As for the movement most passionately devoted to the equality of all men, it spoke with two voices. The secular left was anti-imperialist in principle and often in practice. Freedom for India, like freedom for Egypt and Ireland, was the objective of the British labour movement. The left never wavered in its condemnation of colonial wars and conquests, often – as in the British opposition to the Boer War – at considerable risk of temporary unpopularity. Radicals revealed the horrors of the Congo, in metropolitan cocoa plantations on African islands, in Egypt. The campaign which led to the great electoral triumph of the British Liberal Party in 1906 was largely waged by public denunciations of ‘Chinese slavery’ in the South African mines. Yet, with the rarest exceptions (such as Dutch Indonesia), western socialists did little actually to organize the resistance of colonial peoples to their rulers, until the era of the Communist International.
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