The human heart

An annotation on the back of this cartoon suggests that it was published in the Herald, a Melbourne newspaper, on the 9/5/28. Dyson worked on this paper until he returned to London in the late twenties and thirties. The cartoon represents an allegorical figure of War inside a human heart. He is reading America's proposed Peace Pact. War seems displeased with the pact he holds in his hand. One caption on the drawing, which has been crossed out, reads: 'Eject him from our hearts'. The cartoon suggests that the pact might play a role in removing war from our hearts sense and thus from the world.

The peace pact the cartoon alludes to is the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was signed on the 27 August 1928. The pact was designed to limit the use of war as a 'legitimate instrument of national policy' for those nations who had signed up to its conditions. These nations included: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, India, the Irish Free State, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.