Our main work is education and agitation (in the better sense of the word)'-Gilbert Murray wrote to a friend early in 1933. With a touch of the missionary spirit he went on: 'The truth is that we are leading an enormously important movement and we must not let it collapse either through dissensions that can be avoided or through a mere colourless and timid attitude. The devils on the other side are working hard.'l The League of Nations Union is a characteristic feature of political life in interwar Britain. Though there existed similar organisations in some countries on the continent, nowhere &d they obtain the significance and influence of the British organisation. The peace ballot of 1934-35 in which over 11 million cast a voluntary vote had no counterpart elsewhere. For many of the men and women who adhered to the ideology of collective security through the League of Nations this was more than a political standpoint, it became a political belief, a panacea if not for all, at least for most ills of the world. This semi-religion was a political faith, concerned with one fundamental aspect of life, that of international co-operation. Its leading protagonists, Robert Cecil, son of a prime minister and a man with much drive and strength of character, and Gilbert Murray, the gentle, inward-looking Oxford professor of Greek, appeared to Salvador de Madariaga as 'two monks of a civic religionI.2 There was something both insular and cosmopolitan in their attitude and outlook. They tended to look in a friendly fashion on the people of other nations as 'foreigners' and felt a kind of abstract responsibility to them which could only stem from a nation that had developed a world-wide empire.It is the intention of this article to consider the League of Nations Union as an inter-(or better a supra-) party movement which operated both as an educational agency and as a pressure group.Though its leaders as such did not make decisions on foreign affairs they tried to influence the policy-makers. Their belief in collective security and in disarmament formed a platform on which members of all three major parties could find common ground. It led to the formation of organisational machinery devised to win and mobilise mass opinion with a view to using it for prodding the government on the lines of the league doctrine. The men and women who directed this machinery in the frame of a still 'oligocratic s~c i e t y '~ belonged to the political elite and any British government had to reckon with them. The fact is relevant that politicians like Lord
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.