‘Comrades of the Labour movement’, Sidney beseeched the readers of the War on War Gazette in September 1914. ‘Has your internationalism, your fraternity … been all cant and humbug … Are you racialists first, and Socialists second?’ His politics were secular, his discourse biblical: ‘Remember the voice crying in the wilderness … Think of the grain of mustard seed.’ The power of their collective will could effect change. ‘War, the greatest specific crime of modern times, is preventible, even after it has broken out: a determined people on either side can stop it’. Once they joined the crusade against war, they would soon find, Sidney echoed his favourite poet, Robert Browning, ‘That rage was right i th'main, That acquiescence vain’.

Before the outbreak of war the Labour Party had been growing. Labourites still hoped, optimistically, for a victory in the national elections set for 14 October, the next year. Eddie Roux, for one, was convinced that ‘there seemed no doubt at all that socialism would soon be established’. But the anti-war section were worried that support for the war would alienate potential Afrikaner members and deepen ethnic tensions amongst white workers. ‘Do you think you are going to win [Afrikaners] by flaunting the Union Jack?’, Sidney asked his English-speaking readers. ‘Or will you not rather alienate them? And you know what that means to the future hope of the Party … Remember the once despised pro-Boers’, he reminded them; ‘we are all pro-Boers today.’