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 1® m\ m
 
 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR.
 
 SOCIALISM AFTER 
 THE WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 J. RAMSAY MACDONALD 
 
 THE NATIONAL LABOUR PRESS. LIMITED. 
 MANCHESTER AND LONDON.
 
 j) H 
 
 
 o» 
 
 
 14-5 
 
 FOREWORD. 
 
 To the Members of the Independent Labour Party. 
 
 You have come through a time of great stress because 
 you kept to your international and democratic faith. 
 Every hound of malignity has been released to bite at 
 you. But you have not run away, and have sought 
 shelter neither in silence nor in what is miscalled 
 "patriotism." The result is that to-day your party 
 is stronger than ever it has been, both in membership 
 and moral authority. You have stood the supreme 
 test, which is to point out the right way when others 
 are going wrong, and to stand keeping open the gates 
 through which people must ultimately pass to peace 
 and satisfaction. The war people are now beginning 
 to speak in your language and to adopt your policy. 
 That is the beginning of your triumph, and you have 
 now to think of the future. 
 
 This at least we know 
 That the Dawn and the Day are coming, and forth the 
 banners go. 
 
 These chapters are offered to you not as a complete 
 eet of details but as a general and a guiding survey, 
 not as a dogmatic pronouncement but for your con- 
 sideration.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Chapter Page. 
 
 I. Socialism and the War 1 
 
 II. Socialism and the State 10 
 
 III. Trade Union Organisation 24 
 
 IV. The Political Independence of Labour... 33 
 
 V. A Socialist Parliament 42 
 
 VI. A Socialist Programme 51 
 
 VII. International Policy 62 
 
 VIII. Imperialist Capitalism 68 
 
 IX. Summary 75
 
 Socialism after the War. 
 
 Socialism and the War. 
 
 Change of opinion, in those to whose judgment the public 
 looks more or less to assist its own, is an evil to the country, 
 although a much smaller evil than their persistence in a course 
 which they know to bi wrong. It is not always to be blamed. 
 But it is always to be watched with vigilance, always to be 
 challenged and put upon its trial. Gladstone. 
 
 The experiences of a war lead to revisions of opinion. 
 A mighty conflict carried on with all the resources of 
 a country, with millions of men killing each other, with 
 minds and nerves on the rack of tense emotion, not 
 only upsets mental balance and changes the outlook of 
 people, but develops social and political fears, passions, 
 and sympathies which will not pass away in a day, and 
 introduces new methods of production and new distri- 
 butions of the industrial population. 
 
 What the balance of the effects of this is to be 
 depends altogether on the intelligence of the people 
 and the firmness with which they grip the fundamental 
 facts of the situation. When a nation is in danger a 
 tendency for all class interests to join in its defence 
 naturally arises. On the surface there appears a move- 
 ment for national unity. People announce that they 
 have forgotten party, that the economic divisions of 
 society have been obliterated, that " duke's son and
 
 2 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 cook's son " have reached a common meeting ground in 
 a fraternity of sacrifice. In a measure this actually 
 happens so far as the emotion of the comfortable fire- 
 side and the public meeting is concerned. But in the 
 detailed life of the community it is not so — it cannot 
 be so. People make fortunes off the war, people make 
 illegitimate profits off national distress, people increase 
 their financial grip upon the vitals of the State because 
 it is in great need; and they do these things not 
 because they are hypocritical or evil-minded, but 
 because the herd emotions of unity in defence do not, 
 and cannot, influence the economic and social 
 machinery which determines the success or failure of 
 society. That machine after the war will work just as 
 usual. To decorate a steam engine with flags and 
 ribbons changes its appearance, but does not revolu- 
 tionise the action of its boilers, its pistons, its wheels, 
 and its driving rods. Its parts function as when it was 
 undecorated; its mechanical workings are as of old. 
 Though I do not regard the organisation of society to 
 be as rigid as that of a steam engine, the analogy points 
 to the truth. Unless good emotion in society finds ex- 
 pression through a new system of economic relation- 
 ships, that good emotion can have no social result and, 
 indeed, will sink to mere sentimentality. 
 
 The real facts of the position have been exposed to 
 everyone who had eyes to see in the case of the 
 "profiteers." Some of these deliberately and de- 
 signedly robbed the public. They had no qualms 
 about it. There was the market, there was the scar- 
 city, there was their opportunity, and they took it hand- 
 somely. Then there were others who could not help 
 themselves. The social mechanism forced up prices, 
 and they could no more keep down theirs than stop the 
 war. These two hard facts were in the background 
 when the pose of " the sacred union " was being
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE WAE 3 
 
 adopted by so many, and as time has passed they have 
 come more and more on to the forefront of the stage 
 much to the dishevelment of the picture. 
 
 This emotional and superficial unity appeals greatly 
 to simple-minded people. It is that that is written up 
 in the newspapers, that is talked about in Government 
 circles during the war, that weaves a net of patronage 
 round subordinates and gives office without authority 
 to those who desire such distinction. It offers to pro- 
 mote a new moral and national order after peace, in 
 which fair play will be done and nothing considered but 
 national and communal well-being. It suppresses the 
 experience of conflict in the thought of co-operation, 
 and by using the emotions of a common danger and 
 defence, it induces people to talk about a new industrial 
 and social ethic for modifying, the injustice and ex- 
 ploitation of the existing system without either explor- 
 ing the causes of the injustice or showing how to 
 change the system itself. 
 
 At such times one has always to allow for the tre- 
 mendous pull which the rich and the superior castes 
 have. In their hands are all the prizes which most men 
 value ; to be praised and accepted by them is success. 
 This circumstance affects with peculiar force parties 
 such as our own Labour Party. Professor Michels, of 
 Basle, recently published a study in the organisation 
 and psychology of workmen's political parties* by 
 which he sought to prove not only that oligarchy clung 
 as an evil fruit to democracy — a kind of reversion to a 
 rigid type — but that bourgeois sentiments have always 
 captured successful working-class leaders. He pointed 
 out that a party would always sell its soulf when 
 brought up against such a crisis as a war presents, and 
 
 * Political Parties. A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies 
 of modern democracy. 
 
 t Political Parties. P. 412.
 
 4 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 that Labour parties in particular then use patriotic 
 language and join with other parties in order to make 
 themselves respectable, and thus gain, especially for 
 their leaders, a new companionship amongst the 
 socially distinguished bourgeoisie. In sentences of 
 cruel directness in which he quotes Engels' opinions of 
 English working-class leaders (and which I do not 
 adopt to the full) he writes : ' ' Like all self-made men 
 the Trade Union leader is intensely vain. . . . He 
 is apt to show himself less resistant than he should be 
 towards the interested and amiable advances of bour- 
 geois notables."* This weakness, he says, has had no 
 small influence on labour policy, and the effect of it has 
 been that the new unity of party, class, and interest, 
 which we are told is to follow the war, only means, so 
 far as some labour leaders are concerned, that they 
 have foresworn all their old opinions and have adopted 
 those of their erstwhile opponents. Up to the time 
 when this is being written the revised programmes 
 which labour leaders have accepted have not, in a single 
 item, differed from programmes advocated by the re- 
 action and rejected by labour before the war broke out 
 — tariffs, imperial preference, coercion of Trade 
 Unionism paid for by some improvements in wages, 
 and so on. The emotion of unity has meant amongst 
 the leisured rich a softening of thought for the masses 
 without any change of opinion as regards social rela- 
 tionships or economic classes ; amongst the employing 
 classes it has meant practically nothing; amongst the 
 masses it has also meant little except that crowds hate 
 enemies passionately, and whilst their hate is on it 
 becomes a taint in the whole body of opinion which 
 they hold. The intelligent minority, however, has 
 always been much greater in numbers and in influence 
 
 * Political Partii.. P. 318.
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE WAE 5 
 
 than has seemed to be the case, and contains practi- 
 cally all the vital elements in the Labour movement.* 
 Thus the old order saves itself for another genera- 
 tion. Even when the intention to " make things better 
 for the poor" is genuine, it presupposes no change 
 which will affect the political and economic ruling 
 classes — the rich remaining rich and the poor remain- 
 ing poor. It is to be done by goodwill, by changed 
 hearts. These people intend to turn an economic State 
 into a philanthropic one — and some Labour leaders 
 think they can do it. But in due course the emotions 
 of the war will pass away, and the economic and 
 political mechanism will return to its natural working 
 until again challenged by a new democratic movement 
 created by its failure. All that will have happened is 
 that a generation will have been lost, that the progres- 
 sive movement will have to begin afresh, that once 
 more a set of leaders will have forfeited trust, and their 
 failure will make it more difficult for steadfast men to 
 gain confidence. At the moment of writing it looks as 
 though the Labour movement will emerge from the war 
 not only divided but weakened permanently by sus- 
 picion. This is an evil which everyone should still, in 
 the face of every discouragement, try to avert. 
 
 + Many individuals of the various bourgeois parties have changed. 
 They have come into contact with real life in a way they have never 
 done before, and their experiences, coupled with their disgust with exist- 
 ing political parties and their leaders, have changed their political out- 
 look and economic creed. But change of political opinion to be effective 
 must show itself in parties and organisations of citizens specialised to 
 alter the organic relations of the various functions of society. Thus a 
 great number of these converts to new views have joined or will yet 
 join the Independent Labour Party. That means not that there is to be 
 a new order of politics in which all the old parties are to combine, 
 but that the old order of conflict, modified a little perhaps and with a 
 readjustment of parties, is to be continued, and progress is to be the 
 result of the clash between reaction and conservatism on the one hand 
 and liberal thought on the other. Indeed, how it can be otherwise 
 no one not totally blinded by the delusions of the war mind can believe. 
 When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; 
 When the devil was well, the devil a monk was he. 
 
 I use " the devil " not to indicate individuals, but classes whose 
 characteristics are fixed by economic law, and not by the humanity or 
 inhumanity of their component members. 
 B
 
 6 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 This describes what has actually happened in this 
 country since the war started. And the apparent 
 breakdown of Socialism, nationally and internationally, 
 has made the descent easy. 
 
 When the war broke out, in no country was the 
 Socialist movement ready for it. When the day of 
 terror and excitement came, the mind of the Socialist 
 parties sprung to national defence and not to inter- 
 national understanding. It closed all its disagreements 
 with the ruling authorities; it not only joined in the 
 conflict but merged its identity in it, and, in conse- 
 quence, accepted both the responsibility and the policy 
 of the various national governments. Under the stress 
 of circumstances, which varied in each country, it 
 forgot that wars are but political incidents, and that, 
 if fought and ended with old political views in control, 
 they must be ineffective to secure the results which all 
 governments were professing to seek. In a sentence 
 Labour policy, except in minorities, ceased in reality to 
 exist. This is as true of Great Britain as it is of Ger- 
 many. If Scheidemann had been a Junker, if the 
 majority of the British Labour members had been 
 members of the Carlton Club, the story of how the war 
 has been conducted, the speeches delivered by them 
 and their acts both of omission and of commission, 
 would not have been different. To the political policy 
 of the war they have not contributed one original or 
 characteristic thought. Whatever consideration has 
 been shown to labour — as, for instance, in separation 
 allowances and pensions — has been due not to labour's 
 attitude to the war, but to the strength it had acquired 
 owing to its independent political organisation before 
 the war. These things have been done not because 
 labour has been in power, but because prior to 1914 it 
 showed that it had to be feared. Labour since 1914 
 has been reaping the fruits, not of its " patriotic " (sic) 
 action since then, but of its wisdom between then and
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE WAK 7 
 
 1900. All the time the atrocities and the necessities 
 of war — the hates, the fears, the struggle to win — have 
 been drifting those Socialists who have been supporting 
 governments in all the countries, further and further 
 from their moorings, and raising greater and greater 
 difficulties in their way of return. Many will never 
 return. 
 
 The International itself broke down. There was no 
 international confidence. The organisation had created 
 nothing more substantial than a peace sentiment. It 
 was aware of both the follies and atrocities of war, of 
 its irrationality and its ineffectiveness, of its causes and 
 its consequences. But coherence of the international 
 democracy hardly existed. The international was like 
 a heap of stones, not like a web of cloth. It was 
 easily separated. 
 
 Socialism, like religion and every other movement 
 which saw that something more than patriotism was 
 wanted and had a vision of human unity (or, as some 
 of its sections would prefer to express it, an allegiance 
 to the Divine Will), failed to master the disrupting 
 forces which were unloosened in August, 1914, and, 
 like them, disappeared as a restraining and guiding 
 power. The rationality of internationalism had been 
 established ; the courage of the international spirit had 
 had no time to grow. 
 
 So, the Socialist whose mind wanders in the chaos of 
 Europe to-day is first of all discouraged by the im- 
 potence of his creed, and, unlike others who with him 
 have cause for regrets and humiliation, he is unable to 
 cherish delusions and hypocrisies which console him. 
 He has to face the hard facts of failure unclothed by 
 excuses. He has been overborne. 
 
 When he surveys his surroundings, however, he is 
 saved from the most devastating of all pessimisms, 
 that which comes to a man who is forced to admit that 
 he has been fundamentally wrong, and that he has
 
 8 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 spent the best of his life in opposing what is right after 
 all and in advocating what is wrong. His doctrines of 
 State organisation have received a wonderful proof. 
 Competitive and disorganised individual initiative on 
 an open market have had to be superseded by national 
 control. He sees the inevitable evil in the working of 
 Capitalism producing individual discontent and 
 national weakness. He sees the massing of fortunes 
 and the grasping at power and advantage. He sees an 
 accumulation of industrial and economic problems 
 which will soon become pressing and which he knows 
 that his principles alone can unravel. He sees the 
 soldier who has suffered acquiring a new conception of 
 the expression " my country." The national stress has 
 made the truth of his position more apparent. More- 
 over, his ranks have received great acquisitions which, 
 both in quality and numbers, more than counter- 
 balance his losses.* Nor has the International 
 crumbled completely, for though his movement, both 
 nationally and internationally, has been impotent, 
 sections of it in all countries have remained true, and 
 only await the coming of peace to be the rallying 
 centres of a new democratic Europe. The Italian and 
 British majority in overwhelming numbers and in- 
 fluence stood true to the International, and so did the 
 American majority. The French minority has grown 
 steadily until it is now the majority. In Belgium 
 there is a minority of no mean size. The Austrian 
 majority is with us, and the German minority probably 
 represents a majority. All the governments in one 
 way or another have found it necessary to hamper the 
 activities of the Socialist International in its attempts 
 
 * For instance, tested by everything which shows strength, the war 
 has increased the power of the Independent Labour Party. Its member- 
 ship has increased. The branch in which I am most concerned has raised 
 its membership from 700 to 1.700. The circulation of the Labour Leader 
 has more than doubled, literature sales have soared upwards, the attend- 
 ance at meetings has broken all records, and, above all, never has it 
 shown such a magnificent spirit of loyalty and devotion.
 
 SOCIALISM AND THE WAE 9 
 
 to crush militarist imperialism and bring about a secure 
 people's peace. At the moment when the darkness 
 seemed to be gathering thickest upon him and when 
 liberty had not only left the minds and the bureaux of 
 his governors, but seemed to have deserted public 
 opinion as well, the Russian Revolution burst upon 
 the vision of the harassed Socialist like the streaks of a 
 dawning day, and he saw in the dethronement of the 
 Czar not only the liberation of Russia, but the re- 
 awakening of democracy and the beginning of a new 
 and independent policy in the conduct of the war and 
 in the control of European affairs. The Russian Revo- 
 lution was a European Revolution. 
 
 So from the chaos comes the call to the Inter- 
 nationalist to take up his work anew. The war is 
 evidence of the failure of the old order of governors and 
 government ; its evolution is proof of their incompetence 
 to settle anything. He must begin again his work of 
 enlightenment, for upon his success depends, not only 
 whether the political changes which the war will bring 
 are to be satisfactory, but also whether the economic 
 and industrial opportunities which it presents are to be 
 turned to account by the masses of the nations. In 
 doing this work he may have to modify some of his 
 plans and conceptions owing to changed conditions, he 
 may have to accept departures here and there which 
 he does not like but which may be of temporary advan- 
 tage, but nothing that has happened has given reason 
 for changing his standpoint, for modifying his general 
 principles, or for believing that his judgments passed 
 in times of peace upon the social system of Capitalism 
 have been wrong. 
 
 Socialism retains its proud position in the van of pro- 
 gress. It alone points the way out of the chaos of the 
 war and through the confusions of the coming peace.
 
 II. 
 
 Socialism, the State and Political Party. 
 
 As soon as questions arise about the life, and especially the 
 spiritual life, of individuals, the State finds both its insight and 
 its power hemmed in by limits which it cannot pass. 
 
 BLUNT3CHLI. 
 
 Before the war the British Socialist had no memory 
 or experience of the State as anything but the political 
 organisation of a tolerably free people working demo- 
 cratic institutions. The institutions had their defects, 
 but not to such an extent as to destroy their general 
 character. If they failed the fault was not in them 
 but in the people who worked or ought to have 
 worked them. It was therefore difficult for us to com- 
 prehend the deeper meaning of the controversy which 
 went on in some Continental countries between State 
 Socialism and Social Democracy. We know it now. 
 
 When the war had to be defended and those who 
 merged their Socialist and Labour principles in the v.ar 
 shibboleths of the parties to which they had been 
 opposed, had to make some show of consistency, they 
 turned to the argument that Socialism based itself 
 upon State authority, and that therefore Socialists 
 ought to be the last people in the world to stand out 
 of a national Government and refuse to it an unques- 
 tioning obedience. " The Socialist believes in com- 
 pulsion as regards the feeding of school children," they 
 said; " how can he reject compulsion as regards mili- 
 tary service I" The reasoning was bad, but that was 
 not the only fault. The argument showed that the 
 British Socialist had never thought very clearly about 
 the State. The State at any given moment is the 
 instrument of the party in power ; it is the authority of 
 
 10
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 11 
 
 whatever public opinion prevails. Therefore, the 
 Socialist is not always under obligation to render it 
 implicit obedience. He may bow to its authority — 
 partly because he belives that, however mistaken it 
 may be, he would be guilty of a more evil mistake if he 
 weakened its authority and so destroyed social 
 cohesion, and partly because the difference between it 
 and himself is not one of principle, but belongs, to the 
 kind of opinion where majorities can properly demand 
 the acquiescence of minorities. But this war has re- 
 vealed to us dangers of State authority which have 
 hitherto appeared to be only fanciful. We have not 
 only become familiar with militarism in power, but we 
 have been brought hard up against the crude idea, con- 
 tributed mainly by Trade Union officials, that in order 
 to prove their allegiance to democratic government, 
 minorities must allow themselves to be suppressed. 
 Thus we have had the sudden appearance in Great 
 Britain of the tyrannical State and the Jack-in-office 
 bureaucracv. In future the Socialist doctrine of State 
 authority and of the State itself must be defined with 
 far more care than hitherto, and must be rid completely 
 of the idea of the servile political and military State. 
 
 A belief in democracy is not the same as a belief in' , 
 majority rule, because democracy is not a mathemati- 
 cal conception. Democracy is a spirit and method of 
 government confined in its operations by the end which 
 it serves — liberty. It includes the safeguarding of free-^ 
 dom of thought and speech, as well as of majority 
 mandate; it protects the individual responsible to his 
 inner light as well as the individual as part of a crowd ; 
 it recognises conscience as well as authority, liberty as 
 well as obedience. When perfect, it is a kind of 
 government which has discovered how to harmonise in 
 co-operative activities the apparent opposites of law 
 and individual rights, order and individual initiative. 
 When we argue and act upon mere words, we can
 
 12 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 christen a tyranny and call it a democracy, but when 
 we do so we are not dealing with the realities of life ; 
 we are only dealing with its labels. 
 
 After the war we may nationalise the railways and 
 run them as State Capitalist enterprises. We may 
 nationalise essential industries and conduct them in the 
 spirit of the Munitions Act, offering " national neces- 
 sity " as a justification. In form, Socialism will have 
 triumphed; in fact, it will have receded, because 
 Capitalism will be the ruling factor, and will be 
 strengthened by becoming representative, impersonal, 
 and political instead of being individualist and unrepre- 
 sentative. Hence those who tell us that Socialism 
 has been advanced by the increased grip of the State 
 upon industry because of the war are like a man who 
 believes that winter is passing when he finds himself 
 in front of a warm fire. 
 
 Of all the forms of State organisation and of all the 
 motives behind State authority which are most ob- 
 noxious to and destructive of Socialism, the military 
 State is the chief. As militarism strengthens its grip 
 upon the life of nations — a thing which its uniform 
 failure to guarantee national security has done in 
 Europe, generation after generation — the acquiescence 
 of labour becomes more and more important to the 
 military authorities. These authorities are not 
 primarily concerned with commercial profits; they are 
 ignorant of both economics and politics; of all experts 
 in social responsibilities they are the furthest removed 
 from the real life of the nation. But moved solely by 
 their own needs, they would be willing to give heed to 
 certain labour claims in order to keep labour quiet and 
 transform labour leaders into their own servants and 
 spokesmen. The German State shows that a military 
 authority is willing to be philanthropic if it is allowed 
 to exact obedience ; the history of the British aris- 
 tocracy and the Tories shows that they are willing to
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 13 
 
 be charitable if they are regarded with becoming 
 deference and allowed to control the economic life of the 
 State. There is therefore nothing inconsistent between 
 a military State and a labour philanthropic State. In 
 that State there may be a complete system of Wages 
 Boards, of standard rates, of Trade Union recognition, 
 of physical health and training, of apparent protection 
 of labour against capital. 
 
 * On the other hand, in order not to upset capital, the 
 military State will give a corresponding protection to 
 it in the shape of tariffs or by the adoption of any other 
 scheme which capital may put forth. But the end 
 which such a State serves is not liberty but obedience, 
 not democracy but bureaucracy, and if a majority of 
 Trade Union officials, using the votes of their societies, 
 were to support this bureaucracy, that would not make 
 it the duty of Socialist democrats to acquiesce. The 
 economic and social mechanism which is built up within 
 such a State is one which catches up labour in itself, 
 binds it to itself, and confines it by a baffling network 
 of inter-related interests. That is the servile State in 
 its purest and most deadening manifestation. Its 
 general structure will be Socialist, but its life will be 
 slavery. It will secure a certain degree of animal com- 
 fort, but not the comfort which releases the spirit of 
 man. Sometimes in one's wanderings one comes 
 across a beautiful old religious fabric bearing in every 
 line and moulding the joy and freedom of the spirit of 
 pure religion, but within, if one has the misfortune to 
 enter, one hears only the doctrine of enchaining dogma 
 and theological damnation. The temple built in free- 
 dom has been degraded to being the meeting place of 
 the craven and the blind. Such is the State built after 
 labour has gained political power and turned to military 
 uses. 
 
 Consequently, if any Socialist has ever felt an awk- 
 wardness when following his instinct to defend the con-
 
 1 l SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 scientious objector and at the same time to confess to 
 his belief in State action, his trouble has arisen not from 
 his Socialism, but from his imperfect conception of the 
 limits which democratic Socialism imposes upon the 
 State. The Socialist State is not built only on 
 authority but on right; it is moral and not merely politi- 
 cal ; it is rational and not merely powerful. 
 
 The full import of this is seen if the political problem 
 of the conscientious objector is discussed. The case 
 against him is that if his conduct were generally fol- 
 lowed the State would come to ruin. That was the 
 objection which the Roman State authorities took to 
 the Christians, whose propaganda undoubtedly had a 
 direct political effect. The State then can do one of 
 two things. It can seek to maintain its existence by the 
 coercion of force and by various forms of punishment, 
 from disfranchisement to imprisonment, or it can meet 
 reason with reason and opinion with opinion. If it does 
 the former it will fail, because the problem which the 
 conscientious objector raises is not one which authority 
 can solve ; if it does the latter it may have to transform 
 itself, but it will be saved. Thus we see that from the 
 very nature of its problems a limit is placed upon the 
 State's authority and a compulsion imposed upon it to 
 select one kind of defensive weapon in preference to 
 another. 
 
 The Socialist State is historical and not metaphysi- 
 cal. In its evolution its boundaries are being adjusted. 
 Some of its boundary stakes are already well fixed, but 
 others are not. For instance, nothing is more clearly 
 a " national necessity " than morality, and at one time 
 that was imposed upon the people by Acts of Uni- 
 formity, because the belief was held almost universally 
 that religion and morality were aspects of the same 
 thing. But intelligent and moral people will not wor- 
 ship in the way they are told. They will die first. So 
 experience has shown that this item of " national neces-
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PAETY 15 
 
 sity " cannot be enforced by the authority of the State. 
 Socialists who have been justifying themselves for 
 merging themselves in other camps owing to the war 
 on account of some obligation to obey State authority 
 which they imagine their Socialism imposes upon them, 
 ought now not only to join the Established Churches 
 of England and Scotland, but should compel other 
 people to do the same thing. Then, a broad field in 
 which the State lays down rules but gives, the indi- 
 vidual an option of obeying them, even if their dis- 
 obedience may incur hardship upon their neighbours, 
 has also been staked out. The laws relating to vacci- 
 nation are in that field. Finally, there is the field 
 where State authority and majority rule are absolute, 
 and where State edicts when disregarded bring punish- 
 ment. 
 
 These variations in the degree of State authority 
 arise from the moral nature of the State. In communi- 
 ties of mutual aid and common life a man realises his 
 moral nature and free will, and consequently the State 
 which focuses the authority of the common interest of 
 these communities must give play to moral nature and 
 free will. The mind of the Socialist must be quite 
 clear on these distinctions. I heard a Socialist friend 
 of mine say in the House of Commons that he was sick 
 and tired of " academic distinctions " about the State. 
 I heartily sympathised with him, but, poor man, 
 whilst he was verbally condemning these discrimina- 
 tions, he was their victim — and the academic concep- 
 tions he was unknowingly acting upon were very bad 
 ones. We cannot get away from facts by labelling 
 them academic fictions. 
 
 The Socialist State, based upon authority and 
 majorities, must recognise conscience and minorities.. 
 It is all the time in the position of a judge, not in that 
 of a turnkey; it is an inquirer, not a dogmatist; its 
 books are not closed but are open, and have many
 
 16 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 blank pages upon which new doctrines have yet to be 
 written ; it is historical, not absolute ; it is dynamic^ not 
 static. 
 
 These thoughts must find a more prominent place in 
 our post-war propaganda. 
 
 The application of what I have written about the 
 State will be made first of all, and with the most imme- 
 diate necessity, to our civil liberties so terribly damaged 
 during the war. The spirit of war is against liberty, 
 and we have lost freedom, not merely because the 
 national stress demanded that it should be curtailed, 
 but because the authority which has been placed in 
 power, both at Whitehall and in the hearts of the 
 people, is at enmity with liberty. Thus, in the more 
 advanced political sections which have accepted the 
 war, a doctrine of majority authority and minority 
 servitude has been preached which stultifies obligation 
 that has any element of morality and intellectual free- 
 dom in it. Mr. Gladstone once wrote to Lord Palmers- 
 ton : ' ' You are feeding not only expenditure but, what 
 is worse, the spirit of expenditure." That distinction 
 runs through all life. Some of our Socialist friends 
 have not only supported a war, but the spirit of war, 
 and from that they have come to adopt new, and very 
 bad, standards by which to value liberty and con- 
 science. 
 
 To this, Socialism must issue a decisive challenge. 
 The conditions created by the war have made us 
 identify conscience with pacifism. But that is to 
 narrow the issue. Conscience made some men fight 
 and restrained others from fighting. The first must 
 have liberty as well as the second. Those who disagree 
 with them do so not as to whether they had a right to 
 act as they did, but as to whether they were wise to 
 act as they did, and so the door of Socialism is as open 
 to the soldier as to the conscientious objector, to the 
 recruiter as to him who declined to recruit. But
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 17 
 
 Socialism can have nothing to say to him who limits 
 liberty by military expediency, and who defended a 
 needless oppression and excuses himself by saying that 
 social stability required the sacrifice. 
 
 Nor within its four corners is there to be found any 
 justification for those who took official positions and 
 used them to impose the will of governments upon 
 organised labour, who took decisions of policy from 
 other classes and interests and carried them as man- 
 dates to labour. This will be more fully discussed 
 later, but it must be mentioned here. 
 
 Before the war I felt that what was called " the 
 spirit of the rebel" was, to a great extent, a stagey 
 pose.* It is now required to save us, but it must be 
 serious. Everything that involves the spirit of man in 
 a material system of advantage, that stifles it in a 
 mechanical machine and in formal order, is loss, unless 
 with it is preserved the rebellious spirit for freedom of 
 thought and action. If, for instance, the wider federa- 
 tion of Trade Unions which we ought to support is to 
 result in more centralised authority and the crushing 
 out of all sectional and local initiative, Trade Unionism 
 will become mass without life, and the natural con- 
 servatism of officialdom — who has not felt it creep over 
 him? — will sap the vitality and blurr the vision of 
 democracy. The organisation of labour must, like the 
 State itself, provide room for the man of free mind, and 
 must allow the swelling buds of minority thought 
 burst out into foliage. 
 
 C The war has brought us face to face with two great 
 
 Ndangers — the first, that of Trade Union authority 
 
 besoming so centralised that labour policy can be de- 
 
 termTrr&dJby officials ; the second, that of government 
 
 * Keiensky, in a speech addressed to soldiers' representatives, put the 
 idea into these striking words: " Are we a free Russian nation or a band 
 of mutinous slaves?"
 
 18 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 by an inert mass,* inert because only at the official top 
 does real responsibility rest. Let there be no mistak- 
 ing of the position. Here again we are facing the 
 ubiquitous difficulty of apparently conflicting truths. 
 1 1 is as easy to show the calamity that would follow 
 an independent local control and a weak, irresponsible 
 central executive as to point out the shortcomings of \ 
 the opposite state of affairs. Socialists must devise an 
 organisation which will assign proper functions and / 
 liberties to both, so that they can work in co-operation./ 
 Between the two, however, the most immediate danger 
 is to come from a bm , ejr^c^ati£ally-co^tj^illed--^ r rade 
 Unionism determining the political policy of our 
 democracy. 
 
 When the Independent Labour Party, a quarter of a 
 century ago, was hammering out the principles upon 
 which a Labour Party should be formed, it was always 
 clear that that party should not weaken the industrial 
 action of Trade Unions, and that Parliamentary activi- 
 ties should never supplant, but only supplement, work- 
 shop activities. We must now return to a further con- 
 sideration of this problem because the war has revealed 
 new aspects of it. 
 
 Trade Unionism has been devised for purely indus- 
 trial purposes. It is an army, and is subject to the 
 rules and methods of an army. A political movement 
 cannot be disciplined as a Trade Union must be unless 
 that movement, like the German Social Democracy 
 before the war, is to be modelled on military experi- 
 ence. A Trade Union must be obedient to majority 
 decisions; if a strike is decided upon, the Union must 
 strike to a man, as the whole welfare of the Union 
 depends upon such a complete measure of obedience. 
 This is quite proper, because all these decisions relate 
 
 * The bloc votes* decisions of Trade Union Congresses and Labour Party 
 Conferences since the war created important minorities, show this 
 tendency.
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 19 
 
 to matters of method and not of principle. The dis- 
 agreement raised by whether there should or should not 
 be a strike is just of a kind which a majority should 
 decide. This has some important consequences. For 
 instance, it militates against compulsory Trade Union- 
 ism because the authority of Trade Unionism can be 
 complete only whilst the joining of the Union is a free 
 act on the part of the workman. But if this method 
 of government is carried by Trade Unions into politics, 
 disaster is ahead of them. A political decision is not 
 the same as a strike resolution. Reason, criticism, 
 minority rights are essential features of the government 
 of political parties, and active intellectual life must be 
 encouraged within these parties. A Trade Union join- 
 ing in a political party must therefore be prepared to 
 perform two separate functions which have to be done 
 by two somewhat different sets of rules and frames of 
 mind. As a separate Trade Union it must be ruled 
 absolutely by majorities, as part of a_political party_jt 
 must rpp.ngnigp. minority rights~\vTthih its general politi- 
 cal princi ples. 
 
 But here a practical objection appears. These 
 observations seem to mean that parties can exist under 
 an anarchy of individual opinion which accepts no con- 
 trol or obligation. That, however, is not the case. 
 Minorities, just as much as majorities, must be in- 
 fluenced by political minds, and remain within parties 
 only so long as disagreement with majorities is either 
 on no fundamental question or appears only to be tem- 
 porary. When that is not so, parties split. At pre- 
 sent, if the Labour Party were to decide definitely and 
 finally to support some sections of its majority, there 
 would be no majority and minority; there would be a 
 new party. When division goes beyond certain limits, 
 cohesion ceases to act and disruption comes. So that 
 within a party there is a majority authority which is 
 severely limited, and a minority liberty which is equally
 
 20 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 limited, and the limiting factor is the practical condi- 
 tions of political activity. Before a split is justified 
 two questions must be answered : (1) Is the division 
 irreconcilable? (2) Is it final? If both are answered 
 in the affirmative, then nothing can justify the minority 
 remaining even in nominal unity with the majority. 
 
 The war has given a new significance to some of the 
 later movements within Trade Unionism and Socialism, 
 especially to that known as the Guild movement. 
 When we had to deal with the Syndicalism of the Sorel 
 school, we had to oppose it. It was inadequate; it did 
 not face all the problems of labour ; it had no promise 
 of permanence because it was not a stage in the further 
 evolution of labour's power in society; it was only a 
 revolt towards negations. But it is not that Syndical- 
 ism which now demands our consideration. 
 
 However imperfect the Socialist view of the limita- 
 tions of State authority as revealed by the war may 
 have been, this at any rate we can say, British 
 Socialism never imagined that the political State, work- 
 ing from a bureaucratic centre by political agents, could 
 control the factories and workshops. It is therefore 
 not precluded by past declarations from considering 
 proposals of workshop control on the Guild plan. 
 
 Our conception of the Socialist State must provide 
 for a great measure of industrial control in the indus- 
 trial organisation of society. The central authority of 
 the State must be used for the co-ordination of produc- 
 tion and distribution, of supply and demand. It must 
 issue general laws providing for national standards of 
 pay and conditions ; it must be the final arbiter on all 
 otherwise unsettled questions of demarcation and of 
 disputes between industrial organisations ; it must be 
 the unifying influence dealing with sectional aspects of 
 problems and with relationships and interests wider 
 than those which these industrial combinations can be 
 expected to consider; it must organise and be respon-
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 21 
 
 sible for the great national services, though always 
 working in co-operation with the Guilds of labour con- 
 cerned — in a sentence it should deal with the general 
 obligations of citizens to each other. 
 
 The management of railways gives the best oppor- 
 tunity of considering the problems raised. Obviously 
 the interests involved in railway control are wider than 
 those of the workmen employed. A Guild of Railway- 
 men cannot be the sole controlling authority of the 
 national railroads. The ownership must be national 
 to prevent exploitation by either private companies or 
 syndicates of workmen, for it is as easy for workmen 
 as for Capitalists to exploit a monopoly in their own 
 interest and to hold a pistol at the heads of the general 
 body of users. The National Board of Railway 
 Managers should then be representative of both the 
 community and the workmen, and the sub-divisions of 
 management should not be merely sympathetic but 
 democratic and representative. The problem will, in 
 consequence, be one of adjustment of interests right 
 up from grade to grade, between the railway industry 
 and other industries, between the railway workers and 
 the nation, with a national committee at the centre 
 where these interests are adequately represented. 
 
 There is always a tendency in these corporations to 
 fix conditions and traditions, and to hamper progress 
 in management and improvements in the employment 
 of labour and skill. We see this very plainly in pro- 
 fessional organisations like that of medicine, but the 
 war has shown that when national need is apparent 
 and when the management does not make the work- 
 man the victim of what change takes place, the opposi- 
 tion^ to the change is not effective. It is the Capitalist 
 system which makes workmen conservative regarding 
 time-honoured rules and habits, which has created the 
 difficulties between skilled and unskilled workmen and 
 between men and women, and which has put obstacles 
 c
 
 22 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 in the way of maximum output and an unreserved use 
 of labour power. 
 
 Moreover, even in the medical unions — which are 
 very commonly taken as types of conservative unions — 
 there is always a nucleus of progressive men who wel- 
 come new methods of treatment, who retain the scien- 
 tific mind of inquiry and experiment, who advocate 
 new conceptions of medical organisation, like a State 
 Medical Service ; and these sections in the end de- 
 termine medical opinion and practice, and enable us to 
 forget such attitudes of mind as that shown by the 
 British Medical Association when the Insurance Bill 
 was before the House of Commons. 
 
 I admit that it is easier to retain the spirit of pro- 
 gressive adaptation in a professional organisation than 
 in a labouring one. A great danger of the Guild system 
 is that it may encourage each trade to look after itself 
 even at the expense of other trades. It seems to divide 
 up the unity of economic society into self-centred 
 groups of economic interests, to create governments 
 within governments, and to obscure the interests of the 
 whole by organising the interests of the several parts 
 and giving them an authority which they may abuse. 
 But this only constitutes a problem in practical organi- 
 sation, and in how to secure co-operation between con- 
 flicting interests. Moreover, as the apparent conflict 
 between trade and trade, and one trade and the whole 
 body of consumers, is unnaturally intensified by the 
 conditions of modern Capitalism, which brings into 
 undue prominence the fact that a worker works for the 
 profit of individual Capitalists and obscures the fact 
 that he also works for his community, a change in 
 social organisation which emphasises the latter and 
 obscures the former, will make national Guilds safer 
 than they might now be. We have also to remember 
 that in every State where opposing interests are co- 
 ordinated and made to work harmoniously, and where
 
 SOCIALISM, THE STATE, AND PARTY 23 
 
 opportunities which exist to work the whole machine 
 for selfish and narrow interests are not taken advantage 
 of, there must be widespread education leading to a 
 penetrating understanding of difficulties and to mutual 
 confidence. 
 
 Details will have to be worked out in view of after- 
 war experience, but meantime it is necessary that no 
 doubt should be left regarding the fact that the Guild 
 must play a characteristic part in the Socialist indus- 
 trial State. It is required to guard against the deadly 
 evil of over-centralisation in a political servile State, 
 of a community the material comforts of which will 
 stifle spiritual spontaneity, of a working class deprived 
 of the stimulus of freedom by legal arrangements of a 
 mechanical nature. If the workman's spirit is freed 
 by education, by skill of a technical kind, by work 
 which is no longer deadening toil, it will be necessary 
 to give him a direct responsibility for workshop 
 management, and apply to his industrial organisation 
 the same principles of self-government as will then be 
 applied to his political organisation.
 
 III. 
 
 Trade Union Organisation. 
 
 7 never km w '/"it time in England, when men of truest religion 
 
 were not counted sectaries: but wisdom now, valour, justice, 
 
 ■ tuna/, prudence, united and embodied to defend religion and 
 
 our liberties, both by word and deed, against tyranny, is counted 
 
 schism and faction. Milton. 
 
 So long as the industrial combination of labour forms 
 one of the corner-stones of the political labour move- 
 ment, Socialism must take an interest in Trade Union 
 organisation, and must express views upon it. More- 
 over, no activity of labour can be held to be sacred 
 against the criticism, either friendly or hostile, of people 
 interested in communal well-being. 
 
 The Trade Union movement is now ripe for great 
 changes. Faced with the conditions of war it agreed 
 to forego all its rules and practices which had grown 
 up as a protection to the wage-earner under Capitalism, 
 and it received pledges that when peace came these 
 would be restored. But the industrial effects of the 
 war are not to pass with the war. They have been 
 fixed upon society. Obligations have been contracted 
 to unskilled workers and women, for example, which 
 cannot be dishonoured when peace comes, and new 
 methods and organisation of industry begun during the 
 war cannot disappear with peace. By a wave of a 
 magician's wand the old cannot be brought back again. 
 Death divides us from it. 
 
 The first thing which the Trade Unions will have to 
 do is to throw on one side old claims and shibboleths, 
 and make demands which will have some meaning in 
 relation to the new conditions. The restoration of old 
 conditions will therefore have to resolve itself into a 
 
 24
 
 TRADE UNION ORGANISATION 25 
 
 struggle for the restoration of conditions at least equal 
 in value to those that have been surrendered. The 
 debt must be paid, though the coin may have to be of 
 a new mintage. 
 
 The workman, as a matter of fact, ought not to be 
 content with the old conditions, because the new con- 
 ditions of industry can afford him much better ones. 
 He must therefore look to his organisation now, for 
 upon that his future is to depend. The recommenda- 
 tions of Reconstruction Committees must not be 
 accepted unless they are satisfactory, and the agree- 
 ments which officials recommend must be examined, 
 criticised, and, if needs be, modified by Trade Union 
 opinion itself. Under these circumstances, if labour 
 opinion is to be effective, it must retain its old weapon 
 of the strike, which no one hopea is to be used, but, 
 whether used or not, will in the early critical days of 
 peace be a valuable element in the bargaining process. 
 I can imagine nothing more disastrous than a strike 
 during the first years of reconstruction, unless it be the 
 denial to workmen of the power to strike should they 
 be treated unjustly. 
 
 It is useless to speculate with any degree of certainty 
 on what industrial conditions are to be after the war. 
 Some trades will begin by bp.ing busy, and so long as 
 that lasts wage-earners in considerable numbers will be 
 effective consumers. But prices will be high and so will 
 interest, and an enormous portion of national production 
 will be taken to pay national debts. The dislocation 
 of the workshop will be intensified by the demobilisation 
 of millions of men and the transference of millions 
 of men and women from war to peace production. 
 These are the conditions from which unemployment 
 and lowering the standard of life come. Paper schemes 
 of demobilisation will be found to be full of flaws, and 
 what employers will accept as pious intentions during 
 a war they will set aside under stress of the markets
 
 26 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 during peace. The insult offered to labour by the kind 
 of Labour Department that has been created and the 
 staff which has been appointed is an indication of how 
 governments will face these problems. The final 
 issues will be temporarily kept off by national waste in 
 the form of a continuation of government work after 
 it is needed, of payments of gratuities. All this is only 
 useless work for which productive labour has to pay and 
 suffer, and may intensify the problem which the State 
 will have to face. In such a condition of things Trade 
 Unions must keep their hands free. The presence of 
 their officials on Government committees or in the 
 Government itself must not bind them. They must 
 be free to deal with every problem as it arises, and to 
 take advantage of every opportunity which they can 
 fairly and reasonably use. Capital will certainly do 
 so. 
 
 Union and federation should be the order of the day. 
 There must be fewer Unions and more unity. Where 
 more than one Union covers an industry they should 
 amalgamate ; where there are overlapping Unions they, 
 too, should amalgamate; where there are Unions in 
 allied industries they should federate ; where there are 
 Unions in trades which form inter-related processes in 
 industry they should become allied after the model of 
 the triple alliance of miners, railway and transport 
 workers. Above all, there should be a central intelli- 
 gence Trade Union Department, staffed by the most 
 competent men and kept in touch with the whole 
 Trade Union movement, which will have both propa- 
 ganda and administrative functions, and which will be 
 the centre of Trade Union life and activity. This is 
 now being done but not nearly enough. This move- 
 ment towards centralisation must be safeguarded lest 
 it establish a bureaucracy of the most strangling type. 
 We must therefore see that it is accompanied by 
 changes which strengthen local initiative, so that 
 
 «
 
 TRADE UNION ORGANISATION 27 
 
 workshop and district opinion act with and upon 
 executive and official minds. So we turn to the other 
 end and consider the organisation of the branch. Here 
 we are met with a problem which arises out of the 
 special characteristics of the British Trade Union as. a 
 Friendly Society. It is not much use discussing this 
 characteristic, as it is so deep rooted that no one would 
 seriously propose to pull it up. Its weakness is that it 
 deprives the Unions of some of their fighting energy by 
 attracting and retaining men who are not soldiers of 
 their class, but persons insured against mishap. That 
 weakness, in my view, is far more than counter- 
 balanced by advantage. In a period of a dozen years, 
 say, we have two years of excitement and interest 
 when men are active Trade Unionists, and then ten 
 years when the mass go quietly between their homes 
 and their work-places and trouble little about what is 
 going on — when they are the victims of low-grade news- 
 papers, the tools of anyone who poses and gesticulates 
 in public life, and who appeals to the evil and the lazy 
 that is in them. During the two years Friendly 
 benefits may be a burden; during the ten they keep 
 workmen in touch with the saving influences of organi- 
 sation and combination. 
 
 The Friendly Society Trade Union does not always 
 receive justice at the hands of its critics, for as a 
 matter of fact and in the nature of the case only the 
 best and the most intelligent men take an interest in 
 branch work, and thus in normal times the activity of 
 Trade Unions is carried on by the very men who think 
 least of Friendly benefits and most of working-class 
 advance. This explains why branch meetings are 
 badly attended as a rule. Bigger average attendances 
 would only indicate that the inert mass was being 
 whipped up — as it was several times in certain districts 
 during the war — for some special purpose, generally 
 to outvote those whose interests in the Union are con-
 
 28 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 tinuous and intelligent. The branch nucleus embodies 
 the active Trade Union spirit, and upon it the life of 
 Trade Unionism depends. 
 
 But with a membership scattered over different 
 workshops and subject to different conditions and 
 management, it is often alleged that the branch lacks 
 in vitality and interest. The experience of the work- 
 shop is the stimulus of Trade Unionism, and if by 
 defects in Trade Union organisation that experience is 
 dulled by being merged in a branch of disconnected 
 members, some reforms must be made, for no particle 
 of agitating and reforming energy should be lost. 
 
 The shop steward is the first differentiated officer of 
 Trade Unionism. He is at the beginning of things 
 since he is the embodiment of workshop experience, 
 and the constitution of the Clyde Workers' Com- 
 mittee, which is based upon him, should be widely 
 studied. It is not always possible to attach branches 
 to certain works, either because there are not enough 
 men employed or for other reasons, but where it is 
 possible it ought to be done, for the workshop is the 
 field of the branch. The objection that such branches 
 will be too narrow in their outlook is met by the 
 creation of District Committees, which should be the 
 medium of communication between branches and head 
 offices, and many of the existing District Committees 
 badly want some stimulus. The depressing effect of 
 central authority and officialdom too often lies heavily 
 upon them. They are divorced, owing to the method 
 of Trade Union organisation, from the life of the district 
 they are supposed to represent, and are too much tied 
 up in red tape supplied from head offices. This was 
 the case in Glasgow during the Munition Act troubles. 
 
 So also the local Trades Councils should be in close 
 touch with the workshop and not merely with the 
 branches, as at present, especially if it is to hand over 
 its political functions to a local Labour Party or exer-
 
 TRADE UNION ORGANISATION 29 
 
 cise them through a special sub-eommittee upon which 
 people belonging to sections of the Labour movement 
 other than Trade Unions are to be represented. The 
 Trades Council should catch up and give volume to 
 the Trade Union demands of the district, and should 
 translate the demands and grievances of a trade into 
 those of labour in general. 
 
 The workshop, the workshop committee, the shop 
 steward, passing up through the District Committee 
 and the Trades Council — where the industrial popula- 
 tion is so huge as on the Clyde, the Tyne, the Mersey 
 as to make it practicable — is a more vital method of 
 organisation than the branch, the branch committee, 
 and the Trades Council and District Committee as we 
 now know them. But whatever the practical possi- 
 bilities may be, workshop organisation in the large 
 industries must play a much greater part than it has 
 hitherto done in the life of Trade Unionism. 
 
 A reorganisation of Trade Unionism on these lines 
 will provide a strong central authority, and at the same 
 time produce a spirit in the localities which will pro- 
 tect the Unions against a mere official control, a threat 
 which has so suddenly developed during the war, and 
 which, if allowed to entrench itself unchallenged, will 
 mean that the industrial organisation of workmen will 
 be managed and become the property of a few officials, 
 and that that organisation will be used by its bureau- 
 cracy for political as well as industrial purposes. The 
 menace which the intelligent and active-minded work- 
 men have to face is that of an industrial control by a 
 bureaucracy which is not even to be a good type of its 
 kind, which may be in alliance with a government, 
 capitalist in its inspiration, or with employers, and 
 which will breed in its officials the bourgeois 
 mind. The way to meet this is not to destroy 
 central authority but to make it thoroughly representa- 
 tive, representative of masses of men alive to their
 
 30 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 interests and vocal as regards their wishes, and not 
 merely of a mass of indifferent members whose numeri- 
 cal strength, by a counting of votes never given by 
 them, is at the command of officials. 
 
 I lay down the following proposition, so that discus- 
 sion on this subject may be directed to definite points, 
 for much discussion is still required. 
 
 Trade Union organisation in the future should 
 depend much more upon the workshop and the work- 
 shop steward than it has hitherto done; localities 
 should be given more autonomy than they now have 
 from central executives ; every increase in centralisa- 
 tion should be checked by local autonomy not amount- 
 ing to independence but of sufficient potency to pre- 
 vent the Trade Union from becoming a bureaucracy; 
 and these Unions must include women who, wherever 
 possible, should belong to men's organisations. 
 
 Before the war the need of reorganisation on these 
 lines was felt, and one of the results was a dispute 
 between craft and industrial Unions. At first each 
 side sought to condemn the other by a majority vote 
 at a Trade Union Congress. The battle was a drawn 
 one, and then it was seen that no decision could be 
 obtained in such a clear-cut way between the two, and 
 that if the quarrel was persisted in Trade Unionism 
 might be rent in twain. 
 
 The ideal is undoubtedly workshop unity. It is most 
 unfair that in a great labour battle one section of work- 
 men can throw out of work all the others without those 
 others having any voice in the dispute ; it is also a 
 source of great weakness that in a dispute the various 
 sections of a workshop are separately organised and 
 may be obedient to conflicting orders. On the other 
 hand, industrial unionism, if carried to its utmost, would 
 mean that all members of trades subsidiary to the 
 bigger masses of workmen, like miners and railway- 
 men, would have to merge their interests in those of
 
 TRADE UNION ORGANISATION 31 
 
 the predominant trades. The carpenter in one em- 
 ployment would belong to the miners, in another 
 would belong to the ship constructors, and there would 
 be no general organisation protecting the carpenter as 
 a carpenter. As a matter of fact, there is no insuper- 
 able difficulty preventing an agreement, and the action 
 of organised capital will force one. 
 
 The Shopa' Committee representative of all grades 
 of workmen is the way to a solution. All grievances 
 and movements as they arise should be dealt with, to 
 begin with, by this committee, and the process of 
 federation, which has already begun, and to which I 
 have already referred, will provide joint national com- 
 mittees, either temporary or permanent, which will be 
 able to take up disputes and fight them co-operatively. 
 Under such a scheme the craft can be organised and 
 the mine, workshop, or railway also have its organisa- 
 tion of federated interests. The details are simply 
 matters for discussion and goodwill. 
 
 Nor is this need for a wider union confined to skilled 
 workmen. The skilled and unskilled must act together. 
 We should have less of demarcation disputes and more 
 of mutual aid, less of attempts to confine unskilled 
 labour to the category of unskilled all its life, with all 
 the terrible inferiority which that implies, and more of 
 a common battle for high standards of both work and 
 wages. This unnatural and unlovely conflict between 
 grades of skill is the evil product of capitalism com- 
 pelling men to see enemies in friends and rivals in 
 fellow victims. That ought to be a pre-war condition 
 to which there should be no return. Labour should 
 decline to be the cat's-paw of capital, accepting for 
 capital's convenience the distinction between skilled 
 and unskilled; it should fight for standard wages for 
 standard work, and see to it that whoever does the 
 work gets the wages.
 
 32 SOCIALISM AFTEK THE WAE 
 
 The same holds good as regards women. Many old 
 barriers keeping them subordinate are down and ought 
 not to be erected again. The limits they imposed 
 upon women were the creation of the conflict between 
 an aggressive capital and a defensive labour. Under 
 conditions of an aggressive labour and a defensive 
 capital, or of a rational policy pursued by both, these 
 barriers are unnecessary for the protection of the 
 workers' standard, and consequently are only unjust 
 to women. Let us therefore hear less of opposition to 
 women and of the rights of skilled as opposed to un- 
 skilled, and let us hear more of standard wages. 
 
 There are no limits to labour union. The men of 
 a craft unite in a craft union, but in a workshop they 
 must join in a workshop union; kindred unions must 
 unite in a national federation; the national federation 
 must unite in a national industrial movement to 
 enforce common standards and to protect general 
 interests. The special selfish interests of trade and skill 
 merge in the general welfare of labour. But even that 
 is not the end. The political nation is not an industrial 
 unit. Industrial exchange is world wide. So, com- 
 pleting the plan, comes the International Federation 
 of Labour, with its International Committee and its 
 annual Congress discussing common labour interests 
 and coming to decisions for the protection and advance- 
 ment of 1 the workers of the world. A dream, maybe, 
 yes, but a dream which the operations of capital after 
 the war will call upon labour to make a reality. 
 
 In this organisation, beginning with the experience of 
 the individual workman, uniting him in the double 
 companionship of his craft and his workshop, gathering 
 up as it goes wider interests and more complete co- 
 operation, the movement of organised labour no longer 
 confines itself to the factory^ but calls the legislature 
 to its aid until in its complete equipment of idea and 
 power it develops the intelligence and the authority to 
 establish and maintain an industrial commonwealth.
 
 IV. 
 
 The Independence of Labour. 
 
 The revolutionist will pursue his forward march, whatever his 
 individual position, so long as the evil endures; the reactionist 
 will probably sto-p short as soon as injustice shall cease with 
 regard to himself, or as soon as tJte overthrow of the power 
 attacked shall have satisfied his self-love and mitigated the sense 
 of rebellion within him. Mazzini. 
 
 During the war the independence of labour in politics 
 has been surrendered, and it looks as though there will 
 be no return to the old position without some difficulty. 
 It will have been noted that at recent conferences of 
 Labour, the merging of the Party in other parties has 
 been defended, not on the ground of national necessity 
 but on that of advantage to labour itself. It is the 
 latter whitih cuts at the very root of independence. If 
 labour is tp accept office because in this way it is to 
 advance its own interests, the argument applies with 
 far more force, in times of peace than in those of war. 
 At no time during the last ten years was the Cabinet or 
 the Ministry shut"' to. labour had labour's policy been 
 consistent with the acceptance of office, and so far as 
 labour legislation and administration were concerned 
 such representation might have improved them. 
 
 But.the argument for independence is, that only by 
 decl ining office in a Go Vgrnmen*t~Which lahour~cannot 
 control, can labour buil d up its own Party and keep to 
 a p olicy which is directejQo wards great fundamental 
 change. The Labour Party's distinctive position was 
 that as an independent , party_in Parliam ent it could 
 bring great influence upon the details oriegislation 
 whil stTjft g athered round it the force necessary 
 to _£reate for it a pos ition in the country similar to that 
 
 33
 
 34 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 enjoyed by Liberal and Tory organisations, but that if 
 it became mixed up with other Governments it cut 
 itself off from such a future, and would remain a mere 
 supplementary power in politics, and doom itself to 
 being not a party, but a wing of a party. Adminis- 
 trative advantage would then be bought at the expense 
 of freedom as to policy — a price which no wise man 
 would ever think of paying. When we fought the 
 Liberal-Labour movement twenty years ago the whole 
 case was fully argued out and the policy of inde- 
 pendence won. On the one hand there was offered to 
 us immediately some power over details of legislation 
 and administration ; on the other the opportunity of 
 establishing a self-governing labour political move- 
 ment — and we choose the latter. The success of such a 
 policy must bring a number of men on to the edge of 
 Cabinet position, but its continued success depends 
 upon their refusing to step over the edge. 
 
 The history of the Irish Party is the history of this 
 difficulty. After experiencing again and again the 
 weakness of the open door between the party and the 
 Cabinet, the Irish finally had to protect themselves by 
 closing it from their side to their members, and in 
 accordance with this policy Mr. Redmond refused the 
 offers that everyone knows were made to him to join 
 the Government during the war, even when supporting 
 it on its general war aims. The practical effects of 
 Mr. Redmond's refusal are conspicuous. By joining 
 the Cabinet he could have done nothing to settle the 
 Home Rule difficulty, by being out he was protected 
 against responsibility for the events which attended the 
 Irish rebellion, and yet was enabled to save his country 
 from measures like conscription which as a member of 
 the Government he could not have resisted. 
 
 But in every entanglement which Mr. Redmond 
 avoided the Labour Party was caught. It has to bear 
 its share of blame for the suppression of liberty under
 
 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LABOUR 35 
 
 the different forms in which this was effected, from the 
 prosecution of people who published perfectly innocent 
 but anti-Government opinions, to the Munitions Act, 
 and for the almost innumerable surrenders of the 
 Government to parties and interests violently antago- 
 nistic to every principle and aim which is Labour's — 
 from the vagaries of the censorship to the Imperialism 
 of the Allies' Note to President Wilson, from the Paris 
 Conference Eesolutions to the mishandling of dissatis- 
 fied labour, from the civil action of the War Office to 
 the unjustifiable raising of prices. Moreo ver, the Party 
 was no sooner in the Government trTanTE found that 
 all its ordinary po wer w ent, and it c ould not even 
 criticise with " effect any proposal made by -Ministers 
 or appoint its own members upon . important Com- 
 mfttees. Indeed, it did not want to_do so. The 
 impotence of servitude^ foreseen by those who in the 
 early" days fought for__the Party being independent 
 came" upon it straight away, and its semblance of 
 acquired power had to be used by it to- impose the will 
 of the Government. upon organised. Jaboux. Labour 
 ceased to think and act for itself, and became the 
 servant and pupil of other parties. And be it not 
 forgotten that these things happened not because the 
 Labour representatives were in any way bad, but 
 because they had put themselves in circumstances 
 which led inevitably to such misfortunes. This wrung 
 from Mr. Hodge the touchingly pathetic complaint: 
 " The greatest complaint I have to make on the 
 position in which I now find myself is that I only get 
 the messes of other Departments turned upon me. I 
 would like to have a bigger hand in the policy, and I 
 believe that if I had been given the opportunity, a great 
 many disputes would never have occurred."* The 
 
 * At a dinner of the London Association of Foremen Engineers presided 
 over by Commander Sir Arthur Trevor Dawson, E.N., May 5, 1917.
 
 30 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 position was humiliating, but it was accepted, and was 
 all that Labour members were ever intended to occupy.* 
 
 There would have been a Ear clearer justification for 
 the surrender of independence had it lieen done on the 
 sole ground of national necessity, ho attempt being 
 made to justify it on the ground of labour advantage. 
 Such a position, would, at any rate, not have destroyed 
 the argument for the independence of the Party. It 
 might also have been held to be in accordance with the 
 admission of the International Socialist Congress that 
 in the event of a war of defence Socialist parties might 
 be justified in joining Capitalist Governments. 
 
 Some Socialists have argued that coalitions are 
 never justified. I have never taken that view. But I 
 have never agreed with the International Socialist 
 position. It is just when a country is at war that 
 Socialists should be careful, whatever assistance they 
 decide they can best give to their country, to avoid 
 becoming responsible for the general acts of govern- 
 ments. If there is any truth at all in the Socialist view 
 of democracy and foreign policy, a great war can never 
 be fought with either credit or success, and it is during 
 wars that the best of Governments become most 
 reactionary. The Liberal Pitt's descent into the 
 oppressive Pitt, owing to the struggle with Napoleon, 
 is a chapter in history which ought not to have been 
 forgotten by the Labour movement, but it was. 
 
 War may bring some bye-products of liberty because 
 the nations at war must be kept quiet internally, and 
 one way to do this is to concede constitutional reforms. 
 Or, as in Russia, the pains and privations of war may 
 bring smouldering revolutionary impulses into flame. 
 But the party which can take most advantage of those 
 opportunities must remain outside the Governments. 
 
 * Whilst this book is going through the press the disgraceful attacks 
 being made upon Mr. Henderson for having thought for himself, his being 
 asked to wait outside whilst Cabinet colleagues discuss him and so on. show 
 how little scruple or gratitude labour will receive at the hands of its 
 enemies so soon as it declines to do their bidding, and in what contempt 
 labour is really held by the superior governing classes who now flatter it.
 
 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LABOUE 37 
 
 The effect of the Labour and Socialist parties in France 
 and Great Britain being inside their Governments has 
 been to make it easy for these Governments to suppress 
 liberty and to make the rule of militarism in these 
 countries complete. Moreover, when a war breaks 
 out, the position of all Governments is challenged, new 
 conditions with their opportunities arise because 
 traditional social stability is loosened (for instance the 
 basis of landlordism is shattered by the sacrifices borne 
 by the people to defend their nation), but by mixing up 
 the sections of Radical change with those of Conserva- 
 tive tradition and reaction, the parties of progress are 
 put in chains and obstructed. Labour joining a Govern- 
 ment at such a time hands itself over as a hostage for 
 the obedience of its adherents — it does not acquire new 
 power. It surrenders freedom without acquiring 
 authority; its leaders become Government agents. So 
 far from Labour Ministers being a check upon the 
 Government when it was proposing to sacrifice labour 
 and liberty, they made that easy by their very presence 
 in the Government. The imprisonment of men like 
 Maxton and McLean, the deportation of Clyde 
 engineers, the attempted suppression of the Inde- 
 pendent Labour Party by the seizure of its literature, 
 the embargo upon the Nation — all of which will be ugly 
 chapters in the history of the war — were made possible 
 because there were hostages in the Government 
 charged with the duty of keeping labour quiet. 
 
 The revolt of labour opinion, should it take place, 
 has then to include its leaders amongst its enemies, and 
 has to class with the reaction that section of itself which 
 it had originally chosen to afford it political protection 
 and championship. They will also be cut off from the 
 change towards a sane survey of the facts when it 
 comes. For some time the soldier will set the pace in, 
 and give direction to, our politics, and when the war is 
 over and the Defence of the Realm Acts buried, it will
 
 38 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 be found that the soldier has no reason either to be 
 grateful for, or repose trust in, those who have been 
 responsible for the statesmanship of the war. On the 
 outbreak of war a fussy excitement prompts men to 
 consider that the only help they can give to their 
 country is to utter war cries and join Governments, but 
 when the crisis is over and the storm has blown itself 
 out, those who survey the wreckage always see that no 
 greater disservice has been done to national interests 
 than by those who, setting aside the wisdom taught in 
 times of peace, join the war party, accept responsibility 
 for all its acts, deprive it of the benefit of their inde- 
 pendent thought and criticism, and allow its emotions 
 to take possession of their own minds. 
 
 It is therefore just in time of war that it becomes the 
 supreme duty of Socialists to stick to their principles 
 and apply them to the problems of the nation. Socialism 
 is never more precious for national guidance than during 
 a war. It has a belief in civil liberty as a condition of 
 national efficiency and security, it has a conception of 
 the place of war in the life of a people and of the 
 policies which make peace certain and secure, which no 
 other parties share or can understand. It is therefore 
 not during a war that the call should come to 
 Socialists to merge themselves in coalitions. 
 
 There may be times of great internal crisis when 
 liberty is threatened by military conspiracy, and then 
 Socialists may have to merge themselves in other 
 movements for the time being. I always defended the 
 Jaures policy of the Parliamentary bloc during the 
 Dreyfus crisis. Millerand, who represented the 
 Socialists in the French Government at the time, failed 
 us, and his personal desertion involved the policy in 
 disfavour. But the disaster was due to Millerand's 
 character, not to the fault of the policy. Some men 
 will look after their own personal interests and will use 
 parties to advance those interests, and when that
 
 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LABOUK 39 
 
 happens honest men and wise policies have to suffer 
 opprobrium. But the problem remains to be faced 
 again and again whenever similar circumstances arise, 
 and until the man is found whose rectitude is 
 unassailable and who refuses to run the ship aground in 
 his own interests. 
 
 Supposing the conspiracy to defeat Home Eule by an 
 army mutiny and by revolutionary action on the part of 
 the Tory Party of this country had come to a head in 
 1914-15, the Labour Party would have had to consider 
 its attitude to the revolution, and it would probably 
 have been compelled, whether it liked or not, to range 
 itself with the Parliament and with democracy. Even 
 then, if anyone had joined the Government he ought to 
 have left the Party for the time being, so that it 
 remained free to continue its independence and offer, 
 freed from representative responsibility, its own well- 
 considered advice to the administration. For under 
 any circumstances coalitions are dangerous ventures.* 
 
 It will be the duty of Socialists to see to it that both 
 the principle and the policy of independence are re- 
 stored to labour politics after the war. We shall have 
 to fight all the errors of the Liberal-Labour movement ; 
 labour has been so useful and so amenable during the 
 past two years that no Government, be it Liberal or be 
 it Tory, will willingly be without its labour repre- 
 sentative in some department or other ; having secured 
 a Cabinet status the allurements of office will be great, 
 and labour will be tempted to retain its present 
 position; the argument of advantage will be as strong 
 after the peace as during the war. Thus we are faced, 
 not only with the possible ruin of the Labour Party, 
 but the subversion of labour politics. In the old days 
 
 * So also in Russia to-day. The Socialists ought to have agreed to 
 join a coalition to protect and maintain the Revolution against the 
 difficulties of the inevitable aftermath of suddenly acquired liberty, but 
 they were wise to keep their own independent organisation in the 
 Workers' and Soldiers' Council.
 
 40 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 we had to fight into subordination a desire to get into 
 Parliament under any banner that promised success. 
 The new phase of this battle is likely to be more 
 strenuous because the prize has been raised from 
 Membership of Parliament to Ministerial Office. 
 
 Further, Socialists must reconsider their political 
 alliance. Is the Labour Party enough? To this day, 
 we find some Trade Unionists objecting that some men, 
 who have done more for Labour politics this generation 
 than most Trade Union officials put together, are not 
 workmen, and therefore cannot speak for workmen. A 
 Trade Union membership is not broad enough for a 
 political party; to enter politics with only economic 
 ends in view, is like joining a church for Christmas 
 blankets. There are men outside the Labour Party 
 whose instincts for liberty during this war, whose 
 appreciation of national power and of democratic 
 authority, whose knowledge of foreign affairs and 
 whose devotion to the international spirit, have marked 
 them out as the natural colleagues of those imbued 
 by our spirit. We shall not always agree with them, 
 as we have not always agreed with our Trade Unidh 
 colleagues. But they speak the same spiritual 
 political language as we do, and so long as the 
 elementary rights of democracy are at stake we have 
 more in common with them than we have with some of 
 those who are Trade Union representatives. When 
 some Trade Union leaders were willing to accept any 
 loss of liberty, provided they got a war bonus, our souls 
 demanded other companionship. 
 
 The Socialist movement is a movement of liberal 
 ideas, not a combination of an industrial group. We 
 believe that every Trade Unionist who understands 
 how to translate his industrial creed into politics must 
 see in Socialism the completion of his faith and his 
 work, but we cannot confine our companionship to him. 
 We must enter a wider world and co-operate with a
 
 THE INDEPENDENCE OF LABOUE 41 
 
 wider fellowship. The war has broadened the basis of 
 the political Labour movement, and has called for the 
 use of a new instrument in Parliament and the con- 
 stituencies. There should be no fusions. British 
 politics needs the creation of a new Democratic Party, 
 modern in its outlook and ideas. It is not our business 
 to form such a party, or even to help in forming it. 
 But if others do it, it will be our business to differentiate 
 between it and the present Liberal and Conservative 
 Parties, and to treat it on the whole as a friend and not 
 as an enemy. We must not forget that the greatest 
 failures during this war were those who before it spoke 
 most strongly in phrases of dogmatic class politics. 
 Those who spoke blatantly of Socialism before the war, 
 spoke equally blatantly of patriotism after it, and found 
 a congenial and natural ally in the Morning Post, the 
 organ of nationalist blackguardism and Society 
 ignorance and class prejudice. The German Marxian 
 policy of no co-operation with other parties after having 
 played into the hands of Prussian Junkers, was no 
 protection when the war came from the surrenders 
 . which marked the experience of our own more 
 loosely knit Labour Party. It is not the words 
 from men's mouths which indicate their strength, but 
 the clearness and firmness with which they see the goal 
 to which all their actions lead. The class parties of 
 economic materialism have all failed as indeed they 
 were bound to fail. A month of the war sent them all 
 wallowing in the ditch of Prussianism, the worst 
 variety of which is British Prussianism because it is so 
 unintelligent. 
 
 If Trade Union leaders are out to tread the old 
 paths, they must tread them alone, and we shall begin 
 once again our appeal to the rank and file to do their 
 own work, to form their own political ideas, and to 
 embody them in an independent political party.
 
 V. 
 
 A Socialist Parliament. 
 
 / may speak of the House, of Commons as a school of dis- 
 cipline for those who enter it. In my opinion, it is a school of 
 extraordinary poxmr and efficacy. It is a great and noble school 
 for th; creation of all the qualities of force, suppleness, and 
 versatility of intellect. And it is also a great moral school. It 
 is a school of temper. It is also a school of patience. It is a 
 school of honour, and it is a school of justice. Gladstone. 
 
 The complete falsification of politics which the war 
 has brought about may lead to an attempt being made 
 after the war to keep up the semblance of national 
 unity. The usual cant about parties will be talked, 
 and class interests, always acute in political intelli- 
 gence and united in policy, whoever else may be 
 quarrelling, will dominate the country. They will 
 create an ascendancy and call it peace. Under the 
 cloak of a political truce in which labour may be 
 persuaded to join by the same inducements that have 
 already been effective, the first stage of reconstruction 
 will be gone through with practically no Parliamentary 
 opposition, and what there is may be brow-beaten, mis- 
 represented, and hounded by a press claque. 
 
 In this game of make-believe the Socialist must play 
 no part. The disastrous effect of the suppression of 
 an opposition in Parliament during the first two years 
 of the war is written on the history of the war in letters 
 which spell inefficiency, waste, blunders, oppression, 
 military disaster. Thousands of lives have been 
 wasted, millions of treasure squandered, truth has been 
 suppressed, and the most elementary and harmless 
 civil liberties destroyed. When reasonable criticism 
 was stilled by the censorship, clamour arose to control 
 
 42
 
 A SOCIALIST PARLIAMENT 43 
 
 the Government. A group of well-known, unscrupu- 
 lous blackguards came to the top, expressed public 
 opinion in its crudest and simplest form, showed 
 qualms of neither intelligence nor conscience in its 
 propaganda, and gained control of the popular press. | 
 A sinister collection of notorious swindlers, bankrupts, 
 evil livers, spongers, book-makers, gamblers, public- 
 house loafers — the dwellers in the sewers of civilisation 
 — traitors, and men who never lifted a finger but to 
 suppress liberty and crush nationality, became the 
 spokesmen of " the Christian conscience " of England 
 and the champions of liberty and democracy; and the 
 people appeared to be lacking in both a critical moral 
 faculty and a sense of humour. The nation was sound ; 
 its loudest spokesmen were base. 
 
 The Labour Party had the opportunity of a generation 
 to become a national opposition; it chose the more 
 easy, subordinate, and unpatriotic part. The first par- 
 liamentary task of Socialists should now be to form an 
 opposition with an imperial, foreign, and domestic 
 policy of reconstruction and reform. It is a big task, 
 but no task nowadays is insignificant. In the new 
 world upon which we are entering we want the best 
 intelligence, the widest views, and the most compre- 
 hensive and constructive minds. 
 
 Parliament itself must be democratic. The rule of 
 the Tsar is only separated from that of the British 
 Foreign Office by a difference of degree not by a gulf 
 of kind. The representative assembly must be the 
 seat of power, not the handmaiden of Ministers. It 
 must therefore be truly representative. To break away 
 from the old forms is necessary. Eestricted and fancy 
 franchises must go; impediments like costly elections 
 must disappear ; illegitimate expenditure upon elections 
 by political organisations maintained by the rich in their 
 own interests must be punished and prevented. A 
 Parliamentary election must be an appeal to all the
 
 44 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 people, and the contest must be waged by legitimate 
 political weapons. And when these changes are made 
 we must at the same time remember that trie 
 democracy must be educated not only in political ques- 
 tions but in self-respect, so that certain types of candi- 
 dates of no political intelligence who regard Parliament 
 as a desirable haven and not as the great legislative 
 and administrative workshop of the nation, shall be 
 regarded as insults offered to electors. The shock and 
 revolution of the war should be used to raise the tone 
 of public life and extricate it from the bog of chicanery 
 and humbug into which it was rapidly sinking before 
 the war came. Political judgment in England, thanks 
 mainly to bad education, a disreputable press, and 
 partisanship run riot, was, to put it very mildly, as low 
 as it was in any leading State. In addition to that, 
 a subtle form of bribery and corruption, based upon 
 a dishonourable use of the Honours List and an ex- 
 travagant use of public money, has been creeping like 
 a fungoid growth upon our public life. Our Socialist 
 propaganda must therefore be pitched in such a key as 
 will not only educate the people but teach them inde- 
 pendence and self-respect. That was what the class 
 war crusade was meant to effect. I welcomed the aim 
 but doubted the efficacy of the means, and the war 
 has shown I was right, for both in Germany and here 
 those who talked most loudly of the class war became 
 the victims of the most extreme nationalist balderdash 
 and found a championship and a platform in the 
 ancient organs of reaction and of capitalist and Society 
 dominance. 
 
 I am not at all sure but that the influx of women 
 voters may at first add to our difficulties. The very 
 same reasons which make women bad Trade Unionists 
 tend to make them bad politicians. We cannot con- 
 fine a class for long generations within prisons and 
 nunneries and expect its members on their release to
 
 A SOCIALIST PARLIAMENT 45 
 
 show the interests of those who have been free. 
 Fortunately, the Socialists have not neglected the 
 political education of women, and the political capacity 
 of the working woman is, on the average, higher than 
 that of the ordinary West End lady. But there is some 
 risk that under the existing franchise the sober, intelli- 
 gent, working and professional woman will be 
 swamped by her more worthless sister, whose political 
 notions, belong to the small, snobbish world of the 
 drawing-room, the dinner-table, the fashionable 
 charity, and the Primrose League conversazione. The 
 greatest danger is that women may be induced to form 
 parties of their own. With us, however, that will not 
 happen. The mere fact that there are woman electors 
 ought to widen the interest and the vision of men, so 
 that they both may share equally in an enriched public 
 life. Moreover, quite apart from her numerical force, 
 the really intelligent woman voter should be a purify- 
 ing and energising influence in whatever political party 
 she joins. 
 
 For some time Parliament itself has been sinking 
 into a state of feeble servitude to its Cabinet and 
 Executive. It has no real control over finance, it has 
 absolutely no control over the Foreign Office, and about 
 international affairs it does not know enough to suspect 
 when it is being lied to; it cannot introduce its own 
 legislation or express its own mind in the division 
 lobbies. The time of the ordinary member of Parlia- 
 ment is absolutely wasted if he has any ability at all, 
 and Ministers are chosen from dining circles in normal 
 times, and in time of war from obedient followers or 
 from men who are willing to become such. 
 
 The disease is deep-seated, and it will not be 
 eradicated from our constitutional system until the 
 body of Members of Parliament make up their minds 
 that it must be.
 
 46 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 The House of Commons must perform two great 
 functions. It must preserve the importance of its 
 great debates and deal with big problems in a large- 
 minded way. It must also be an efficient business 
 assembly doing work. 
 
 I have never looked with great favour upon com- 
 mittees in the French style. Under a degraded 
 partisan Parliamentary system, committees will take 
 upon themselves the evil Parliamentary features. The 
 shortcoming lies not so much in machinery as in spirit. 
 For many years Parliament has been trying to protect 
 its independence and efficiency by rules and regula- 
 tions, and as soon as a new protecting rule like closure 
 has been devised, it has been abused by partisans in 
 power or in opposition, who put party advantage before 
 Parliamentary honour and national well-being. The 
 House of Commons has an esprit des corps of many 
 fine qualities, but that of honourable party fighting is 
 absent. It has forgotten the instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion in its partisan lusts, and so its book of standing 
 orders has grown in bulk whilst its great debates have 
 diminished in quality and number, and its control over 
 itself has weakened. The House of Lords has pre- 
 served these qualities to a greater extent, with the 
 result that in recent years it has increased the respect 
 paid to its deliberations. It has done this, however, 
 on account of its legislative unimportance. Had its 
 decisions had greater weight its partisanship would 
 have been more bitter and its atmosphere less calm. 
 
 This is a tremendous problem for the Socialist. He 
 depends for his authority upon the respect paid to the 
 House of Commons, and if that respect goes he is left 
 with meanness in public life, which to him ought to be 
 the most dignified and important of all activities. If 
 we cannot attain ideal conceptions of Parliament the 
 zest will go out of our work, and our best men will
 
 A SOCIALIST PARLIAMENT 47 
 
 find no compensations for ita inevitable disappoint- 
 ments, worries, and waste of precious time. 
 
 But under the new conditions, and to mark off quite 
 clearly and definitely the new departure, we may be 
 wise in setting up new forms of control, and Parliamen- 
 tary Committees attached to the great departments of 
 State, especially to those of Foreign Affairs and 
 Finance, might be a convenient expedient. If they do 
 no great good they will do no great harm, and, taking 
 opportunity from the freshness of mind which will 
 come with peace, they might establish good traditions 
 in their working which they could not have done under 
 pre-war conditions. In any event they will give 
 Members of Parliament something to do which will be 
 worth doing and may make the House of Commons a 
 better business body. 
 
 Questions will never be voted on purely on their 
 merits so long as Governments treat every division as a 
 vote of confidence. When Cabinets free the House of ' 
 Commons from coercive authority, the initiative of 
 private Members will be restored. Cabinets should be 
 put in their proper place as servants convenient for the 
 work of Parliament, not as autocrats controlling Parlia- 
 ment. For this, rules and machinery will always be 
 ineffective, because rules cannot control clever men, 
 and good machinery will produce bad results whilst the 
 hands that work it are inspired by the sinister spirit. 
 If no division bells were rung and Whips were not 
 allowed to stand at the entrance to the lobbies, there 
 would be a greater revolution in Parliamentary habits 
 than has been known for centuries. But everything 
 depends upon the political intelligence of the con- 
 stituencies and upon the backbone of the elected repre- 
 sentatives. If a really great statesman came into 
 power after the war he could lead Parliament to free- 
 dom. He would divert the attention of members from 
 destruction to construction, and by giving them a share
 
 48 SOCIALISM AFTEK THE WAE 
 
 in the government would weaken in the House of 
 Commons those activities which do nothing but retard 
 work and put sand in the bearings of the machine. 
 
 No greater curse has come upon Parliament than 
 the establishment of enormous party funds accumu- 
 lated in secret and spent in secret. To keep these 
 funds in existence, honours and titles are unblushingly 
 sold. The knight, the baronet, the peer of to-day has 
 gone into the market and has bought his commodity 
 as his wife buys her hats from her milliner. 
 These funds are used to buy constituencies and mem- 
 bers, who thus find a resting place and a prison in the 
 Whip's pocket. If a man does what he thinks is right 
 and his right does not coincide with his party instruc- 
 tions, he is invited to have a hot interview with his 
 Whip, and mischief is made between him and the 
 political leaders in his constituency. Thus the able 
 individual man disappears and the inferior party 
 hanger-on takes his place, and men who enter Parlia- 
 ment full of enthusiasm for public life are disillusioned, 
 and either give it up or a shell of cynicism encases 
 them. The vice of uniform conformity has thus become 
 the greatest Parliamentary virtue as party, which is 
 the natural condition of progress, has been subverted 
 to being a mere tool in the hands of political managers. 
 All this was seen before the war, but the circumstances 
 of the time gave no hope that energy spent in trying 
 to destroy it would be productive. Besides, we were 
 in the midst of other work. Conditions have altered, 
 and if the revolutionary spirit bred by the war would 
 lay the axe at the root of these evils they could now be 
 cut away. We could not do better than begin by im- 
 peaching Ministers who have sold " Honours " in 
 recent years. We might appoint a committee, with 
 power to examine witnesses on oath, to inquire into 
 the " Honours " Lists of the last decade and 
 publish to the world the prices paid, and thus robe in
 
 A SOCIALIST PARLIAMENT 49 
 
 their appropriate garments of disgrace the knights, 
 baronets, and peers who have satisfied their vanity by 
 corrupting public life. Upon such an exposure as this 
 Committee would make, it would be easy to cancel the 
 patents granted to these people, impeach the Ministers 
 who were responsible, and protect the nation by legal 
 enactment against a continuation of these disgraceful 
 and harmful transactions. 
 
 I hold no brief, and confess to no admiration, for 
 the superior oddity who can work with nobody and 
 who has no capacity to compromise for orderly progress 
 or to keep step with his fellows. I have therefore 
 never been attracted by the prospects held out by the 
 advocates of Proportional Representation and their 
 peculiar views of minorities. But if the tyranny of 
 uniformity and conformity cannot be broken by the 
 intelligence of constituencies, let us have the evil of 
 Proportional Representation, with a chance that a few 
 oddments of independence with Parliamentary 
 ability may be returned to break down the iron ring 
 of party obedience. Parliament is a place for co- 
 operation, not for individual whims ; it is a field where 
 the work is of a rough-and-tumble nature, and where 
 men must give and take. But when that is pushed to 
 extremes, as it has been, it becomes a dull, flat waste, 
 where cheap cleverness, cheek, and dishonesty hold un- 
 disputed possession. 
 
 It is of supreme importance that the Socialist should 
 strive that, in the reconstruction after the war, Parlia- 
 ment and public life should be restored to dignity and 
 respect. The reputation of a service determines the 
 kind of man who enters it ; the dignity of an institution 
 decides the homage paid to its decisions. 
 
 To sum up : The authority of Parliament must be 
 restored by the ending of Cabinet dominance and by
 
 50 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 making its assent necessary to all international agree- 
 ments which bind the country. 
 
 The position of the Member must be made more 
 responsible and independent by allowing him greater 
 freedom in voting and by giving him more work to do 
 through Committees, which will discuss and be con- 
 sulted regarding departmental business, arid have some 
 initiative in legislation. 
 
 The system of corrupt dealing in " Honours" Lists 
 and the sale of titles to replenish funds spent in pur- 
 chasing Members of Parliament must be ended with 
 drastic thoroughness.
 
 VI. 
 
 A Socialist Programme. 
 
 A legislator is bound not to think solely of the present effict 
 of his measures; he must consider what influence the acts he does 
 now may have over those of his successors. Whatever change he 
 introduces should be a step in the direction in which a furthet 
 advance is, or will hereafter be, desirable. His half-measures 
 should hi so constructed as to recognise and embody the prin- 
 ciples which, if no hindrance existed, would form the best founda- 
 tion of a complete measure. J. S. Mill. 
 
 When the soldiers return they will be able to make 
 claims upon the nation of quite a new kind. Possessions 
 have hitherto been determined by buying and selling; 
 now they can be based upon sacrifice and service. This 
 particularly affects land ownership, the parchments of 
 which have been cancelled by the war. The nation has 
 become the people's inheritance. The gifts of creation 
 upon which all our trade and commerce rest have, by 
 all moral right, passed under the ownership of the 
 people and the justification for legislation imposing 
 special taxation upon rent, and special control upon 
 the uses of land, cannot be questioned. The fight for 
 the historical thing called Great Britain has gained for 
 the people a right to possess the material thing of the 
 same name. 
 
 There will be much need for the change. When men 
 were required for the army our landlords toured the 
 country in their patriotic zeal, but only a remnant of 
 our people listened to their appeals. The rest, land- 
 lordism had scattered over the face of the earth because 
 a peasantry interfered with the selfish enjoyment of the 
 land, or because the maintenance of an independent 
 people on the soil was never part of the intentions of 
 
 51
 
 52 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 landlordism. This was particularly the case in Scot- 
 land where clearance and sporting had been the land- 
 lord policy for generations. One great landlord won 
 some advertisement for his patriotism by offering a 
 limited occupation to soldiers of lands which an 
 ancestor had cleared of men to make way for sheep ! 
 Another, during the recruiting campaign, attacked 
 
 ' Pacifists " in a district where many men were raised 
 during the Crimean War, but which by clearance and 
 discouragement on the part of this man's family was 
 almost depopulated. Only those who were born and 
 brought up on the soil can feel in their peasant hearts 
 the crime of landlordism. A land population and 
 British landlordism cannot exist together. 
 
 The war has exposed the evils of landlordism too 
 seriously for them to be allowed to continue. From an 
 army point of view our empty fields and our crowded 
 towns were bad. But the townsman living in the open 
 air when he joined the army showed very soon how 
 unnecessary it is that the British race should be 
 physically stunted. When famine threatened, the 
 system of agriculture, which is the inevitable conse- 
 quence of our landlordism, nearly allowed the sub- 
 marine campaign to be successful. It had kept the 
 productivity of our country low. Land was not a 
 medium of production, it was a social possession used 
 in accordance with social tradition (which had some 
 very fine characteristics), but not to meet national 
 requirements. 
 
 When peace comes there will be a great impetus to 
 increased efficiency in production. Agriculture will 
 improve both by good and bad stimuli, but landlordism 
 and the type of farming spirit which landlordism 
 fosters will trust to the bad. Already the Corn Pro- 
 duction Bill advertises to the country how the land- 
 lord and the inefficient farmer are using the war to 
 rob the nation to a greater extent than ever. So long
 
 A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME 53 
 
 as there is any honour in public life bargaining made by 
 the State must be kept, but the niching of profit and 
 rent from the pockets of the taxpayer, which is the pur- 
 pose of this Bill, is being effected under circumstances 
 which impose no obligations upon a future Parliament. 
 It will be a Frankenstein, however, for it will, after the 
 war, compel Parliament to reconsider the economics of 
 rent, cultivation, and all the unjust privileges given to 
 farmers as regards rating and income tax. The better 
 organisation of industry and the increased efficiency of 
 production will also mean more rent, for no legislation 
 devised by the wit of man can prevent the operation of 
 the economic law of rent. In the impoverished and 
 debt-burdened state of the nation the rent portion of 
 production cannot be allowed to pass into private 
 pockets to maintain a new class of parasitic people or 
 to enrich an old one. 
 
 Thus our old Socialist argument that economic rent 
 must be taken by the State because it is created by 
 circumstances of which the whole community is 
 entitled to take advantage, has been enormously 
 enforced by the results and the experiences of the war. 
 And it is fundamental. 
 
 When we think of social and political programmes 
 we find ourselves in the midst of a thick wood. Where 
 are we to begin? Housing, education, unemployment 
 — every social interest which has been occupying our 
 attention for the past generation has been intensified 
 by the bankruptcy and destruction of the war. It may. 
 be that the hearts of many people are changed, and that 
 men who never understood the iron in the soul of the 
 workman now do so, and are willing to co-operate in 
 reform. I believe that that is so; I believe that both 
 the intelligence and the conscience of people are 
 troubled, and that they wish to do better things than 
 they have done. In their emotional way they are 
 grateful and wish to show it. But intention is not 
 
 E
 
 54 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 enough. Social evils arise from two main sources, 
 individual weakness and a bad social organisation, 
 j Mere philanthropy will cure nothing. The change that 
 1 is required must be of the system ; it must be emanci- 
 pating in its effect; it must not be a clothing and a 
 feeding of Lazarus who still remains begging at the 
 gate. We hear and read of many good sentiments 
 expressed in unexpected quarters, but we hear of few 
 good ideas issued from hard thinking. And so, many 
 workmen's representatives, listening to these good 
 sentiments and without thinking what they are doing, 
 are accepting agreements which only add to past allow- 
 ances of crumbs. Dives must not be let off with that. 
 
 Let me indicate specifically what I mean. 
 
 Some Trade Union leaders are now committing them- 
 selves to after-war schemes which will allow of higher 
 wages being paid to their members under conditions 
 which will be a national loss. They are agreeing to 
 Protection as the price of high nominal wages, to 
 Imperial preference as a recognition of Imperial service, 
 and to Paris Economic Conference resolutions as a 
 proof of their friendship with our Allies; to mistaken 
 theories about " essential trades," although we have 
 been told that this war is to bring a lasting peace to 
 Europe, which destroys all the war arguments regarding 
 these trades. Economics in future are, apparently, to 
 include the ruffled and the hostile mind as well as the 
 trading reason, and are to voice national animosity 
 rather than national well-being. Every one of these 
 proposals has been examined and has been condemned.* 
 
 ' But that was before the war," is the reply. The 
 war has not upset the economic laws of creation, how- 
 
 * It is also peculiarly unfitting that hampering arrangements should 
 be proposed when national ill-will will be a sufficient economic barrier 
 for the immediate future, and when the destruction caused by the war 
 and the postponement of renewals and other necessary output will for 
 •ome time make the ordinary peace market problems of little consequence.
 
 A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME 55 
 
 ever. It has not altered things, so that in future profit- 
 able exchange is to mean exchange at a loss; that 
 bounties are to be anything but excessive and wasteful 
 burdens upon the taxpayer, and tariffs oppressive 
 burdens upon consumers ; that Imperial Preference can 
 mean anything but the subsidy of certain colonial 
 interests of a personal kind at the expense of the user in 
 this country, or can bring anything in the long run but 
 profit to a class and friction to the nation ; that high\ 
 nominal wages are necessarily high real wages, or 
 that people can buy things without giving value in 
 return. If the war had changed these time-rooted 
 experiences of the market we should have had to revise J 
 our opinions regarding the advantage and disadvantage 
 of our pre-war economics. But it has not changed 
 them. All that has happened is that it has destroyed \ 
 our normal economic conditions and has upset markets! 
 and disorganised transport, but, above all, it has upset*] 
 ourselves. Whilst that upset lasts, the spirit and) 
 mental outlook of the Tariff Eeformer are congenial to 
 us, and we are enticed to put his harness upon our 
 necks. Economics not being upset, however, we 
 return to the programmes outlined in our speeches 
 before the war, and dismiss the emotional Utopias 
 which colour perorations during the war. The 
 economic criticisms which influenced the country in 
 1906 were far more likely to be right than those which 
 are popular in 1917. Wise people commit themselves 
 to practical schemes, not to heady emotions, and no 
 practical scheme to carry out Paris Economic Con- 
 ference resolutions and Burleigh recommendations has 
 been devised or can be devised. 
 
 The Socialist's policy is one of free exchange. He 
 admits that if the world is to be forced by its rulers to 
 remain encamped on the edge of the battlefield, 
 essential industries must be maintained and become 
 part of our armament costs. The grand contribution
 
 56 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 which tin* war lias then made to peace will be that it 
 has added the cost of the " essential " industry to that 
 of the army and navy as being necessary to national 
 defence ! And the expense will all have to come out of 
 the produce of labour. If this scheme of international 
 economics which some Labour leaders are accepting as 
 a necessary sequel to the war and an essential part of 
 national defence, is to be adopted, it is a complete con- 
 
 (demnation of the war, a proof that it, like those of the 
 past, is only to increase labour's load without adding 
 to labour's security; it is evidence that the war is to 
 leave behind it the seeds of further strife. These are 
 not the economics of a European settlement, but of a 
 European armament, and the preparations being made 
 for peace contradict the professions of the sup- 
 ' porters of the war. These heresies have no place in the 
 Socialist programme after the war. 
 
 We set up Internationalism as a foreign policy, and 
 nationalisation as a domestic one. With Inter- 
 nationalism I shall deal later; of nationalisation, as this 
 is not a book explaining Socialism, but addressed to 
 those who already understand Socialism, I need only 
 ^ay this, that nothing which has happened during the 
 war has weakened the argument in favour of it, but 
 much has happened to strengthen it. The State has 
 had to step in to save the nation from chaos ; chaos will 
 threaten us after this war is over, and the State will be 
 called in again, and the community will be asked to 
 protect the farmer, the manufacturer, and the 
 capitalist — to put him on his feet, to give him security 
 against unreasonable demands made by his workpeople 
 — in short, to put Humpty Dumpty up on the wall 
 again and restart the system which kept him seated 
 there. Our reply is, better organisation and adaptation, 
 more labour control, more intelligence and economy, 
 more education, and the prevention of exploitation by 
 'those whose only function in society is to own some-
 
 A SOCIALIST PEOGEAMME 57 
 
 thing which other people require to use, and to charge \ 
 them for the use of it. With care in making our \ 
 conception of the State clearer and more detailed than 
 hitherto, the Socialist programme of how to raise the\ 
 standard of life, how_to economise and use for common 
 purposes "national resources, stands unshaken by the/ 
 storms of the war. And the Socialist policy of free! 
 international exchange provides the best condition I 
 under which these ends can be secured with the greatest j 
 economy for labour and the greatest advantage to the 
 community. It may be that immediately after the war 
 the destruction of life and capital may mean a scarcity 
 of food and raw material, and that the limited produc- 
 tion will necessitate some international organisation to 
 secure its equitable distribution at fair prices. That 
 Socialists will support, but the failure of our various 
 Food Controllers shows that different political and 
 economic minds and principles must be in charge of 
 the organisation, or the profiteer will defy it and the 
 people will suffer. Certainly this scientific and regu- 
 lated distribution cannot be secured by the operations 
 of Paris Conference resolutions. These will only add 
 to the injustice and the difficulty. They are wrong in 
 their conception and impossible in their practical 
 working. We want an international committee repre- 
 sentative of all the interests, and in touch with all the 
 nations regulating supply, not in a military, but in an 
 industrial mind, and not as monopolists punishing 
 enemies, but as protectors guarding the well-being of 
 peoples. — <■ 
 
 When considering the detailed applications of 
 principles, it must be remembered that Socialism will 
 not for some time after the war be oppressed as it was 
 before the war with the almost immovable burdens of 
 the past and of habit. These are gone, and that is why 
 the times are revolutionary. A revolution is not an"\ 
 armed demonstration making change by force. It
 
 58 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 happens when traditional ways and authorities are 
 suddenly broken, and when men feel free to act — when 
 will is master of tradition and initiative of habit. We 
 may expect politics to be revolutionary in this sense in 
 Europe for some time to come. The authorities cannot 
 for three or four years upset all our ordinary ways, 
 suppress our liberties and rule with a high hand, and in 
 the end expect us to go back like the sow to our 
 wallowing in the mire. Millions of men cannot live for 
 years in the riotous lawlessness of war, killing, destroy- 
 ing, smashing their way along, and then suddenly on 
 the blast of a bugle and the issue of a proclamation, 
 return to the methodical ways of civil life. The revo- 
 lutionary mind is handed over by war to peace. When 
 the army was a small one and a hired one, the revolu- 
 tionary beggar was the trouble ; when the army is the 
 nation the revolutionary citizen is to be the trouble. 
 
 The programme, then, is to be revolutionary. The 
 war and its honours and offices may have changed some 
 leaders towards reactionary contentment; it has 
 changed the movement towards revolutionary demands. 
 In thinking of programmes this is a fundamental con- 
 sideration. 
 
 The Budget after the war will be something to make 
 people sore and sane. Expenditure will probably reach 
 to £600,000,000 per annum. There must be a large 
 conscription of wealth. Conscription of life tilted the 
 balance of justice, and it must be readjusted. Wealth 
 has not borne its fair burdens or the National Debt 
 would not be so oppressive as it is. Repudiation of 
 debt would be unjust because the wrong people would 
 suffer. Conscription of wealth to reduce the debt 
 would be scientific, both in its incidence and effect. 
 Income tax must be kept high and the sources from 
 which incomes are derived must be differentiated. 
 Inheritance must be greatly limited by new and higher 
 scales of death duties. At least £1,500,000,000 should
 
 A SOCIALIST PROGRAMME 59 
 
 be taken immediately by the conscription of 
 wealth, and a graduated income tax reaching to 
 20s. in the £ of higher increments should be 
 imposed. The fortunes made out of the warl 
 should be enquired into and forfeited. There/ 
 can be no half measures with wealth. It has not 
 bome its fair share of the nation's burdens, and to-day 
 it is actually in a position to make perpetual profit out 
 of them. One very objectional idea must be opposed. 
 It is calculated that a more efficient organisation of 
 production made possible by the war will result in e,n 
 increase of at least 10 per cent., and that that increase 
 will be available for the interest on the debt. That 
 means that this extra production is to be taken by 
 financiers for their personal use, whereas it is 
 urgently needed for social reform, for building up 
 the life of the nation, for increasing the share of 
 labour, and for shortening working hours. This 
 possible increase is now a national reserve, and whereas 
 we think that the debt should be reduced by conscrip- 
 tion of w r ealth, and the reserve in production used for 
 national purposes, on the other hand the antagonistic 
 proposal is to earmark the reserve for personal purposes 
 and leave the nation in the lurch. 
 
 We used to talk of a living wage of 30s. a week when 
 we thought of Utopia. That, now, seems to be meanly 
 inadequate when we think of every-day experience. 
 National standards adequate to secure freedom and joy 
 in life must be fixed and enforced. Energies drawn 
 out for national defence in a war will have to be kept 
 active to make the nation a fit place to live in. 
 
 The conditions of family life must be the care of the \ 
 nation, and the first of these is the home itself. A vast I 
 scheme of re-housing must be put in hand at once,* the [ <\ 
 waste of child life must be stopped and every cause, \ 
 
 * At least £6,000,000 a year for some years can be spent on this. Care 
 should be taken not to force inferior building and designing by too great 
 haste, pressing as is the need.
 
 60 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 • 'economic, hygienic, feeding, parental ignorance and 
 , neglect, must be removed. The child not being a mere 
 object of physiology, but having a mind and a soul, 
 I must be educated in freedom and culture, and this 
 \ means a complete re-modelling of our educational 
 system, and a policy by which the finer influences of the 
 arts may become part of the atmosphere of life which 
 I /all may breathe.*. It also means that women must 
 [ enter a new world of political and economic freedom. 
 As labour, either by muscle or mind, is the only 
 service which the nation benefits by, and which entitles 
 the able bodied to life and citizenship, so the State ^an 
 no longer afford to allow the anarchy of unemployment 
 to paralyse itself and visit evil upon innocent and 
 willing workers ; nor can it allow the decay of old age to 
 go neglected, or to be cared for by a miserable pittance 
 of 5s. a week, or by the doles given by charity. This 
 means that railways, mines, and similar nationally- 
 organised services should be nationalised and con- 
 trolled, as I have already indicated, for communal 
 benefit. For this, a real Labour Ministry must be 
 established and not the insulting apology now in 
 existence. 
 
 Then, a vast reconstruction of our Municipal and 
 Local Government is required to give local bodies 
 more legislative freedom, more powers over supplies 
 like electricity, more liberty to act jointly for common 
 interest; and this must be accompanied by a revision of 
 local finance and a readjustment of imperial and local 
 burdens. 
 
 I fear this means long days of unwearying strife. 
 Who is to blame for thai; — if blame be the word to use ? 
 Those who lay hands upon a settled order must endure 
 the storms they let loose. The economic war after the 
 
 * The Education Vote should reach at least £50,000,000.
 
 A SOCIALIST PKOGKAMME 61 
 
 war is not to be a conflict managed by the rulers of 
 nations, but one between those who oppress and those 1 
 who are oppressed. Better far that these things had 
 been done otherwise, and that they had come in a 
 summer calm and not in a winter gale. We did our 
 best that that should be so, but it was otherwise 
 decreed.
 
 VII. 
 
 V 
 
 International Policy. 
 
 At last, after many devastations, overthrows, and even complete 
 internal exhaustion of their powers, the nations are driven for- 
 ward to the goal which reason might easily have impressed upon 
 them, even without so much sad experience. This is none other 
 than the advance out of the lawless state of savages and the 
 entering into a federation of nations. Kant. 
 
 The International will have to be reconstructed. It 
 was never a satisfactory organisation because it had 
 never been given enough important work to do. A little 
 Executive Committee sitting in Brussels composed of 
 men belonging to one nationality ; a secretary without 
 a staff ; a meeting of the Bureau once a year, when there 
 was a demonstration and a discussion on matters 
 internal to Socialism ; a Congress once in three or four 
 years, unwieldy in size and again absorbed mainly with 
 Socialist resolutions which, when passed, were left 
 there either because they related to matters which 
 were not of vital interest, or because they were being 
 dealt with at a time when there was no necessity or 
 opportunity for doing anything regarding them. That 
 was the International. Some good principles were laid 
 down (regarding colonisation for instance), but no real 
 success was met with in getting the representatives of 
 the various nations to come to agreements as to action 
 on the resolutions, or in any way to discover the lines 
 upon which in their different countries they should act 
 in co-operation with each other. 
 
 The Socialist movement has a distinctive inter- 
 national programme which is founded upon a much 
 more secure and deep-dug base than those put forward 
 by other interests and parties. We do not believe that
 
 INTEKNATIONAL POLICY 63 
 
 mere machinery like International Courts or Leagues of 
 Nations will end war any more than industrial arbitra- 
 tion even of a compulsory kind has ended industrial 
 strife and strikes. We believe that in modern States 
 the development of exploiting capitalism is always 
 found to be an unvarying predisposition to war. It 
 may not become boldly and badly the advertised cause 
 of war, but it is always a motive, and it enters into war 
 programmes and makes itself felt as an important 
 factor in peace settlements. Who can, in the present 
 war, dissociate economics from the Balkan policy of 
 the Central Powers, from the problem of Alsace- 
 Lorraine, from the place of Eussia in the Entente, and 
 from the mutual antagonisms between Germany and 
 Great Britain? In the Paris Conference resolutions, 
 in the various trading Corporations which have arisen 
 from the war, in the Imperial exploitation projects 
 which have been launched during the war, in the Colon- 
 ial programmes which the war has brought forth, it 
 stands openly confessed. Capitalism is to use the war: 
 to advance its international interests and organisations, 
 and the international debts, accumulated by the war, 
 will help it enormously. One looks in vain for a 
 glimmering comprehension of this problem by the 
 Labour leaders, who are now acting with the Govern- 
 ment and actually giving their names in support of 
 these capitalist ventures, apparently in blissful ignor- 
 ance of what they all mean. 
 
 No Socialist or Labour representative can support 
 these projects. In some of their aspects they call for 
 direct opposition and in others they demand counter 
 proposals. The world must be unified economically, 
 its various products must be exchanged in the interests 
 of consumers, its resources developed in the interests of 
 mankind. With this I deal in the next chapter; in 
 this I discuss the problem of internationalism so far 
 as the more civilised nations are concerned. There the
 
 64 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 competition of nationalist capitalist interests must be 
 eliminated, and the co-operation of national productive 
 resources put in its place. That means that inter- 
 national commerce must be conducted on a basis of free 
 exchange. Upon that basis labour will have a perfect 
 right to protect standards of living, but in doing so it 
 must be careful to avoid the pitfalls of what is known 
 as Protection of the simple and crude kind advocated by 
 men like Mr. Hodge. Sweating, which everyone 
 admits ought to be prohibited on the home markets, 
 should also be prohibited on the international 
 markets, and this is the only important modification 
 which the Socialist International should make in its 
 Free Trade programme. 
 
 The new International should lay down a Trade Union 
 minimum of conditions, and that minimum should be 
 enforced by Trade Union agreements or by legislation 
 in the nations, and those nations which fall short and 
 which therefore compete with what advantage lower 
 conditions may give them, should be penalised. Even 
 then there is a danger lest superior skill or organisation 
 on the part of one nation may be regarded by other 
 nations as sweating, and the crude programmes of the 
 Tariff Reformer may, in consequence, be resorted to. 
 It is that danger which makes some of us willing to 
 advocate an unqualified system of Free Trade, and trust 
 to the effectiveness of Trade Unionism and Socialism 
 in the various countries to remove unfair competition, 
 instead of depending upon a system of economic 
 penalties which can so easily be abused. Personally, 
 I am one of those, and I am strengthened in my policy 
 by the further consideration that, as a matter of fact, 
 when the whole volume of international trade is con- 
 sidered, the advantage of sweating in competition is 
 negligible. When Socialism changes the aspect of 
 Capitalist competition and makes international ex- 
 change not a matter of class interest or profit but of
 
 INTERNATIONAL POLICY 65 
 
 national effort and advantage, the question of national 
 exports and imports will be considered from a new 
 standpoint. With a democratic political security 
 against war there will be no special economic policy 
 necessary regarding " essential " industries, which will 
 then be subject to the only protection which Socialism 
 recognises — energy, ability, education, enterprise, 
 national advantage. 
 
 Whilst the conditions of this economic freedom are 
 being worked out, the International will have to deal 
 with the other causes of misunderstanding, conflict and 
 war. The old traditions of strife are maintained by 
 diplomatic and military castes, which renew their grip 
 immediately after wars have been fought, because 
 nationalist pride and emotion have always been insulted 
 and challenged by the kind of peace hitherto made, 
 and because people always start peace whilst the fury 
 of war is still in possession of them ; and that grip once 
 gained is never relaxed. Thus, one war leads to 
 another. 
 
 The International must be the means by which all 
 this is to be set aside and peace begun free from the 
 bias of war emotions and diplomacies. Therefore the 
 International should have a direct influence upon the 
 making of peace. It is pre-eminently the organisation 
 which gathers up in itself the motives and intelligence 
 which can settle with justice the problems of Europe, 
 and apply with impartial will the moral declarations in 
 favour of national freedom which every country uttered 
 whilst at war, and which the diplomatists of no country 
 will honour in the settlement of peace. The Inter- 
 national should therefore meet concurrently with the 
 diplomatic peace congress, discuss and issue pronounce- 
 ments upon the subjects being settled, and thus bring 
 into play an awakened and a vocal democratic 
 diplomacy.
 
 66 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 But when the diplomatists have done their best and 
 worst, Europe will have to go on with its unhappy joggle 
 over rough roads. International Socialism will have to 
 fight International Capitalism; International Demo- 
 cracy will have to preserve itself from the menace of 
 nationalist diplomacy and aggressive policy. The Inter- 
 national must, therefore, become something of the 
 nature of an International Parliament wherein these 
 subjects are discussed and conclusions regarding them 
 arrived at, and these conclusions should be taken up by 
 the Socialist Parties in the various national Parlia- 
 ments so as to influence Government action and public 
 opinion. In this way the International will become the 
 only "League of Nations " which the democracy can 
 safely support, for every other form of such a League, 
 being a combination of official governments, carries 
 within itself the same evils which now make for war. 
 We do not want a league of nations, we want a 
 
 Society " of nations. We want nothing to " enforce " 
 peace; we want something to keep peace. An Inter- 
 national organisation of Socialism can do this best of 
 all. No body of officials, or diplomatists, or Govern- 
 ment nominees, or lawyers ; no Court or Board of 
 Arbitration, leaning ultimately upon armies, can keep 
 the peace. There must be such Courts, but the essential 
 thing is that disclosure and discussion of difficulties are 
 required if the tendencies making for war are to be 
 thwarted, and the discussion must take place amongst 
 the representatives of public opinion, men of political 
 influence and standing, leaders of the people, whose 
 influence is international, if it is to be of any value. 
 Political and not legal minds are to end war. Let this, 
 then, be the conception of the new International, a 
 Parliament of the peoples, wherein the international 
 affairs of the nations will be discussed and agreements 
 come to which will find effectiveness through the 
 national Parliaments. Thus the State becomes inter-
 
 INTEKNATIONAL POLICY 67 
 
 national, and an international legislature is ultimately 
 established whose decisions are accepted. 
 
 That being the work of the International it must be 
 reconstructed. It should meet at least every second 
 year with an annual assembly of Parliamentary repre- 
 sentatives, and its executive should consist not of two 
 or three men of one nationality, but of the best men of 
 the various Socialist Parties who ought to confer at least 
 once every six months. The Executive should become 
 an important international business committee, and its 
 discussions, both in subject and in influence, made as 
 important as those which take place when kings and 
 diplomatists meet. It should have at its command the 
 transactions of Foreign Offices, and no event of inter- 
 national importance should pass without being con- 
 sidered by it. 
 
 A special subject of supreme importance must be 
 dealt with by it immediately. It must settle the question 
 of armaments. I do not think we shall be able to go 
 from this war straight into a condition of disarmament. 
 I wish we could, for that would be best, but the peoples 
 may not hear of it. They have not sufficient wisdom or 
 courage to take such a plunge. But the International 
 ought to appoint at once a Commission to consider this 
 matter, and make first of all a definite statement which 
 will expose to the nations the whole fraud of militarism 
 as a means of national defence, and then detail a 
 scheme by which a balance of armaments will, first of 
 all, be secured, and, then a progressive diminution of 
 them begun. The questions which will arise out of this 
 will be the subject of the most important discussions at 
 the meetings of Socialist deputies for some time to 
 come, but unless it is faced with knowledge and deter- 
 mination in this way, militarism will have plenty of 
 chances for preying upon popular panic, and for 
 acquiring secret influence, and thus starting on an even 
 keel on a new voyage of destruction.
 
 VIII. 
 
 Imperialist Capitalism. 
 
 Under all varying outivard forms, the two essential charac- 
 teristics of this type of relationship between a civilised Power 
 and a tropical dependency which may be distinguished ar>i (1) 
 the placing in the foreground as a prime consideration that the 
 occupied territory is to be worked like an estate in the interests 
 of the country whose " possession " it is supposed to be, and 
 (2) the complete subordination of the native interests to those 
 of the occupying Power. However this type of relationship may 
 be modified, the fact must be clearly recognised that the main 
 idea underlying it is incompatible both with the spirit and the 
 forms of modern civilisation. Benjamin Kidd. 
 
 The war will lead to the development of capitalism 
 among the native races of the world on a scale hitherto 
 undreamt of. Baits will be offered to the nation in the 
 shape of profits (which will enable it to pay some part 
 of its war debts) and of a command of raw material, 
 particularly vegetable oils, which will provide us with 
 new industries essential to modern scientific require- 
 ments in chemical production, foods, manures, 
 explosives, and so on. Great Britain will thus be 
 induced to launch upon a policy of colonial and tropical 
 exploitation which has always resulted in the degrada- 
 tion of the exploiting country and in a cruelly oppressive 
 and unjust attitude to the natives. The history of the 
 Belgian occupation of the Congo in the time of King 
 Leopold, with all its crime and disgrace, is not that of 
 a deliberately wicked body of administrators, but of a 
 policy of exploitation of natives in the interests 
 of capitalist ventures, backed by State authority and 
 under State patronage.* That is the sordid chapter 
 
 * " Those who say let us have the Congo system, but without atrocities, 
 fail to grasp the fact that, given certain administrative conditions, 
 atrocities must inevitably follow." — J. H. Harris, " Paying Britain's War 
 Debts by Easy Methods." Page 6. 
 
 68
 
 IMPERIALIST CAPITALISM 69 
 
 which capitalist imperialism is asking us to add to our 
 Colonial records to-day; that is the chapter which 
 Socialists ought to prevent from ever being written. 
 
 Moreover, it must be noted that " capitalism " used 
 in this connection does not mean capitalism generally, 
 but groups of financiers. These groups use political 
 influence to gain their ends. They have the ear of 
 Foreign and Colonial Offices, and generally have some 
 grip upon Parliament and political parties. They are 
 therefore corrupt and corrupting. When in this way 
 they secure a monopoly they work it in their own 
 interests and exclude others from their fenced field. 
 Thus, to-day, we have the Empire Resources Develop- 
 ment Committee run by the Rhodes Group, and having 
 captured some Labour leaders, seeking to create a 
 monopoly in African oil products, offering the State a 
 bait of £50,000,000 per annum out of the wholesale 
 exploitation of natives, and securing for itself untold 
 and unestimated profits. 
 
 Apart from the part played by the natural tendency 
 of capitalism to use the war and the feelings it has 
 roused for its own purposes, the problem of the German 
 Colonies and of the position of German trade in the 
 tropics before the war broke out is the immediate 
 occasion for the movement. The position is this : 
 
 1. Germany on account of chemical skill and 
 organisation and of superior ability and enterprise in 
 applying chemistry to industry, had gained a virtual 
 monopoly in the African oil industry, and so soon as 
 the war came this monopoly was found to be of the 
 most vital importance to the nation. It affected the 
 supply of food both for man and beast, fertilisers for 
 the soil, and high explosives for the army. It was 
 the easiest thing in the world to persuade the country 
 that owing to these war experiences it should secure 
 for its own capitalists a monopoly of this trade, 
 acquire the territories necessary to gain this
 
 70 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 monopoly, and work them upon a system which 
 would produce the desired result. 
 
 2. The conquest of these territories has been 
 effected under South African commanders ; parts of 
 the territories are desired by the South African 
 Union; the South African Union will consider that 
 the disposition of the conquered territory is mainly its 
 concern. 
 
 3. The best harbours on the East Coast of Africa 
 are to be found in German East Africa, and, assuming 
 a continuation of military preparation, it is claimed 
 that these harbours must be secured by us, lest they 
 be turned into bases of naval menace. They are also 
 the natural outlets of Central African commerce. 
 Thus the naval argument is reinforced by the 
 commercial one. 
 
 4. We have encouraged the chiefs of tribes living 
 in what was German territory to revolt, and the 
 Germans know it. If we hand over these people to 
 their old rulers after peace the direst punishment will 
 be meted out to them. 
 
 5. Certain cruelties of the German administration 
 are recounted, and are used as a humanitarian 
 reason why, these territories having come into our 
 possession by the fortune of war, we should continue 
 to hold them in the interests of their people. 
 
 6. It is also argued that our method of allowing 
 the natives to manage their own production has been 
 more successful than the German method of 
 appointing white overseers, and that that justifies our 
 retention of these territories. 
 
 None of these arguments will bear the test of close 
 scrutiny, especially in view of the commercial designs 
 of influential groups of British capitalists, and the 
 fourth alone will weigh with those who are really con- 
 cerned about native rights and liberties.
 
 IMPEEIALIST CAPITALISM 71 
 
 But in each of them there is a thread of truth which 
 the Socialist should disentangle from the mass of error 
 in which it is entwined. The Socialist would lay 
 down the following propositions : 
 
 1. The product of the tropics must be made 
 available for our use, and every encouragement given 
 to the natives to make these products ample, and to 
 market them. 
 
 2. The rights, both humanitarian and economic, 
 of the natives must be protected. Cruelty and 
 elavery of every form must be prevented, and the 
 natives' right to their land must not be interfered 
 with. Native economic customs must not be 
 changed to such an extent as to force them into a 
 more degrading condition of existence than that in 
 which they now live, and white exploiting overseers 
 should not be employed. 
 
 3. If this war fails in its main declared object to 
 secure a lasting peace, and it only ends in more 
 danger and more preparation, the military defence of 
 South Africa must be cared for, and to that extent a 
 truly honourable settlement, in which we have gained 
 nothing for ourselves, will be impossible. 
 
 The question is : How can these ends be secured ? 
 
 In the first place the product of the tropics must be 
 at the disposal of all. There must be a free flow out- 
 wards from them to peoples of temperate zones, and 
 commercial preserves, spheres of influence and prohibi- 
 tions must not be countenanced ; the natives must not 
 be asked to pay a tribute secured by forced labour after 
 the manner of King Leopold's occupation of the Congo. 
 From the experience of many years, and many methods 
 of Colonial administration, the idea of international 
 control and protection is emerging, and the war has 
 brought this much nearer. If the British Empire is to 
 be increased in Colonial territory as the result of the 
 war (it matters not what the excuse may be) that will
 
 72 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 require troublesome explanation. It will be taken to be 
 imperialist conquest, and it will hamper our future 
 relations and diminish the confidence extended to us by 
 other Powers. We may satisfy ourselves as regards 
 such acts, but we cannot satisfy the world and history. 
 A nation is not its own judge, and does not write its 
 own certificate of honour. Nor will it be enough to say 
 that the governments of our Allies have agreed (pre- 
 sumably that of Russia will not). These temporary 
 arrangements made under the stress of circumstances 
 have to stand the judgment of peoples. France ten 
 years from now will not approve of everything to which 
 its government may assent to-day, and these conquests 
 will help to isolate us, and will greatly add to the 
 distrust in which we are now held. 
 
 On the other hand, the events of the war in Africa 
 enable us to reconsider the policy of partition which has 
 been pursued hitherto, and also enable us to readjust 
 boundaries. I believe the policy of partition to have 
 been wrong. It was forced upon Africa by the clash of 
 the Imperialist jealousies of European States, and 
 nothing in the days to come will vindicate our honour 
 more than if we set it aside as the result of this war. 
 All lands within fifteen degrees north and south of ihe 
 Equator should cease to be Colonies or possessions of 
 European States, and should be put under the 
 guardianship of an international commission whose 
 business will be political and social, and not commercial 
 in the common meaning of the word. The function of 
 the Commission will be twofold : to protect the natives, 
 and to develop the productiveness of the tropics through 
 native agencies. It would have power to appoint the 
 necessary staff, to issue the necessary regulations, to 
 arrange for and control the necessary means of com- 
 munication. It would regulate the relations between 
 the people and the outside world as regards trading and 
 financial interests — especially alcohol, and it would be
 
 IMPERIALIST CAPITALISM n 3 
 
 the medium through which all governments could 
 approach the area under its control . It should have no 
 power to exclude any State from legitimate trade, or to 
 give preference to any. It would exclude monopolist 
 financial interests. If it were found to be necessary to 
 organise the tropical products so that the outside world 
 might secure a proper distribution of them, this inter- 
 national body would help to carry out the agreement. 
 In short, it would hold tropical Africa in trust for the 
 world with no unnecessary interference with the 
 natives. 
 
 Some such new policy of control as this is required, 
 for if Africa is repartitioned once more by the, will of 
 victors and the weakness of the vanquished, we shall 
 have done nothing to meet the problems that have 
 arisen during the European occupation of these lands ; 
 and if we continue the thoroughly bad economic 
 policies of France and of Portugal, we are only laying 
 up quite gratuitously for ourselves new troubles and 
 disgrace. 
 
 In any event, we must not practice the fraud of 
 annexing these lands by pretending to consult their 
 people. No one who understands what this would mean 
 in practice would even suggest it unless he wished to 
 spread a cloak over his deceit. The chiefs alone could 
 be consulted, and, of course, they could not decide 
 against a victorious nation and a powerful neighbour. 
 These people are at our mercy. An appeal for a 
 democratic decision presupposes a freedom and an 
 equality under which it can be given. This does not 
 exist, and Africa must therefore be settled by Europe 
 doing justice and acting wisely.* 
 
 * When working out the details of this, care must be taken not to 
 appoint a body or officials who will be so independent of Parliamentary 
 control that no authority will be a real watch dog over their proceedings. 
 We do not want another Berlin Act.
 
 74 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 The position of the German stations in the Pacific 
 presents other difficulties of adjustment. Some are 
 held by Japan, others by Australia, and neither the one 
 nor the other will surrender them if they can keep 
 them. Their problem is military. 
 
 Is this war to end war, or is it not? Upon the answer 
 Europe gives to this question depends whether the 
 defence of South Africa and Australia requires us to 
 even consider the taking over of these possessions. If 
 the pledges given to the men who enlisted to fight in 
 this war are to be kept, these military questions will 
 not arise, but if we have abandoned that ideal, then let 
 us tell the world with honest straightforwardness that 
 these phrases about no indemnities and no annexations 
 are nothing but Utopian clap-trap, and let us produce a 
 programme of annexation based upon considerations of 
 imperial defence. Pious professions which we do not 
 mean are the seeds from which the most deadly weeds 
 of enmity grow. As trading stations, and as fields upon 
 which the problems of natives have to be settled, the 
 German Colonies present no hard nuts to crack. In any 
 event it is the duty of the Mother Country to impress 
 upon the Dominions the wider views of British honour 
 and of a far-reaching world policy. It is not enough for 
 us to accept passively whatever demands they may 
 make upon us. To continue the war for one week 
 longer than would otherwise be necessary in order to 
 add the German Colonies to our own would be a crime 
 the wickedness of which will be seen increasingly 8 a 
 times goes on. But important as this is as a problem in 
 peace conditions, it will be still more important in the 
 development of a Socialist policy after the war ha§ 
 ceased to be more than a historical event.
 
 IX. 
 
 Summary. 
 
 Such is the law — the idea first, the pure idea, the understand- 
 ing of the laws of God, the theory : practice follows with slow 
 steps, cautious, attentive to the succession of events; sure to 
 seize, towards this eternal meridian, the indications of supreme 
 reason. The co-ordination of theory and practice produces in 
 humanity the realisation of order — the absolute truth. 
 
 Proudhon. 
 
 It is advisable to summarise the main contentions of 
 this book, so that they may be stated within a short 
 compass. Details and programmes ought to be 
 subordinated to principles and aims, because when the 
 latter are fixed their application is only a matter of time 
 and circumstance, whereas, when the latter are not 
 fixed, the former are too often ineffective and disruptive, 
 and bring results which do not fulfil intentions. 
 Further, we must not forget that a Socialist programme 
 carried out by those who are not Socialists may be a 
 most damaging victory to Socialism itself, and bring 
 discredit upon it and reaction into politics. 
 
 I have worked upon certain propositions, of which the 
 following are the chief : 
 
 1. The Socialist State must be the condition of 
 individual liberty and not merely an authority impos- 
 ing obedience. Hence the Socialist programme must 
 be so devised that its compulsions, its organisation, its 
 communal control shall be of a kind which liberates 
 the individual, protects him from industrial and 
 economic slavery, and makes possible for him an 
 entry into a world of intellectual and spiritual 
 freedom. 
 
 75
 
 76 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 2. The war has awakened the revolutionary spirit 
 so that the hesitating and tentative proposals of 
 social reform which a lethargic nation, even when 
 most radical, demanded before the war, is of no use 
 now. Policy must now be bold, thorough and revolu- 
 tionary ; and in the. reconstruction the conditions 
 from which so much industrial and political poverty 
 and strife arose must not be modified only, but 
 completely eliminated. In political matters the 
 watchword, therefore, must not be "as we were 
 before the war," but " as we ought to have been 
 before the war. ' ' 
 
 3. The political movement of Socialism ought to 
 retain its connection with the Trade Union move- 
 ment, but ought not to allow itself to be swallowed 
 up so that the Labour political movement is 
 dominated by Trade Union officials who, solely by 
 the virtue of their position in their Union, find them- 
 selves in places of political authority. The life, the 
 training, the equipment of the member of the House 
 of Commons and the political leader, are quite 
 distinct from those of the Trade Union official. They 
 are sometimes combined, but they are often not com- 
 bined. A political party must be a political party 
 and not something else; the choice of candidates 
 must be a choice of men of political ability, and not 
 of those with Trade Union and other funds at their 
 disposal. 
 
 4. The organisation of Trade Unions requires 
 drastic change so as to protect them from degenera- 
 ting by over centralisation into a bureaucracy, and 
 compel them to adopt not merely the forms but the 
 spirit and substance of democracy in their govern- 
 ment. Above all, the life of the workshop and of the 
 locality must invigorate Trade Union action, 
 influence central policy and curb central authority.
 
 SUMMAEY 77 
 
 5. A Trade Union organisation combining the 
 advantages of both Craft and Industrial Unionism 
 must be devised so as to retain vigour in action and 
 improve fighting efficiency. 
 
 As to the demands which go to make up a programme 
 after the war, none of the following interests can be 
 overlooked. 
 
 Finance. This will become pressing at. once. The 
 greater part of the National Debt should be wiped out, 
 not by repudiation which would fall unjustly upon 
 people, but by conscription of accumulated wealth. The 
 heavy annual budgets which will still have to be 
 imposed should contain no extra taxes on ordinary con- 
 sumption, and no method of levying a national income 
 by indirect taxes which are borne out of all proportion 
 by the poor. We must raise the claim that no one with 
 incomes less than living standards should pay any 
 taxation. It is monstrous that the State should bleed 
 people whose incomes are not sufficient to enable them 
 to repair properly the daily wear and tear of their 
 bodies. Taxation in future must be a taxation of 
 wealth, not of life. Income Tax and Death Duties 
 must be drastically revised; the State should claim a 
 share which ought always to have been given to it) of 
 the profits of monopolies, and should deal specially with 
 rents and all similar economic forms of income. In 
 addition, the process of nationalising industries should 
 be extended, the railways and mines nationalised, the 
 Post Office used for the transport of goods, for 
 insurance, for banking in ways not yet adopted ; this 
 should be done immediately for the purpose of revenue, 
 but essentially for the purpose of social reconstruction. 
 
 Trade. "We oppose Protection, the Paris Economic 
 Conference resolutions, and everything which is 
 designed to impoverish the nations, add to unnecessary 
 labour, and increase militarism by continuing economic
 
 78 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 wars. We believe in free exchange between nations. 
 But we shall support on their merits schemes of State 
 assistance in research, in collecting information, in 
 maintaining consular services, in establishing inter- 
 national organisation, and in similar ways which, with- 
 out creating vested interests leading to inefficiency and 
 exploitation, will enable trade to be more effective and 
 to gain a more ready access to markets. 
 
 Labour. Labour must not ask for mere restitution 
 of old conditions, but for vast improvement after the 
 war. Every low paid trade should have a bottom 
 standard wage given to it by law or administrative 
 order; the Trade Unions must be taken to be the 
 industrial representatives of the workers, and their 
 agreements with employers must be the standards 
 applied by the Government whenever it has to decide 
 what is fair or unfair in trade conditions. There must 
 be no more quibbling about district rates and Trade 
 Union rates. The Government must know only the 
 agreed rates and must be able to enforce an agreement, 
 if necessary. At the same time there must be no 
 forfeiture of the right to strike or lock out. I hope 
 they may never be used, but for some time yet they 
 must be in the background. 
 
 The control of workshops must be shared by 
 organised labour and a committee upon which labour 
 is adequately represented, and which is based upon 
 a system of shop stewards, should become a common 
 feature of management. 
 
 All schemes like profit-sharing which tie up labour 
 without giving it adequate control and which induce it 
 to remain satisfied with mere crumbs, must be dis- 
 couraged. Their influence in the past has not been to 
 labour's advantage, and now with a much wider out- 
 look in front, their inadequacy is only the greater. 
 Labour organisation must be directed to raise the mass,
 
 SUMMARY 79 
 
 and not only to benefit the trade — probably at other 
 trades', or at the consumers', expense. 
 
 Under these safeguards and with these inducements 
 both labour and capital must consent to a great increase 
 in productivity. 
 
 Social Legislation. Vast schemes of housing must 
 be put in hand without delay, the policy being not to 
 provide houses by State or other charity, but to force up 
 wages so that they may bear the necessary rents. The 
 State, however, should reduce the costs of building by 
 (a) grants to meet the extraordinary war charges; (b) 
 fixing the price of building material; (c) preventing 
 monopoly values being paid for the land, and settling 
 its purchase price by the value upon which it has been 
 rated. 
 
 Comprehensive schemes of land and village settle- 
 ment should also be taken in hand with a view to 
 decentralising industry after the manner of Garden 
 Cities, the provision of allotments, the settlement of the 
 unemployed, the maximum use of land for cultivation, 
 afforestation, co-operative agriculture, and a proper 
 system of transport to markets. To this end the policy 
 of the Corn Production Bill is a hindrance, not a help. 
 
 In this scheme of reconstruction no favour should be 
 shown to subsidies to landlords or farmers who are 
 inefficient. Such subsidies would only effect cultiva- 
 tion by increasing the amount of rent that is paid, and 
 would put farming as a permanent charge upon the 
 community. No good results can follow upon such a 
 scheme. If our agriculture has declined, our landlord 
 system and our methods of farming are to blame, and 
 to bolster these up owing to war panic is only to per- 
 petuate them both. Agriculture wants brains and 
 independence, not subsidies and servitude. 
 
 If we were compelled to assign to one cause all our 
 national shortcomings we should choose our bad 
 education. The reform of this should begin with the
 
 80 SOCIALISM AFTER THE WAR 
 
 training colleges. The teacher is the beginning and the 
 end of an educational system. We must have colleges 
 with an atmosphere of culture. The teachers in 
 elementary schools must be so well equipped that they 
 can teach higher as well as lower classes, and the 
 schools themselves must be so liberal in their culture as 
 to entitle them to be regarded as truly educational 
 establishments. The age of pupils must be raised ; the 
 teachers' salaries paid must be professional as regards 
 their standards. Secondary education must be ampli- 
 fied into a national system, and the Universities 
 remodelled lock, stock, and barrel on democratic lines. 
 Educational endowments must be systematised and 
 spent on education to which all classes have access. 
 
 Our task is vaster than any that has ever yet faced a 
 nation. And yet if at the end of this devastating 
 tragedy feeble futility, philanthropy and sham are to be 
 accepted by our people as their portion, if the leaders of 
 labour with the way open in front of them to citadels 
 they have been long assaulting, turn away blinded in 
 vision and craven in heart, and come to truces that are 
 surrenders, they will have betrayed their class and, by 
 that, the nation. 
 
 Revolution is not a bloody upturning ; it is the change 
 which is made when men long asleep wake up, when 
 society oppressed by the lethargy of its own com- 
 plexities suddenly finds itself free to move, when a new 
 tide of living energy rushing up into old channels 
 breaks them and overflows in a fertilising flood. The 
 civilised world is in such a state to-day. Let Socialism 
 boldly step out and take the opportunity which presents 
 itself. 
 
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