthood. At the same time, the isolation and monotony of his life as a colonial servant had taken their toll, and he recognized that marriage to Virginia would be incompatible with his overseas career. Having assumed his cadetship in the colonial service in 1904, shortly after leaving Cambridge, he had neither professional qualifications nor family resources to fall back upon. Until he resigned from the Ceylon civil service, Leonard drew a salary of £22 a month and had also amassed savings of £600, which he thought might suffice for two years. Virginia’s additional inherited income ensured that initially they could live in relative comfort while pursuing literary careers, but her mental instability, apparent within a year of their wedding, curtailed her earnings amid increasing medical expenses. The Village in the Jungle, written between August 1911 and the following summer, was published to critical acclaim in February 1913 but generated little income. By 1929, over 2,000 copies having been sold, his earnings from the book amounted to only £63. Despite their frugality and disregard for money, they had no obvious means of earning the £400–£500 a year that Leonard calculated as necessary. Journalism seemed a plausible option, and Virginia had already begun to review for the Times Literary Supplement, but what was he to write about, and how was he to establish links to periodicals? His Cambridge contemporary R. C. Trevelyan introduced him to the editor of the TLS; Leonard asked to review books on industrial questions but was instead sent ones on French poetry. Cambridge had turned him from a budding classical scholar into an aesthete and a decidedly apolitical intellectual. In a paper presented to the Apostles in 1903, he noted that “it would be no unfair charge if anyone summed me up as ignoring politics.”1 The Dreyfus trial appears to have been the only international incident that aroused his indignation. Like others of his generation, and perhaps more pointedly as a Jew, he regarded the victimization of the Jewish French army officer as of cosmic significance for civilized values, comparable to the trial of Socrates or Jesus.2
During 1912 and 1913, politics remained peripheral to Leonard’s literary ambitions. It was in a Spanish hotel on their honeymoon, in September 1912, that he began his second novel, The Wise Virgins, completed in August 1913 but not published until December 1914. Virginia described their work habits in a letter to Violet Dickinson: “All the morning we write in two separate rooms. Leonard is in the middle of a new novel; but as the clock strikes twelve, he begins an article upon Labour for some pale sheet, or a review of French literature for the Times, or a history of Co-operation.”3 Later, in 1913, as the manuscript of The Wise Virgins was making the rounds of friends, family, and his publisher, Edward Arnold, he toyed with a third novel, provisionally titled “The Empire Builder.” It began, he later recalled, “with a boy of 16 kicking a stone along a towpath at Richmond, imagining how the stone, which had lain for years in one spot, suddenly found itself uprooted to a completely new world 50 yards away. Symbolical? Autobiographical? I think it may have been a good beginning, but it never got any further.”4
All of Leonard’s fiction, his short stories as well as his novels, real and projected, dealt with alienation from one’s own culture and offered a way to come to terms with his sense of himself as an outsider, caught between two worlds, never quite belonging to either. He felt the need to assert his own identity apart from his Jewish background or as an imperialist who questioned the validity of British domination of a native population. While the content of The Village in the Jungle and his Stories of the East (1921) derived from his experience in Ceylon, The Wise Virgins and “The Three Jews” explored Jewish distinctiveness within the dominant Anglo-Christian culture. It was the hostility of his family, no less than its commercial failure, that undermined his confidence as a novelist and as an interpreter of Anglo-Jewry. Leonard claimed defensively that the onset of war killed the book commercially, but he later refused to reprint it, perhaps out of deference to the misgivings of his mother and siblings. Some years later, however, he did contemplate writing “a revised version of the Wandering Jew,” according to Virginia, who found it “very original & solid,” but nothing ever materialized.5 By the time that he finished The Wise Virgins, Virginia was in the throes of a serious mental breakdown, during which she attempted suicide. Their joint careers as creative writers had to be put on hold, at least until she recovered her sanity. Her illness, especially during its most acute phase in 1913–14, dominated his life to the point that his own health suffered, as he spent more of his time providing care. As her earnings dwindled and the financial burdens of medical and nursing care mounted, it was incumbent upon him to discover new, more lucrative sources of income than the writing of fiction.
While his years in Ceylon had shaped his views of imperialism, Leonard had returned with a meager understanding of domestic social conditions and even less of a perspective on how to respond to them. His empathy for those under his authority in Ceylon was not readily translated to the disadvantaged at home. During the summer of 1912, before he departed on a two-month continental honeymoon, Virginia’s cousin Margaret (Marny) Vaughan inveigled him into working for the Shoreditch Care Committee, an affiliate of the Charity Organisation Society, dispensing relief to the East End poor. It took only two home interviews to convince him that he was unsuited to the role of benevolent philanthropist in Hoxton, whereupon he promptly resigned from the Care Committee and the COS. Imogen Booth, daughter of the great social investigator Charles Booth, had invited Leonard to become secretary of the Hoxton branch, but, as he told, Molly MacCarthy, “I don’t much believe in that work after what I saw of it.”6 Shocked by the depths of misery of the inhabitants, he later observed that he “would rather have lived in a hut in a Ceylon village in the jungle than in the poverty stricken, sordid, dilapidated, god-forsaken hovels of Hoxton” (Beginning, 100). Later in the year he accepted an invitation from Roger Fry to act as secretary for the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, a temporary job that involved dealing with inquiries from prospective buyers and fending off philistine critics. However brief, it seemed preferable to enlisting as a rent collector in the London slums.
What Leonard had witnessed in the East End transformed him from a conventional liberal into a socialist without providing a focus for his burgeoning political convictions. Through the Apostles he had come to know two Llewelyn Davies brothers, friends of the Stephen family. Virginia was also acquainted with their formidable sister, Margaret, the secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, who became a mentor and lifelong confidante to Leonard and exposed him to the lives of working-class women in northern England. Starting in August 1912, under Margaret’s influence, he wrote a number of unpaid articles for the Co-operative News and the Daily Citizen, visited industrial towns to learn about cooperative factories and businesses, staying with families, lecturing to local branches, and attending a three-day Women’s Co-operative Congress in Newcastle in June 1913. His reports on its deliberations, which appeared in both the Nation and the New Statesman, attracted the attention of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who were eager to discover bright young men to enlist in Fabian research projects. In later years he would write numerous pamphlets and several books on the cooperative movement, whose guiding principles remained at the core of his socialist convictions. Having published six articles on scientific management in 1912, mostly in the Co-operative News, he broadened his topical scope and periodical audience with twenty-two articles and reviews in 1913 and thirty-two in 1914, while Virginia became a semi-invalid, his work appearing in the Nation, the New Statesman, The Times, the TLS, the Labour Leader, the New Weekly, War and Peace, and the Manchester Guardian.
In the autumn of 1914, seemingly undaunted by the outbreak of war, Beatrice Webb approached Leonard, who had joined the Fabian Society the previous year, about taking part in the Fabian Research Department’s investigation of professional organizations, which would complement the Webbs’ earlier books on trade unionism and the cooperative movement. His task would be to gather information about the legal profession in England, America, “and as many of the continental countries as you can get hold of.”7 This material would then be incorporated in their proposed survey, although Beatrice later intimated that Leonard’s report might be published as a companion volume. It was never entirely clear whether his role was primarily that of a research assistant or of an independent writer. Remuneration, not mentioned, was no doubt assumed by Leonard, who agreed to the proposal, despite his lack of qualifications, aside from being the son of a barrister and QC. The Fabians seemed to regard any willing neophyte as a potential expert, if given the opportunity to undertake serious research. Plans were, however, overtaken by international events, and Bernard Shaw, still prominent in Fabian circles, persuaded philanthropist Joseph Rowntree to contribute £100 to underwrite a limited inquiry into international mechanisms for the prevention of war. On December 16, less than a month after her first overture to Leonard about the legal profession, Beatrice invited Leonard to undertake the executive role in the inquiry, serving as a secretary to the International Agreements Committee of the Fabian Research Department. This time a fee of £50 (half of the Rowntree grant) was offered as “a small remuneration for the drudgery entailed.” As a further enticement, she indicated that the ensuing report would be published by the Fabian Research Department with Leonard identified as author, provisions to which he agreed. He stipulated that nothing should appear over his name of which he was not the author.8 Somewhat unrealistically, she added a postscript hoping that he might complete his study on the legal profession before tackling international peace.9 Such was not to be: Leonard scrapped that research in favor of the international project. Initially overwhelmed by the enormity of the task (and the meagerness of the fee), he resolved to resign his commission and substitute a pamphlet on international arbitration.10 Soon overcoming his trepidations, he moved ahead with dispatch. Virginia noted in her diary on January 26, 1915: “He has already grasped his Arbitration—such is the male mind—& will, I see, go through with it straight off.”11 Within weeks of accepting the offer, he delivered an outline of proposed topics to the committee, largely ignoring Sidney Webb’s injunction to avoid proposing alternatives or treating the subject historically. He advised Leonard to confine himself to what could be included in the peace treaty and to exclude what could be done in the future to diminish the frequency of wars.12 At first he was engaged to prepare a report embodying the results of the committee’s work, but this quickly evolved into autonomous research on his part, with the committee offering merely perfunctory oversight. Despite wide disparity of views about the war among members of the International Agreements Committee, they confirmed that the report would be published over Leonard’s name, that he would have a free hand as to its scope, and that he would be paid a fee of £100. It was a crucial milestone in his political career and launched what would become his most influential publication.
Although Virginia suffered a relapse in February 1915 that continued through the spring, Leonard forged ahead with his investigation into the causes of war, international treaties, and the history of European conferences and congresses since 1815. As he wrote to Lytton:
I have been absolutely submerged in Internationalism. The result will I imagine be the lowest pit of dullness. It would make it easier if I knew something about history. I met my “Committee” last week—14 wretched creatures led by the Webbs, Eagle [J. C. Squire], & Shaw. The only thing they did was to pass a resolution that they would not even ask me what I was going to do.13
This jocular, self-mocking tone may have more closely reflected his epistolary style to his closest friend than his actual mood. He completed the first part of the project in time for Webb to explicate it to a joint conference of the Fabians and the so-called Bryce Committee, including Leonard’s Cambridge friend Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, which was also interested in international organization, at Barrow House, near Keswick, in May 1915, and it was published in July as a New Statesman special supplement. Years later, reflecting on this period in his autobiography, Leonard noted that “in 1915 I worked like a fanatical or dedicated mole on the sources of my subject, international relations, foreign affairs, the history of war and peace. By 1916 I had a profound knowledge of my subject; I was an authority” (Beginning, 185). The difficulty lay in the scarcity of books on the subject. This required original research in Blue Books, White Papers, and annual reports of an array of international organizations from the Universal Postal Union to the International Institute of Agriculture, and interviews with civil servants, representatives of non-governmental bodies, as well as participants in international congresses. His aim was not to prod the government toward peace negotiations, but rather to enlighten officials about the types of institutional machinery available to alleviate the risk of war in the future. This was Fabian research par excellence, involving much of the “drudgery” about which Beatrice had warned, yet, somewhat surprisingly, given his background and ongoing marital travail, he demonstrated extraordinary aptitude for the undertaking.
Once the first report had been published with the title “Suggestions for the Prevention of War,” Leonard readily accepted Webb’s advice to expand his report into a book by investigating all non-governmental international associations. They collaborated on the formulation of a treaty to establish a supranational authority to prevent future war and published their proposal a week later in a second New Statesman supplement called “Articles Suggested for Adoption by an International Conference at the Termination of the War.” Given the alacrity with which he had completed his task, the Fabians urged him to extend his research, offering an additional £100. Challenging the common view that international government neither existed at present, nor could be viable in the future, he elucidated wide areas of human activity that demonstrated cooperation among nations. This inquiry, longer than either of the New Statesman supplements and occupying him for much of 1915–16, constituted the most original portion of his book International Government, published in July 1916 by the Fabian Society and George Allen & Unwin, incorporating all three parts of the Fabian project. Leonard was listed as sole author, although “a Fabian committee” claimed responsibility for the concluding chapter, essentially the draft treaty devised by Leonard and Sidney Webb. The original plan was for Shaw, as chairman of the Fabian Research Department, to contribute a foreword. He had, after all, been instrumental in promoting the original project by securing the Rowntree subvention. Leonard insisted that the British edition be published without Shaw’s contribution “on the ground that, as a young man and writer, I wanted my book to be judged on its merits and defects; it should stand solely on its own legs” (Beginning, 123). A year later Allen & Unwin published The Framework of a Lasting Peace, with an introduction by Leonard, the Fabian draft treaty written with Webb, and seven alternative schemes put forward by other interest groups for a League of Nations. These differed on such issues as compulsory arbitration and whether a league should comprise all independent nations or only the victorious powers.
In retrospect, Leonard’s book was prophetic, anticipating a host of publications by British and American writers that proliferated in the later years of the war. Whatever he hoped would emerge from the conflagration, he proposed only what seemed practicable, leaving aside aspirations toward world government or attempts to undermine the sovereignty of nations. “We must build not a Utopia upon the air or clouds of our own imagination, but a duller and heavier structure placed logically upon the foundations of the existing system” (International Government, 8). Nor did he advocate—at least initially—outlawing war, suggesting instead mechanisms for resolving conflicts short of armed struggle. It would be foolhardy to attempt to make war impossible, but it might be rendered less likely: “If war is ever to become an impossibility or even an improbability in the society of nations, there must be in that society a regular, easily working, recognised system of obtaining in some kinds of international disputes a judicial decision” (International Government, 18). Above all, he tried to persuade readers that his proposals either emulated past settlements or followed current practice in social and professional organizations. International government did not require rigid, centralized structures: it could be flexible and pragmatic, as circumstances warranted.
After tracing the various causes of war—legal, political, territorial, questions of honor—Leonard underscored the importance of international law, contending that the violation of its rules did not constitute proof that they did not exist. Furthermore, “unless there are certain general rules regulating the conduct of nations, a peaceful solution of international differences will always be doubtful” (International Government, 12). Although he was writing in wartime, he wanted to show that a rudimentary system of international relations had evolved during the previous century. Its key feature was concerted action to resolve political disputes, which he illustrated by reference to European congresses from Vienna in 1815 to Berlin in 1878 to Algeciras in 1906. Legal disputes should be resolved by tribunals, but, where conflicts stemmed from political disagreements, a special congress would be more appropriate. His underlying assumption was that international conflicts could be settled only by the collective decision of the powers. The reference of political disputes to conferences or arbitration tribunals should be made compulsory, so long as they did not infringe the independence or sovereignty of nations. Within the sphere of its independence, every state “must remain absolute master of its own destiny” (International Government, 80). While arbitration might resolve certain disputes, he was skeptical as to whether making it obligatory was feasible. Using Irish Home Rule as an example, he doubted whether the contending parties would be willing to comply with the decision of a court of arbitration. It followed that treaties that bound nations to refer all disputes where negotiation failed to arbitration were “useless and dangerous” (International Government, 48). While arbitration had a role in the pacific regulation of conflict, it was not a panacea. If a judicial tribunal were unable to settle a dispute that posed a threat to European peace, reference to an international conference should be made compulsory. This was an alternative to the traditional way of settling disputes: negotiation or war. It also reduced the risk of secret diplomacy, perceived by British radicals as fomenting wars. Little progress could be made “unless the rights of an international majority to bind a minority…are admitted” (International Government, 43). Had such a conference taken place in 1914, war among the powers might have been averted. In that crisis, warmongers played upon popular fears, ignorance, and patriotic sentiment. An international authority, however perfunctory, might have proven instrumental in preserving the peace:
It would allay unreasoning excitement; it would let in the light; it would strengthen the hands of those persons who were working for peace. But perhaps its most potent influence would come from another side. The holding of Conferences whose decisions would be binding…would involve the formal recognition of that principle upon which the future stability of international society depends—the principle that the nations have the right collectively to settle questions which imperil the peace of the world. (International Government, 87)
To be sure, much of this was wishful thinking. His notion that lack of machinery to resolve conflicts was a principal cause of war underestimated the role of ideology, propaganda, and power politics. In his mind, international government, rationally organized, could transcend aggressive instincts. He was eventually to modify his faith in reason during the 1930s, as the threat of Fascism loomed over Europe.
The substantial middle section of International Government began with the presupposition that international hostility stemmed from popular misconceptions that the interests of one country were inimical to the interests of others. A growing recognition that national interests were also international was the “great social discovery of the last 100 years” (International Government, 96). During the course of the nineteenth century, cosmopolitan institutions had begun to proliferate. Participation in international bodies did not imply any sacrifice of national interests, but it might almost imperceptibly restrict sovereignty. Leonard cited not only the emergence of intergovernmental organs, like the Universal Postal Union or the International Telegraphic Union, but also hundreds of voluntary bodies set up to meet specific needs. He enumerated the spontaneous growth of at least 500 international associations to promote social causes, to maintain uniform standards, or to serve the interests of professions. Such bodies might combat the slave trade or prostitution, control maritime safety, improve labor conditions, promote temperance, regulate public health, or focus attention on grievances. Advances in communications, transcending national frontiers, facilitated the organization of international commissions or periodic conferences. He cited science as the most obvious area in which voluntary international societies broke down national barriers that impeded the progress of knowledge. There was, he concluded, “hardly a sphere of life in which a consciousness of international interests had not penetrated, and led to men of every tongue and race joining together to promote those interests” (International Government, 106). Integral to the book’s theme was the idea that associations of citizens from different countries constituted embryonic forms of international government. Upholding the chimera of sovereignty would impede the intercourse between peoples. To insist upon national legislative autonomy was incompatible with the evolving modern state, which was in “perpetual and intimate and intricate relationship with other states;” there was no “department of life in which their most vital interests and relations [were] not international” (International Government, 217). To establish even limited international authority would be a major step toward the elimination of war. These arguments served as a kind of preamble to the more elaborate plans for international organization, constituting the third part of the book and based on the joint initiative by Leonard and Webb that appeared in the New Statesman in July 1915.
In order to make their draft treaty appear less objectionable, they limited its goals to what might prove palatable to existing governments. There would be no merging of independent states into a world federation or imposing national disarmament. If nations could not resolve disputes through the projected machinery, they would retain the right to go to war, even at the risk of perpetuating international anarchy. The alternative to war was adherence to law, reinforced through institutions, but they were for the most part voluntary. The key component was an International High Court, to which nations would be obliged to submit legal or justiciable disputes. If a nation refused to accept its judgment, they would be subject to social and economic sanctions. Leonard deliberately ignored the implications of military sanctions in the event that economic ones failed to constrain a recalcitrant state. In principle, the international community might be compelled to enforce its authority by resorting to war, so abhorrent a prospect that he largely discounted it in his formulations. The difficulty of enforcement remained an unresolved dilemma in his work.
Parallel to the court, but not subordinate to it, he advocated an International Council with representatives from some forty or more independent nations that might voluntarily choose to join. An immediate difficulty was that roughly half of these states were in the Western hemisphere, so separate regional councils were proposed for matters touching Europe or America. A further complication was the inequality of nations in power, wealth, and population. The eight Great Powers—Austria–Hungary, the British Empire (perceived as a unit), France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the United States—would be permitted to nominate five representatives to the council, while smaller states would be limited to two. Any of the Great Powers had to right to refer a question either to the entire council or the council of the eight. In the International Council, voting power would be weighted so as to ensure preponderant influence to the powers, whereas in the regional and partial bodies states would be treated equally. This cumbersome machinery, envisaging separate proceedings by a Council of the Great Powers or a Council for Europe or for America, as well as by the full International Council, was probably unworkable, since so neat a division of interests rarely occurred. Flexibility was intended to make operations more efficient, to prevent the council from being swamped with problems pertinent only to a specific region. Its primary function was to provide an arena for the amicable settlement of disputes that involved national honor or a vital local interest rather than questions of law, which were the province of the International Court. This scheme presupposed the inclusion of all states, not merely the victorious powers, a goal that did not survive the deliberations over the founding of the League of Nations. Constituent states were, however, bound to avoid committing aggression or violating the territory of other nations for a year after disputes were submitted to the International High Court or the International Council. Coordinating these units was an International Secretariat, whose function would be to organize inquiries, manage funds, and communicate decisions of the court or council to states. What the scheme involved was the establishment of an international civil service both as a counterweight to the machinations of statesmen and to provide stability in the face of shifting political leadership. It was to prove crucial to the operations of a League of Nations.
International Government was not only a visionary tract: it was, like all of Leonard’s political writings, polemical and propagandist. He tried to apply Fabian beliefs in regulation to the field of international relations, blaming nationalism and capitalism for the persistence of international anarchy. Arguments against international government had long been couched in terms of allegedly vital national interests, but these turned out to be either the concerns of a small class in one nation pitted against those in another, or those of the capitalist predators against dispossessed working people. Purely national government made it easy for powerful economic forces to delude the populace through specious appeals to patriotism. International government would strengthen the ability of the masses to combat capitalist exploitation, so that the interests of the majority would be advanced, not hindered, with the growth of international institutions. “The world is full of communities which have lost their souls, and they have lost them through war or by conquest. For so long as there is nothing between absolute independence and absolute dependence, the world must be divided between communities which oppress and communities which are oppressed” (International Government 230).
Late in 1917, Leonard published a brief study, The Future of Constantinople, an offshoot of his larger work. Its radical recommendation for international administration attracted little attention. Coupled with international control of the Straits, internationalization would serve as a guarantee against Russian aggression and a barrier to German military expansion. Instead of perpetuating the system of aggression and imperialism after the war, an International Commission, including the United States, could provide a reasonable probability of security for Russia. A test case of the success of Allied aims, it would avoid exclusive control and offer a practical solution to the conflicting interests of Russia and Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. As long as Constantinople and the Straits remained neutralized, under the control of an international authority, the risk of future war in the region would be diminished: “If it can be, and is given to any one State, it means the rule of the world by war; if in the hands of an International Commission it be administered by all for all, Constantinople means the rule of the world by peace.”14
Published under the aegis of the Fabian Society, International Government attracted a limited, but influential, audience and respectful reviews. H. N. Brailsford, journalist and early proponent of a League of Nations, lauded it as “a brilliant book,”15 and scholars on both sides of the Atlantic cited it throughout the interwar years as a pioneering work. In a lengthy review of several of his publications, the Athenæum referred to Leonard as “the ablest of a small group of thinkers and writers who have devoted themselves to the study of International Reconstruction and the League of Nations.” In an analysis containing anti-Semitic overtones, the reviewer noted “his shrewd analytical Jewish brain,” which had “dissipated many of the mists with which sentimentalists have been allowed to envelop the subject.” Even though he performed “the immense service of bringing the whole subject down from the clouds,” his conclusions were nonetheless flawed. While he recognized that enemy combatants were unlikely to be reborn as international patriots, his intellectual approach failed to come to terms with national selfishness. A mechanism for preventing war might prove effective in normal times, but it ignored the “deeper moral forces” and provided no security in a crisis.16
If International Government failed to attract a popular readership, it had considerable influence on policymakers at home and abroad. Translations of the book appeared in Paris, Stockholm, and Zurich during the peace negotiations, and President Wilson’s agent, Edward M. House, supervising the draft American proposals, was known to possess a copy. Sydney Waterlow, Cambridge acquaintance and former suitor of Virginia, now a Foreign Office official employed in the League section under Alfred Zimmern, “lifted almost verbatim” Leonard’s arguments in a brief prepared for Lord Robert Cecil, who was formulating the position of the British delegation to the January 1919 peace conference. Cecil incorporated “virtually the whole of Woolf’s ideas” into the British draft covenant submitted to Wilson in Paris. According to Philip Noel-Baker, Leonard played a key role “in giving concrete form to the general ideas about a League” and “in launching the conception of the League’s technical, social, economic and financial work.”17 Zimmern’s Foreign Office memorandum of November 1918 also foregrounded Leonard’s views for British negotiators, readily acknowledging “the masterly analysis of Mr Woolf,” which “drew attention to the existing international administrative agencies and offices and to the possibility thus opened up for co-ordination and development.”18
When Leonard first accepted the Webbs’ invitation in 1915 to undertake the study, he was scarcely known in radical political circles, with only two novels and a handful of articles on cooperation to his credit. By the time International Government appeared, he had become recognized as a leading authority, whose participation in internationalist groups, Fabian research, and Labour Party activities was eagerly sought. He was no longer merely the Webbs’ young protégé, a reliable Fabian workhorse who could in a few months acquire expertise, as he had done so adroitly in his investigation of international government. The Fabian Society was a convenient sponsor of his work, but he was never fully committed to its collectivist views on domestic reform. Sidney and Beatrice classified him as “the ex-colonial civil servant,” someone to turn to when foreign questions, in which they were not greatly interested, arose. Much to Virginia’s relief, he slowly disengaged himself from their clutches while continuing to acknowledge his debt to them. The Women’s Co-operative Guild had introduced him to the world of labor, setting the course of his evolution as a socialist, but he ultimately found it too parochial. Indeed, having spent seven years in Ceylon, his preoccupation was always with foreign and imperial affairs in both his journalism and his public activities. In his personal life his friendships were chiefly among Cambridge and Bloomsbury intellectuals, whose interests were mainly artistic and literary.
One exception was Dickinson, a Fellow of King’s and an Apostle, who served as his intermediary to pro-League activism. Goldie, as he was known to friends, originally coined the term “League of Nations” and was the dominant figure in the Bryce Group, named for Lord Bryce, Oxford professor and former British Ambassador to the United States. Common goals reignited Leonard’s ties to Dickinson through discussions to coordinate plans for an international authority. That collaboration resulted in 1915 in the founding of the League of Nations Society, whose executive committee included Leonard and Goldie. Its objective was to propagandize for a league that would be incorporated into the eventual peace treaty. In 1917 the society arranged a roster of five speakers, among them Leonard, Goldie, and Brailsford, who would follow each other at weekly intervals, delivering lectures in various towns on the idea of the league just as it was beginning to arouse interest. The movement gained momentum from President Wilson’s pledge to join a league and to employ American economic and military might against any power making war. Late in 1917, the League of Free Nations Association, an establishment group with greater financial resources, promoting a league based on the Allied War Council but excluding Germany, emerged on the scene. This flew in the face of the society’s contention that Germany should join the league from the outset to prevent it from becoming a club of victors. In a letter to the Nation, Leonard had protested the insufficient attention paid in the British press to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s pronouncement that Germany, as part of a negotiated peace, was ready to join a union of peoples, an apparent willingness on the part of the enemy to accept “the principles for which we are fighting.”19 In the summer of 1918, as war was winding down, Leonard negotiated terms of amalgamation, which merged the two groups into the League of Nations Union. A compromise formula declared that Germany must eventually enter the league but not until it had fully democratized. Leonard was elected to the Executive Council of the Union and later to its research committee, but International Government remained his most substantive contribution to the league movement in Britain.
Goldie also linked him to the radical founders of the Union of Democratic Control, men of the left, such as Brailsford, Hobson, E. D. Morel, and Norman Angell, who had never succumbed to the Fabian embrace. He persuaded Leonard to enlist in the effort to secure parliamentary control over British foreign policy by becoming a member of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC) in November 1915. In the spring of 1917, celebrating the hopeful early phase of the Russian Revolution, Leonard joined a handful of other activists to establish the left-wing 1917 Club, financed by Maynard Keynes, in a building in Gerrard Street, Soho. Among the founders were prominent UDC and Independent Labour Party figures, including Ramsay MacDonald. In due course its radical orientation was superseded by a more bohemian element, including Virginia and Strachey, actors and artists, dissipating the political tone. Leonard, of course, easily straddled both groups, and, while generally refusing to join clubs, he enjoyed the ambience of the 1917.
For British radicals, the overthrow of the Czarist regime offered a moment of optimism amid the horrors of the First World War. Leonard’s own exhilaration recalled his sentiments when Dreyfus was exonerated earlier in the century. He served as a delegate of his local branch of the Independent Labour Party to the Leeds conference in June 1917, convened by party and trade-union leaders to extol the Russian Revolution as an example for socialism in Britain. It was a high point of pro-revolutionary agitation in Labour circles, much of which evaporated rapidly after the Bolshevik takeover. Although he refused to sanction British intervention in the Russian civil war, Leonard developed an antipathy toward the policies adopted by Lenin. His ambivalence in the 1920s yielded to outspoken hostility once Stalin came to power. As he commented to Margaret Llewelyn Davies: “I hope you don’t think I’m anti-Bolshevik. I’m not. I think they’re the only people who’ve made an honest and serious attempt to practice what I believe in. But I cant help seeing their faults & mistakes which, if persisted in, will undo the good they’ve done.”20
As well as reviewing books on foreign affairs regularly for the New Statesman, he joined the editorial committee of Angell’s monthly magazine War and Peace in 1916, temporarily replacing its editor in December 1917. In addition, for a brief time, he served as lobby correspondent for the Independent Labour Party’s Labour Leader until MacDonald complained of Leonard’s failure to devote enough coverage to party leaders. When War and Peace became a supplement of the Nation, he attempted to transform it into an international socialist review with European, as well as British, contributors. He sought endorsements from Belgian socialist Camille Huysmans and British leaders, such as MacDonald, Arthur Henderson, the Webbs, and Robert Smillie, head of the Miners’ Union. All concurred, except the devious MacDonald, who may have viewed it as a potential competitor to his Socialist Review. Arnold Rowntree agreed to finance a less ambitious publication, with Leonard as editor but without the abortive international editorial board. “Rowntree had been greatly bitten by my scheme for a Review,” he told Lytton, “& will certainly finance it unless the expense proves too terrific.”21 In December 1918 the International Review began to circulate but survived only thirteen months. In addition to editing, Leonard contributed an “International Diary,” treating crucial topics of the day, and a documentary section. Regrettably, the International Review incurred mounting financial losses, which Rowntree was unwilling to sustain. He did, however, offer Leonard the editorship of a new international section of the established monthly Contemporary Review, to continue the kind of documentary journalism that he had pioneered earlier. He needed to find material inadequately covered in newspapers but soon became frustrated with the constraints and space limitations. In 1922 he resigned from the Contemporary Review to become political editor of the Nation, replacing Brailsford, recently appointed editor of the New Leader. This seemed a promotion on the journalistic ladder, a testament to his growing reputation. Within a few months, however, the situation had changed: H. W. Massingham, longtime Nation editor, had fallen out of favor with the Rowntrees, mainly because his allegiance was shifting from Liberals to Labour in the 1920s. They decided to sell the paper, and, when Massingham failed to raise sufficient funds to buy it himself, a consortium headed by Keynes took over, with economist Hubert Henderson assuming the editorship. When Keynes offered him a choice of roles, Leonard opted for the position of literary editor (after T. S. Eliot had declined it) from April 1923, indicating that he would relinquish the foreign affairs leader, despite Keynes’s plea to continue. His assignment was to write a weekly 1,200-word review article (“the World of Books”) and to oversee the literary pages, spending two and a half days in the Nation office every week at a salary of £500 per annum. It was a curious decision for him to take, since international relations had become his forte, the area in which his expertise was acknowledged, but he may have feared that his socialist proclivities would not sit easily with Keynes’s avowed Liberalism. Still, he had never abandoned his literary interests, now given scope in the Hogarth Press and in his cultivation of reviewers among young literati. As he confided to Strachey:
I expect you have heard that, having failed as (a) a civil servant, (b) a novelist, (c) an editor, (d) a publicist, I have now sunk to the last rung…—literary journalism. I am now Literary Editor of The Nation and Athenæum, and I would not even have sunk to that, if I had not been told that you had agreed to write for it…22
After Webb and Henderson had drafted a new constitution for the Labour Party in 1918, reflecting its national ambitions, they proposed several advisory committees to provide expert advice to the bulk of working-class MPs, whose knowledge of foreign and domestic issues was often deficient. Leonard may even have suggested the idea to Webb, who promptly invited him to become secretary of an Advisory Committee on International Questions. (ACIntQ). Although soon replaced by Charles Roden Buxton, Webb was initially designated as chairman. The two had collaborated in the past, but it was obvious that Leonard was destined to become the facilitator and dominant figure, since Webb was untutored in foreign relations. Confirming Leonard’s appointment, Henderson charged the committee with advising the Labour Executive “through me” about current international developments.23 He may have been trying to provide a back channel for the committee, whereas it saw its function as helping to formulate a democratic foreign policy, a substantial innovation in the way that parliamentary government operated. It was to find that influencing foreign policy was less straightforward than anticipated, even during the very few interwar years when Labour was in power. Leonard served as secretary from 1918 to 1939 and again after it was reconstituted late in the Second World War, retiring only in 1946. He was predictably industrious, drafting minutes, producing memoranda, and coordinating the committee’s various inquiries. The ACIntQ, which met weekly in a committee room of the House of Commons, comprised a number of experts drawn from retired civil servants, journalists, and regional specialists, many of whom had been active in the Bryce Group or the UDC. The countless memoranda and reports produced were impressive for the information gathered, but their impact did not live up to expectations. Some Labour MPs attended its meetings, gaining new insight into foreign or imperial problems, valuable training for eventual office. It would not be incorrect to conclude that the ACIntQ was more effective in its advisory and propaganda role than in policy formulation. While the Labour Executive rarely interfered, the committee jealously guarded its autonomy, especially when MacDonald, who perceived it as an irritant, sought to circumvent the proffered advice. Henderson, on the other hand, was far more supportive, welcoming its counsel, even when unable to implement its proposals.
At the outset the ACIntQ was preoccupied with the peace settlement and the establishment of the League of Nations. Its fear was that the League, dominated by Britain and France and without a balancing American presence, would simply perpetuate traditional diplomacy rather than embody a new order. Leonard had warned that, for the League to prove an effective agent of peace, it could not be merely a forum for the victorious allies. The chances for economic recovery, fundamental to a restored European comity, had been compromised by the harsh conditions imposed on Germany. The ACIntQ conceded that Germany should make some restitution to Belgium, but Leonard proposed that an international commission should settle claims with any additional reparations payments coming from an international fund.24 His denunciation of the peace terms anticipated Keynes’s incendiary Economic Consequences of the Peace. In a blatantly anti-French leader in the International Review in June 1919, he fulminated that “it is not a peace but a truce in the armed struggle between Latin and German.” At its core were “vindictive punishment, subjection and economic discrimination.”25 He was less critical of the League’s structure than some on the British left, because, at least functionally, the council, court, and secretariat closely approximated his earlier guidelines. Softening his tone in an anonymous article a month later, he observed that “the League is not quite so bad a League as the peace is a bad peace.” Since the covenant incorporated Wilsonian principles, the League marked “an enormous advance in international relations.”26 An ACIntQ memorandum in July, probably drafted by Leonard, recommended extending equality of opportunity to all colonies, with Germany included as a mandatory power, and the establishment of a World Economic Council to manage the distribution of food and raw materials and prevent international profiteering.27
These themes recur consistently in his articles and memoranda through the early 1920s. A 1922 draft resolution condemned a treaty of alliance with France or even a limited guarantee against German aggression as inimical to an inclusive League of Nations.28 Before shifting his focus entirely to the literary side of the Nation, Leonard wrote a series of vituperative leaders in response to the French occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923. The British should “wash our hands of Reparations and resign all claims under the Treaty.”29 The government should not only refer French actions to the League Council for consideration, but should “make it perfectly clear to France that, short of arms, we shall use every instrument available to oppose her present policy.”30 Inaction by the Council confirmed his fears that the League was proving ineffective in the face of Great Power provocation. This did not, however, foreshadow a diminution of the pro-League policy within the ACIntQ. Leonard never hesitated to suggest reforms of the covenant, while reiterating that the League must remain the cornerstone of Labour’s foreign policy. Although International Government had alluded to the limits of arbitration, Leonard and Will Arnold-Forster sketched out a plan in 1927 for a system of arbitration in non-legal disputes, moving beyond the League formula for conciliation. The cumbersome procedure was never adopted and, in any event, depended on a willingness of the parties to renounce war.31 When Labour and the Nation, the party’s campaign manifesto, masterminded by Henderson, appeared in 1928, its international policy section was largely written by Leonard and Noel-Baker. Doubtlessly the result of compromise, it called for disarmament and arbitration without mentioning economic or military sanctions. Instead, it reflected an increasingly tenuous reliance on the League: “the whole structure of peace and of a foreign policy of cooperation must be built on the foundation of the League of Nations.”32
His years as literary editor of the Nation were never free of tension that ultimately led to his resignation in 1930. Leonard wanted autonomy in choosing his reviewers, but Hubert Henderson, irritated by the flippant style of younger critics, such as George (“Dadie”) Rylands and Raymond Mortimer, tried unsuccessfully to veto their employment. In addition, Leonard complained that Keynes was “materially deteriorating the literary side” of the weekly in 1924 by focusing more on politics to serve the interests of the faltering Liberal Party, while its competitor, the New Statesman, was enhancing its literary section at the expense of the political.33 The literary pages of the Nation benefited from his dual role as editor and publisher, with his retinue of Hogarth authors. Conversely, the magazine’s reviews uncovered potential authors for the press. But the grind of a weekly column on books, sometimes on performances or recordings, took its toll, and the job became increasingly tedious. These columns revealed the breadth of Leonard’s reading and his admirable skill as a reviewer. Increasingly restive, he informed Keynes in 1927 that he intended to relinquish the editorship, but a compromise was devised: he would spend less time in the office and accept a pay reduction to £250. Finally, at the end of 1930, he quit as literary editor, vowing “never again to take a full time journalistic job” (Beginning, 132). His work as literary editor confirmed “the corroding and eroding effect of journalism upon the human mind” (Downhill, 128). Financially, the decision was facilitated by Virginia’s commercial success with To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). The Woolfs—especially during this period of mental stability for Virginia—could now more easily afford to rely on income from the Hogarth Press, their books (mainly Virginia’s), and occasional articles or reviews.
In 1927, William Robson, a young member of the LSE teaching staff, conceived the idea of a progressive political quarterly and approached his colleague, Kingsley Martin, on the verge of becoming a Manchester Guardian leader writer, as a potential collaborator. Shaw contributed £1,000 to launch the journal, and a small organizing committee, which included Leonard, Keynes, and Harold Laski, was set up. The social historian and journalist J. L. Hammond was approached to become editor, but he declined, even when offered a joint editorship with Leonard, who had been sounded out as to his availability. Leonard was willing to serve as joint editor, but, in the event, Robson and Martin were appointed, despite the fact that the latter was then living in Manchester, and the Political Quarterly began publication in January 1930. When Martin wrote to express discomfort about displacing him, Leonard responded courteously:
There is no need for you to feel bad. I always tell the truth unless there is a very good reason for telling a lie, and in this case there was no reason for me to do so. The Quarterly interests me, and I like having a finger in interesting pies, but as I said (truthfully) I have not really the time for it and was glad to get out of it for that reason.34
This was not completely accurate: Leonard had not withdrawn his name from consideration, in case the committee had second thoughts about Martin, who had a reputation for impetuosity. In the autumn of 1930, Martin, fired by the Manchester Guardian, returned to London and was almost immediately offered the editorship of the New Statesman, about to be amalgamated with the Nation. Since it would have been impossible to edit a weekly review and a quarterly periodical simultaneously, Martin withdrew from the Political Quarterly after only one year and was succeeded by Leonard, who served as joint editor with Robson until 1958 and continued on the editorial board until his death.35 The two worked harmoniously, with Leonard acting as sole editor from 1940 to 1945, while Robson was involved in war work. Willie (as he was known) became one of his closest friends during the years they shared editorial duties, as well as one of his few Jewish associates. Virginia regarded him as pedantic, but Leonard cherished their relationship. He discovered that co-editing a quarterly review was far less onerous than filling the literary pages of a weekly magazine. It also provided a vehicle for his own commentaries on international affairs: between 1930 and 1945 he published fourteen substantial essays on a range of topics, thoughtful analyses of the world scene that provided greater scope than allowed in brief articles for the New Statesman, to which he continued to contribute throughout Martin’s editorship.
Leonard had little to add in the 1920s to his earlier work on international government, aside from the strongly pro-League foreign-policy section of Labour and the Nation. His first contribution to the Political Quarterly in 1930 was an assessment of the League and foreign affairs since the end of the First World War. He contrasted the old spirit of national rivalry, symbolized by Sarajevo, with the new internationalist spirit embodied in Geneva, the headquarters of the League. The war had undermined the appeal of nationalism, although it had dictated much of the peace settlement. The framework of a new Europe was reconstructed as though the new international psychology had not penetrated the minds of statesmen. Even so, French troops had evacuated the Rhineland and a reparations agreement was in the works. The remarkable fact was “the unexpected strength and position developed by the League in the short time of its existence.” It had become “a visible rallying point and focus of internationalism.” In his 1916 tract he had tried to demonstrate how national interests had become internationalized through the proliferation of organizations. Now, as he surveyed the activities of the League, he could conclude that “in the every-day internationalism of European society Geneva and the League are already playing a dominant part.” In shouldering many of the burdens of post-war Europe, the League had achieved a level of stability “which it could not possibly have won in ten years if it had merely remained an instrument to be used in emergencies for preventing war and for the pacific settlement of international disputes.” It was becoming what he had not dared to imagine—or to express—in 1916: a “Super-State in embryo.” All that was lacking was the growth of international psychology, which was “still weak, vacillating, and uninstructed.”36 Nationalist passions survived as a perpetual menace to the emergence of a civilized system of international relationships. An ominous portent was the refusal of the Conservative government in Britain to sign the so-called Optional Clause requiring that justiciable disputes be submitted to arbitration. This implied that Tory politicians were still wedded to traditional diplomacy, leaving each nation the judge of its own self-interest, impervious to the needs of the world community. He underscored the absurdity of imagining that nationalist psychology was compatible with a League system.
By the beginning of 1933, Leonard’s prognosis was far gloomier. He noted a recrudescence of virulent nationalism and militarism, especially in Germany. The League had failed to deal with Japanese aggression in Manchuria, and the persistence of unregulated armaments provided neither peace nor security. The choice for the Great Powers was clear: as long as they obstructed efforts at general disarmament, it was futile to expect an international system based on the League to develop. What was needed was for every state to commit itself to aid victims of aggression. Nor was Britain’s refusal to surrender its naval dominance entirely the fault of the National Government. Public opinion was also culpable: pacifists on the left refused to face up to the dilemma posed by collective security. They might endorse a League-oriented foreign policy, but not at the price of resisting aggressors. “If we want to know where to place the blame for the League’s failure, we must look to the governments of the Great Powers and to the people who send nationalist governments to Geneva.”37 Even Leonard had not fully resolved the dilemma for himself: was pooled security compatible with general disarmament? Nations should meet their obligations to resist aggression, but how were they to do so if stripped of their weapons? A move toward a League military force under international command was nowhere on the horizon. The ACIntQ was hardly more resolute, concluding that alternatives to supporting the League were even less plausible once Hitler came to power. Distrust of national armaments blocked any move towards providing the League with adequate resources to combat aggression. While the League’s record since 1930 was abysmal, unless there was some kind of system, like the League, “another large-scale war in Europe is sooner or later inevitable.”38 Robson described this article, ostensibly about Henderson’s tract Labour’s Foreign Policy, as “profoundly disturbing, utterly realistic and merciless in its analysis of the inevitable consequence of the failure of the League.”39 Still clinging to the League and the goal of collective security, Leonard was not yet ready to resort to sanctions and risk armed conflict. Even after the Nazis had come to power, he advocated revision of Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty to assuage German sentiment over the war guilt clause and sought ways, perhaps through the mandate system, to respond to Germany’s colonial grievances. Within a few years, however, his attitude began to shift, as League impotence and the menace of Hitler became indubitable. He was frustrated by the weakness of the party and the trade-union movement in facing up to growing international threats, yet his commitment to the movement never wavered. However divided its views and inconsistent its policies, Labour’s values were ones he fostered in his writings and organizational activities. In addition to the ACIntQ, he was appointed to the Executive Committee of the New Fabian Research Bureau and became head of its International Section. He had acquired a reputation for sound judgment and political integrity, a man to be trusted in perilous times.