On This Day, 20 February 1918

Evening Despatch

Wednesday 20 February 1918

A CLEAN GOVERNMENT.

WOMEN’S LEAGUE AND SECRET TREATIES.

Addressing the members of the Birmingham branch of the Women’s International League at the annual meeting held at the Priory Looms, Birmingham, last evening, Mrs. Swanwick (the chairman of the League) declared that if the country desired a clean peace, it must have a clean Government, which was not the sort of Government that was at present in power in this country, as the secret treaties which the Bolsheviks had published had revealed.

She believed that it was a most happy augury that the British and French Socialists had come to an agreement on the British Labour Party’s memorandum, and that it was now the duty of the Allied Socialists, who did not desire territorial conquests or a military peace, to combine in a great forward push directed towards sweeping away all the secret treaties which diplomats and not peoples had made.