XIII
ON BEHALF OF E. D. MOREL
E. D. Morel, secretary of the Union of Democratic Control, was arrested in London during August, 1917, and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in the second division, upon the ridiculous (and incorrect) charge of having attempted to send to Romain Rolland in Switzerland one of his own political pamphlets which was being freely circulated in England.[1] The "Revue mensuelle" of Geneva asked R. R. what he thought of this affair, concerning which at that time little was known on the continent, for all the information hitherto published had been in the form of defamatory articles, attacks upon Morel manufactured in England and disseminated in various tongues. R. R. replied as follows:—
YOU ask what I think of the arrest of E. D. Morel. I am not personally acquainted with E. D. Morel. I do not know whether, as is asserted, he has sent me some of his works during the war. I never received them.
But from all that I know of him, of his activities prior to the war, of his crusade against the crimes of civilisation in Africa, of his writings upon the war (few of which have been reproduced in Swiss or in French journals), I consider him to be a man of high courage and vigorous faith. He has always dared to serve truth, to serve truth alone, scorning danger, regardless of all the animus he was arousing. These things would be little. Morel has displayed rarer qualities, has achieved a more difficult task, in that he has been willing to disregard his own sympathies, his friendships,
- ↑ E. D. Morel, having served his sentence, has given a number of lectures in various parts of Britain, arousing the sympathetic indignation of his audiences by his account of the illegalities in his trial and of the undercurrents in the whole business. He was able to show that there were influences at work emanating from certain persons whose interests had been injuriously affected prior to the war by Morel's press campaign against the Congo atrocities.—Cf. The Persecution of E. D. Morel, Reformer’s Series, Glasgow, 1919.
