GIFT OF CAPT. AND MRS. 
 PAUL MCBRIDE PERIGORD 
 
 \\ B. H BLACKWELL Ltl . | 
 
 nnnVspllprs.
 
 LIBRARY
 
 XTbe IRew lEra Series 
 
 (VOLUME TEN) 
 
 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK
 
 First Published April 1921 
 
 Leonard Parsons Ltd.
 
 THE NEW 
 LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT WILLIAMS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LEONARD PARSONS 
 
 DEVONSHIRE STREET 
 
 i /I 'X i A-
 
 The Children of this and all other 
 Nations, including our own darling 
 boy, "Vanya," in the knowledge 
 that before they reach manhood and 
 womanhood the Fight for Socialism 
 will be definitely won.
 
 S PREFACE 
 
 The following has been written in part before I 
 went to Russia, and the remainder since my return. 
 It represents my considered views on policy and 
 purpose, whatever defects it may contain of a 
 literary character. 
 
 Few of us appreciate the fact that we are passing 
 
 through a definitel}^ revolutionary period. It is a 
 
 well-known historical truism that in all revolution - 
 
 fi ary periods the bulk of those who lived through 
 
 1^ these times considered the events happening round 
 
 ^ and about them were mere transient affairs. What 
 
 P. is called human progress consists of the partial or 
 
 ■p complete success of an active and intelligent 
 
 a. minority forcing their views and con\'ictions on 
 
 K an undiscerning and indiscriminating majority. 
 
 g 'Twas ever so. It will remain so. 
 
 k; I hope the book will arouse criticism. It will 
 
 assuredly receive condemnation. So much the 
 
 better. Anyone who goes through life without his 
 
 share of criticism, and even abuse, contributes 
 
 nothing of real value to that which we call human 
 
 progress. 
 
 I regret that space considerations prevented me 
 from going more fully into that which here and 
 there has merely been hinted at or dealt with very 
 briefly. However, there it is. and I leave it thus. 
 
 R. W.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Introductory 7 
 
 Chapter I. 
 The Older Outlook 30 
 
 Chapter II. 
 The Changing Outlook 59 
 
 Chapter III. 
 The Newer Outlook . . _ 104 
 
 Conclusion 154
 
 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 There is nothing brand-new under the sun, and 
 it would be idle to pretend there is a really new 
 outlook of Labour. There is, however, a con- 
 stantly changing outlook, a transitionary out- 
 look. It has been well and truly said that all 
 our thinking is influenced, if not actually caused, 
 by the material conditions which surround us. 
 There are, of course, many misled by the time- 
 worn and obsolete idea that men in general, and 
 great men in particular, are responsible for the 
 changes which occur in human development. 
 We shall be wise, however, in searching for the 
 causes of the changed Labour outlook not in per- 
 sonal factors so much as economic and material 
 considerations. Mankind will remain undeni- 
 ably the instrument through which material 
 forces will express themselves. Retired half-pay 
 ofiicers, who live in the back^voods of places like 
 Cheltenham or Exmouth, when they are not 
 rendering the lives of their Club attendants in 
 Piccadilly and Pall Mall intolerable, imagine, in 
 their abysmal ignorance of the main current of
 
 8 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 events, that Labour Unrest is the product of 
 wicked agitators or the thrice-cursed result of 
 free, elementary education, and they can do no 
 more than call for the repeal of the chief Educa- 
 tion Acts, or shout loudly over their Morning 
 Post for a " whiff of grapeshot " as the one and 
 only remedy for strikes and Labour upheavals. 
 
 They, poor products of their material condi- 
 tions, must be excused on the grounds of their 
 aloofness from all the things which chiefly 
 matter except their own inane lotus-eating lives. 
 
 The difiference between, say, a driver of a 
 modern motor- bus in the crowded London 
 thoroughfares and one of his predecessors, a 
 driver of an old horse-drawn vehicle, is greater 
 than the difference between a feudal baron and 
 a modern capitalist. Our typical motor-bus 
 driver is about the livest wire, both as a prole- 
 tarian and a trade unionist, that I know. He is 
 in many respects probably the most militant 
 worker of all the sections of Labour provided 
 for in the Transport Workers' Federation. Com- 
 pare him, however, with the driver of the old 
 lumbering horse-drawn vehicle This individual 
 could not be induced to join a trade union even 
 if he were offered free membership. He was 
 horsy and sporty. He called Edward the 
 Seventh " Teddy," knew all the winners back to
 
 INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 the "early umpties," and was more free from 
 any revolutionary sentiments than the mistress 
 of a growing ladies' seminary. The difference 
 between these two well-understood and typical 
 cases is the difference of the machine. The bus 
 driver who comes earlier in point of time has the 
 associations of the stable. He is of the groom, or 
 personal man-servant type, coming probably from 
 a rural area. There is an immediate association 
 between himself and his horses. He is as much 
 in their charge as they are in his. They knew 
 their way through the maze of traffic almost as 
 well as he did himself. Now look at our modern 
 bus driver : he is the living embodiment of 
 "Straker" in Bernard Shaw's Man and Super- 
 man. He has in his hands a machine — great, 
 heavy and apparently cumbrous thing though it 
 be, it responds to the veriest touch of the steering- 
 wheel. Instead of driving an animal with instinct 
 and vagaries like his own, he controls a wonderful 
 mechanism. He learns automatically the laws 
 of mechanical cause and effect. He returns with 
 his motor-bus to the garage which, unlike the 
 old-time stable with its straw and litter, grooms 
 and ostlers, is a factory for repair work, washing, 
 cleaning and overhauling in general. Highly 
 qualified engineers and their mates help to 
 produce a mass-psychology.
 
 JO THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 To-day, while competing with electric tram 
 and tube for the passenger traffic of Greater 
 London, he knows he is but one small cog in the 
 great machine of the Traffic Combine. It is not 
 by theory but by conditions of employment that 
 he is made an industrial unionist. 
 
 I have chosen the foregoing illustration, not 
 because it is any more applicable than others, 
 such as the gradual supersession of manual labour 
 and handicraft in engineering, textiles, boot- and 
 shoe-making, wood working, and a host of other 
 trades too numerous to mention, but because it 
 is one in which the changed outlook is radical, 
 immediate, and easily observable by all. 
 
 I have many times wondered to myself why it 
 is that my outlook on life is widely different from 
 that of my father. He was a docker, working at 
 a time before the general dock labour movement 
 was commenced in 1889. His wages were 25s. 
 per week, and he was glad to work on Sunday in 
 order to earn a few additional shillings. Accord- 
 ing to his circumscribed ideas, the system for 
 which he worked and under which he lived was 
 a permanent one, and his one idea in life was to 
 obtain just sufficient to maintain himself and 
 those who were dependent upon him. 
 
 Some ten years after he died I commenced 
 work at the self-same docks, and in consequence
 
 INTRODUCTORY 11 
 
 of the effective results achieved in the mean- 
 time, I was frequently enabled — working on the 
 piecework system and irregularly employed — 
 to earn as much in a day as my father did in a 
 week. While he was content with the Christian 
 Herald and comparable literature, I was busily 
 nosing into the works of Karl Marx and reading 
 the extensive literature published by the Ration- 
 alist Press Association, to say nothing of the 
 writings of Blatchford, Hyndman, Keir Hardie, 
 and hearing the speeches of Tillett, Mann and 
 other well-known Labour Leaders. In my own 
 work, that of a coal-trimmer, it was not so much 
 the development of the machine as the introduc- 
 tion of labour-savins contrivances which affected 
 profoundly my own mentality. As a youth, when 
 I commenced to do a man's work, the bulk of 
 the coal which was loaded in the port at which 
 I worked was exported in what we called the 
 " ordinary " — and frequently " double-decked " 
 — type of steamer, for which the average pay- 
 ment was about 3d. per ton, divided between 
 twelve men. When I left my work to assume 
 my present position some fifteen years later, two- 
 thirds of the coal was taken away in ships of 
 what are called the " self-trimming " type, for 
 which the average payment was l^d. per ton, 
 divided between six men. The labour-saving
 
 12 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 device, like the mechanical contrivance, is one in- 
 troduced deliberately by the captains of industry 
 in order to minimise labour charges. I and my 
 fellow- workers were therefore compelled to realise 
 that if this tendency to build and use self- 
 trimmers were allowed to continue unchecked, 
 those men who were disemployed as a result of 
 the use of the labour-saving device, or mechanical 
 contrivance, would be driven, in the stress of 
 competition for work, to offer themselves at 
 cheaper rates of pay to replace the men who 
 remained in the job. This, of course, would 
 tend to bring down wages to — and even below 
 — the bare level of subsistence. 
 
 The old outlook of Labour can be easily deter- 
 mined by watching a Labour Demonstration in 
 one of our big towns. When a big demonstra- 
 tion takes place in Hyde Park or Trafalgar 
 Square, the serried ranks of trade unionists will 
 be seen, each section j)roudly carrying its own 
 banner. The mottoes on the older ones excite 
 the disdain and even contempt of the younger 
 and more militant proletarian, and they serve 
 as indications of the changed outlook of trade 
 unionism. Such inscriptions as " A Fair Day's 
 Wage for a Fair Day's Work " excite laughter 
 from the modern student of Marx, who knows 
 that the wage system means the robbery of
 
 INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 the workers. The old motto " Defence not 
 Defiance " enrages the trade unionist, who be- 
 lieves that the best policy for the workers to 
 pursue is unrelenting attack upon the capitalist 
 system and all that system stands for. One 
 sees again a banner blazoned with a portrayal 
 of the visit of a delegation to the bedroom of 
 a disabled comrade, intending to indicate the 
 advantao-es of disablement and sick benefits and 
 kindred objects. The modern trade unionist 
 tends more and more to scorn such adventitious 
 aids to trade unionism. The union, he main- 
 tains, must be a fighting organisation first and 
 foremost, and a friendly society last — that is, 
 assuming that he is inclined to have anything 
 to do with friendly benefits at all. 
 
 The older craft unions, created round and 
 about the tools used by their members in their 
 particular trade, sheltered and protected the 
 craft in which the men found employment, and 
 they appeared to envisage the existing regime 
 as a stable one, susceptible only to small accre- 
 tions of change. These older craft unions were 
 conservative to the last degree, subscribing in a 
 vague and incoherent manner to the now ex- 
 ploded theory of the older political economists, 
 that there was a fixed wages fund beyond which 
 they were unable to draw. In many cases they
 
 14 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 treated the labourers in their own industry and 
 in other industries with unfeigned contempt, 
 imagining — stupidly enough — that the more 
 these labourers obtained, the less it would leave 
 for them to share with their beneficent em- 
 ployers who provided them with work. The 
 craft conception of industry, however, has been 
 broken down by the sheer insistence of economic 
 and material development, although there is still 
 a relic of trade and craft superiority. 
 
 One of the foremost factors in altering the 
 outlook of organised labour is the arrival and 
 growth of the large-scale industry. The largest 
 organisation of men engaged in one clearly de- 
 fined industry is, of course, the Miners' Federa- 
 tion of Great Britain. In this organisation old- 
 time ideas have been modified by the changes 
 in the mining calling. The earlier organisations 
 were formed round and about the 23ithead districts 
 in which the men originally found employment. 
 Organisation at that period was confined to the 
 district or districts in which the men resided. 
 Frequently, also, the men at the coal-face ignored 
 other sections, like the surfacemen and timber- 
 men, inseparably connected though they were 
 with the calling. In every effort they made dur- 
 ing the earlier stages to improve their economic 
 status, by adding to their wages, by shortening
 
 INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 hours or improving the general working con- 
 ditions, they were invariably met with the reply 
 by the employers that they could not afiord 
 any improvement in conditions, because of the 
 competition to which they were subject from 
 other employers in other districts. The em- 
 ployers would argue that they were in competition 
 for trade with other employers, and were not 
 loath to suggest that wages and conditions in 
 their own particular collieries were superior to 
 those of their competitors. The workers were 
 therefore compelled to ask themselves why, if it 
 was undesirable to allow themselves to compete 
 upon the principle of the jungle instinct for 
 work in their own district, they should be the 
 instruments of competition between one district 
 and another. And, as a result of the harsh 
 experience of their daily lives and the exploita- 
 tion by their immediate employers, they extended 
 local organisation to district organisation, and 
 district organisation to national organisation. 
 
 The old-time point of view and outlook was 
 almost invariably determined — as is, in fact, the 
 newer outlook — by economic facts and circum- 
 stances. Trade unionism in its earlier forms was 
 limited by the fact that there was a much more 
 personal and human relationship between master 
 and man, or employer and workman, than there
 
 ]6 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 is to-day. The employers, as a rule, were very 
 small capitalists, as we understand tlie word 
 capitalist to-day. A man could easily acquire 
 a small amount of property or capital, and tlie 
 active workman of the day become the employer 
 of the morrow. He lived on or about the job he 
 owned and controlled, and he was supervisory 
 director as well as a capitalist in embryo. 
 
 The growing power of the workmen's organisa- 
 tions compelled the employers to institute and 
 develop comparable organisation in order to resist 
 the growingly insistent demands for higher wages 
 and improved conditions of life. There used to 
 be a saying in Lancashire that there were only 
 three generations from " clogs to clogs," meaning^ 
 of course, that the textile employer of the period 
 had worn clogs as an operative, and that his 
 grandson would be back again in the factory in 
 consequence of the operation of economic laws 
 and the want of stability in industry in general. 
 This theory of " clogs to clogs," although occasion- 
 ally translated into practice nowadays, is by no 
 means general in its application. It must be 
 generally admitted that in the earlier stages of 
 industrial development there was a great element 
 of competition between employer and employer 
 for a share of national and international trade, 
 but the formation and growth of employers'
 
 INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 associations tends to eliminate the elements of 
 competition from their respective businesses and 
 industries. In order to reduce their labour costs, 
 which were a first charge upon production, the 
 ingenuity of the human mind was taxed to find 
 mechanical means and cunningly-conceived con- 
 trivances and devices to reduce the amount of 
 human labour required. The illusive theory of 
 the old-time economists was that every cheapen- 
 ing in the cost of production would redound to 
 the advantage of the consumer and the general 
 public, and thereby to the men who were dis- 
 placed in the particular industry, employment 
 being eventually found for them by an increase 
 in the demand for the commodities produced. 
 This, however, is not borne out by the facts of 
 latter-day industry. 
 
 It might be said in passing, that the volume of 
 employment is now greater than at any other 
 period of human history. What we must bear 
 in mind is that the proportion of those engaged 
 in productive and useful employment tends to 
 become gradually less. Even during the war, 
 when man-power was presumed to be taxed to 
 the utmost in order to maintain six or seven 
 millions of men in the fighting services and 
 another two millions or more behind, preparing 
 munitions and materials of war, we still saw well- 
 
 B
 
 18 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 to-do families having at tlieir disposal retinues of 
 men-servants in order to gratify tlieir manifold 
 whims and caprices. I am reminded that for 
 months hundreds of building trades operatives 
 have been cleansing the fagades of the big hotels 
 in Northumberland Avenue in order to prepare 
 for the reception of rich visitors from America, 
 the Colonies and Europe, who were prevented 
 from globe-trotting and sight-seeing during the 
 war. This is being done at a time when millions 
 of those who fought and suffered during the war 
 cannot find adequate housing accommodation. 
 One can observe arriving in London from the 
 outer districts during the hours between 8 a.m. 
 to 10 A.M. hundreds of thousands of fit and active 
 men employed in banks, counting-houses, clearing 
 houses, exchanges, insurance offices and the rest, 
 who perform no socially useful labour, but occupy 
 their time in registering, checking and docketing 
 the results of the labour of the actively useful 
 class in the great industrial districts. That is to 
 say, the bulk of the work at which they are em- 
 ployed could be dispensed with under a properly 
 arranged condition of affairs. 
 
 For generations prior to the war Socialists and 
 Labour men, who had seen through the hollow 
 sham of what they called the capitalist system, 
 urged the workers to organise themselves econo-
 
 INTRODUCTORY 19 
 
 mically in the Co-operative Movement,industrially 
 in the Trade Union Movement, and politically 
 in the Socialist Movement, for the purpose of 
 overthrowing the wasteful and unprofitableindivi- 
 dualistic regime, and establishing a system of 
 society upon a co-operative basis. 
 
 When one refers again and again to men's 
 minds being influenced chiefly by material con- 
 siderations, it must not be forgotten that many, 
 if not most, of the pioneers acted from motives 
 based upon the highest ethical conceptions. In 
 fact, progress is almost entirely due to the 
 spirited advocacy by the few of great causes, 
 making for the development of human relation- 
 ships and institutions. It was not possible, how- 
 ever, that they in their respective periods should 
 bring about any tangible results by education, 
 agitation and advocacy, without the compelling 
 economic and industrial preparedness. It was no 
 more possible for Robert Owen to introduce the 
 Co-operative Commonwealth by means of his 
 Grand Consolidated Union of Labour Movement 
 in the early part of the last century than it would 
 be for Robert Smillie to compel the nationalisa- 
 tion of mines unless and until there appeared the 
 mental and moral preparedness of the people 
 and the economic preparedness of Society as a 
 whole. Even its most bitter critics will admit
 
 20 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 that trade union organisation has brought about 
 important and beneficial results to its various 
 adherents, but there is no denying the fact that 
 it falls short of what many hoped for, worked 
 for, and expected. 
 
 The organisation of the employing class has 
 developed with more celerity and has taken a 
 wider outlook than the organisation of the work- 
 people. Combines, trusts, syndicates, rings and 
 cartels have been formed for national and inter- 
 national exploitation. Margarine firms and soap 
 firms, with their interdependent glycerine, chemi- 
 cal and other trades, own and control alkaline 
 deposits in this and other countries. They domi- 
 nate the cotton-seed and soya-bean plantations — 
 they control, in short, the raw material of their 
 industry at its source, in order to avoid being 
 exploited by other rings of capitalists and finan- 
 ciers. A similar state of afi"airs obtains with iron 
 masters who manufacture steel, own blast furnaces, 
 run coal-mines and coke ovens, make aniline dyes 
 and fertilisers, and carry on a multitude of trades, 
 thus proving the ramifications of modern indus- 
 trial enterprise and its unquenchable thirst to 
 dominate the world's markets. 
 
 Intelligent workers, long before the outbreak of 
 the war, knew that war and the possibilities of 
 war threatened us as a result of international
 
 INTRODUCTORY 21 
 
 capital and finance. Money invested in the 
 Deutsclie Bank by the German capitalists sought 
 to obtain favourable terms for investment in the 
 Berlin-Bagdad Railway through the Balkan corri- 
 dor to the Persian Gulf. The schemes thus 
 advanced, together with the schemes of the 
 Austrian capitalists, cut across the policy of the 
 Russian Government supported by the French 
 capitalists, who wanted to control the Balkan 
 Peninsula as their field for investment and exploi- 
 tation. British ship-owning capitalists observed 
 with feelings of envy the development of Ger- 
 many's overseas trade. The war was not the 
 result of the clash in 2; of rival militarisms and 
 navalisms, but rival capitalisms struggling and 
 striving for the domination of the undeveloped 
 and under-developed parts of the earth. 
 
 The workman who dimly and vaguely under- 
 stood that a system which took from him two- 
 thirds of the wealth which his labour produces 
 in the form of rent, interest and profit, provided 
 for a sated, owning and controlling class, who 
 could not themselves consume this surplus value, 
 and were always groping and questing for pro- 
 fitable and remunerative outlets for it, began 
 also to realise that unless the system was 
 changed, he could make no progress in his class 
 standard.
 
 22 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 A Ruskin or a Morris might have hoped that 
 capitalism would take a beneficial turn and 
 attempt to reorganise industry and to beautify 
 our industrial districts with the aid of the teem- 
 ing w^ealth which modern industry placed at its 
 disposal, but the very nature of world finance 
 and w^orld capital makes it inevitable that all 
 those within its grip shall be creatures rather 
 than creators of their own system. A Quaker 
 family might seek to improve conditions in its 
 cocoa factories while preaching international 
 Peace, and at the same time put its financial 
 reserves at the disposal of a banking corporation 
 — which in its turn sent missionaries with the 
 Bible and liberal supplies of gin and subsidised 
 apostles of " Empire," like Cecil Rhodes, Doctor 
 Jameson, and that kind of "pioneer" — and thus 
 be as responsible for bringing about a World War 
 as any set of international exploiters without any 
 qualms or misgivings. 
 
 All of these things were known to tens of 
 thousands before the war, but there had not 
 been the clear demonstration of commercialism 
 and militarism which has been made evident 
 since August 1914. Trade unionism on a craft 
 basis was doomed before the outbreak of war, and 
 was giving way to various and manifold efi'orts 
 to institute some form of industrial unionism.
 
 INTRODUCTORY 23 
 
 It will be remembered that the National Union 
 of Eailwaymen was formed by the amalgamation 
 of three Unions involved in the great railway 
 strike of 1911. The total membership of the 
 three Unions which formed the nucleus of the 
 then existing N.U.R. was less than 150,000, but 
 in consequence of the changed policy forced upon 
 them by economic and material considerations, 
 the membership has been increased to something 
 like the round half-million. The Transport 
 Workers' Federation includes an equal number 
 in the membership of its thirty-six affiliated 
 Unions. Speaking of the old Austro-Hungarian 
 Empire, someone once said that so economically 
 interdependent were the peoples that formed 
 that Empire, that if there were no Austro-Hun- 
 garian Empire, one would have to be formed, in 
 order to maintain the peace of Eastern Europe. 
 Something similar can be truthfully said about 
 the Transport Workers' Federation. So much 
 depends upon solidarity of men employed in 
 coastal and overseas transport, in dock, harbour 
 and riverside labour, in commercial goods and 
 passenger road transport, and on and about the 
 canals of the country, that had no actual Associa- 
 tion existed, one would have had to be formed, 
 because of the pressing needs of transport workers 
 for more effective organisation, co-ordination and
 
 24 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 mutual support enjoined upon them by present- 
 day capitalist requirements. 
 
 The Triple Alliance of Miners, Railwaymen 
 and Transport Workers was formed, not because 
 of the militancy or far-sightedness of any number 
 of professional agitators or Labour Leaders, but 
 because of the constraint imposed upon the con- 
 stituent bodies composing the Alliance in conse- 
 quence of their chequered experiences in 1911 
 and 1912, The Transport Workers' Federation 
 and its constituent Unions used to grope about 
 in a vicious circle, attempting to improve condi- 
 tions, especially of seamen and dock and water- 
 side workers, going around from port to port 
 and constantly being reproved by the employers 
 for attempting to impose conditions at, say, 
 Liverpool, which were not imposed in Glasgow 
 and London. At other times it was accused of 
 seeking to impose conditions on Glasgow which 
 were not imposed on Hull and Bristol. In the 
 event of a dispute taking place at one port, the 
 power of the men's organisation was broken by 
 reason of the diversion of ships and cargoes to 
 other ports, and the use of one set of trade 
 unionists to destroy the aims and aspirations of 
 another. So glaring were the defects of this 
 system, and so powerful was the Shipping Federa- 
 tion in resisting the demands of the seafaring
 
 INTRODUCTORY 25 
 
 workers, as well as the dock workers, that the 
 Transport Workers' Federation determined to 
 extend local and district grouping to some form 
 of national organisation, thereby creating some 
 semblance of solidarity. But even with national 
 solidarity it was found that the labour of organised 
 trade unionists in the railway service was used 
 to counteract the effects of a transport strike, 
 just as by diversion of traflQc, transport labour 
 could be used to defeat a railway strike. In the 
 year 1912, when the Miners' Federation made 
 such heroic efforts to establish the principle of 
 the minimum wage, their strike of eight weeks 
 was not so successful as the promoters hoped, 
 because of the fact that railwaymen and transport 
 workers conveyed the reserves of coal which had 
 been accumulated by the employing class, and 
 allowed the capitalist to eke out the coal reserves 
 sufficiently long to starve the mine-workers into 
 a state of partial submission. Before the war, 
 every strike, great or small, was destroyed, not 
 by the power and resourcefulness of the employers' 
 organisations, but by the defective organisation 
 and the lack of broad conceptions of policy among 
 trade unionists themselves. 
 
 The systematic attempt to extend trade union 
 organisation has certainly not been confined to 
 the organisations mentioned above. The Ship-
 
 26 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 building and Engineering Trades' Federation is 
 an attempt to organise the multifarious grades 
 and sections organised in a large number of 
 separate Unions involved in those trades. They, 
 too, realise that the employers will refrain from 
 no efforts, costly as they may be, to resist the well- 
 conceived and moderate demands of their work- 
 people. Although it is not generally accepted 
 by the overwhelming mass, the active minority 
 who influence the inert mass as yeast leavens 
 bread, boldly claim to-day, as they have to a 
 lesser degree for many years since, that an injury 
 to one trade union is an injury to the whole 
 trade union movement, and that a calculated 
 injury to one trade unionist is an injury to the 
 trade union of which he is a member. 
 
 In this Introductory Chapter one has been com- 
 pelled to give here but a fragmentary outline of 
 what for its full elucidation would require a huge 
 volume with quotations, extracts and statistics 
 fully to elucidate the facts. The sort of synopsis 
 which has been set out may be likened to the 
 old cinema films in the early development of the 
 screen drama. The outline will be here and 
 there blurred and indistinct ; possibly pieced 
 together again and again, but trying to show as 
 graphically as opportunity will permit, how and 
 to what extent the labour outlook and the point
 
 INTRODUCTORY 27 
 
 of view of organised labour have been changed 
 under the duress of economic and industrial 
 development. Those of us who have been thrown 
 into positions of greater or lesser responsibility 
 or prominence, laugh to ourselves when w^e are 
 described as "extremists" and "paid agitators." 
 We realise full well that we are merely the 
 voices by which the inarticulate mass are able 
 more or less adequately to express themselves. 
 I am reminded that responsibility makes for 
 hesitancy and moderation when I recall tw^o 
 colleagues with whom I was personally associated 
 during the early years of my connection with the 
 Transport Workers' Federation: Mr J. Keir Hardie 
 and Mr Ben Tillett. Tillett, being the Secretary 
 of the Dockers' Union, was, if I may say so, 
 cautious to the last degree in regard to his trade 
 union work. He rarely advocated strikes, being 
 — as is well known — a prominent advocate of 
 compulsory arbitration. Knowing as he did the 
 suffering entailed upon those w^ho took part in 
 a long-drawn-out dispute, -and mindful of the 
 responsibility he held, he countenanced a stoppage 
 of work only with extreme reluctance and as a 
 last resort. Once a strike w^as declared he was, 
 as might be expected, a resolute protagonist for 
 his own side. In politics, however, Tillett was 
 an uncompromising revolutionary Socialist, and
 
 28 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 I remember that at the Labour Party Conference 
 held at Portsmouth, Tillett circulated a pamphlet 
 entitled " Is the Labour Party a Failure ? " im- 
 peaching the members of the Labour Party for 
 their cowardliness in failing to champion more 
 vehemently the cause of the workers on the floor 
 of the House of Commons. He fought many 
 Elections, and showed that, whatever responsi- 
 bility weighed him down in his capacity as an 
 industrial organiser, he refused to be weighed 
 down by any responsibility as a Socialist advocate 
 and as an avowed revolutionar}'- in all his earlier 
 political work and effort. 
 
 Keir Hardie, on the other hand, had political 
 responsibility. He was largely if not mainly re- 
 sponsible for the steps which ultimately brought 
 into being the old Labour Eepresentation Com- 
 mittee, now the Labour Party. Hardie could 
 always find reasons to justify hesitancy and 
 alleged recreancy in the Labour Party, but, 
 having no industrial responsibility whatsoever 
 since his dissociation from the Scottish Miners' 
 Association, Hardie could always be found loudly 
 championing the cause of a general strike against 
 war and any effective strike action which would 
 improve workshop and factory conditions. I 
 have no hesitation in saying, as one who has 
 both political and industrial responsibility, that
 
 INTRODUCTORY 29 
 
 there is need for more militancy both on the 
 political and industrial field. Compared with 
 the active and rebellious members of our rank 
 and file, Tom Mann, Smillie, myself and others 
 may be looked upon as rather moderate, cautious 
 individuals, cautious, however, in consequence 
 of general conditions over which we have little 
 or no control. 
 
 Having briefly sketched the causes of the 
 changed outlook in the Labour Movement, I 
 must gradually approach the new outlook, and 
 indicate as well as I can what that changed out- 
 look suggests, and submit the broad lines of 
 policy which will probably be followed not only 
 in Great Britain but in all parts of the world in 
 consequence of the changes made inevitable by 
 industrial and economic development, and accele- 
 rated by war and post-war conditions.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 The Older Outlook. 
 
 Within the compass of a book of this character 
 there will be no room for anything approaching 
 a ponderous historical survey of the rise and 
 growth of the Labour Movement. Nor has the 
 writer any intention of wearying the eye and 
 irritating the mind of the reader by pedantic 
 foot-notes : where quotations are used, they will 
 follow from the text. Suffice it to say that 
 students who desire to obtain detailed and pre- 
 cise knowledge of the changes in working-class 
 outlook have a fairly comprehensive and increas- 
 ing literature already at their disposal. 
 
 The outlook of the militant section of the 
 working class before the war was an embittered 
 outlook, which, in particular, resented the manner 
 of distribution of the national wealth. One did 
 not require to burrow deeply into learned and 
 abstract economic treatises to discover that 
 those who worked the hardest got the least, 
 while those who rendered no socially useful 
 services whatsoever received most ; such was 
 
 80
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 31 
 
 painfully evident to all those who had eyes to 
 see. While Free Traders and Tariff Reformers 
 were wrangling over fiscal policies, showing how 
 the national income was derived, militant Labour 
 said in effect : '"A plague on both your houses,' 
 we are cheated of the wealth produced by our 
 collective labour all the time ! " 
 
 History proclaimed that practically all pro- 
 perty consisted of the accumulated theft, by the 
 existing owners and their precursors, from the 
 toiling masses who had built up Britain's com- 
 mercial prosperity. " Wealth is the reward of 
 abstinence," said the prating apologists of the 
 capitalist system, content to accept the crumbs 
 which fell from their paymasters' tables. " Very 
 well," replied Socialist proletarians; " we and ours 
 have been abstemious to the point of poverty 
 and destitution ; we are sprung from the loins 
 of those who have rendered the desolate and 
 waste places of our own country habitable and 
 fertile ; we, and those who have preceded us, 
 have built with our blood, bones and tissue the 
 foundation and superstructure of present-day 
 industrialism ; our women-folk and children 
 have toiled in the mines in order to create the 
 prosperity of coal-owners and iron and steel 
 masters ; infants of eight years of age have been 
 chained to the textile looms for fifteen hours a
 
 32 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 day, their little eyes kept open by the whip of 
 the overlooker in the fetid atmosphere of the 
 weaving shed, in order that Lancashire's trade 
 shall follow Britain's Flag. Look where you may, 
 on every side you may find convincing evidence 
 that it is the common people who have been 
 industrious and thrifty, while those for whom it 
 is claimed that their present possessions are the 
 reward of abstinence have enjoyed abounding 
 luxury, even to the point of satiety." 
 
 For generations before the war the workers were 
 confronted with the contradiction of abounding 
 material prosperity, shown by exports, imports, 
 revenue from Income Tax, and all the outward 
 evidences of such well-being — at a time when 
 there were recurring industrial crises, widespread 
 unemployment, poverty and destitution among 
 large sections of the mass of the working people. 
 Wealth production and distribution had become 
 a social process, allowing accumulations of wealth 
 to remain in the hands of the propertied classes. 
 Idealists had hoped for centuries that once man- 
 kind had solved the problem of production, equity 
 in distribution would follow as a natural conse- 
 quence. The worker, being taught in the harsh 
 school of practical experience, was compelled to 
 realise that, while the labour of a single unit, 
 applied to the machinery of production and
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 33 
 
 assisted by the technique and science of modern 
 industry, could produce more in a day than his 
 grandfather could in a week, his own position 
 was little, if any, better than that of his forbear 
 of two generations ago. During the heyday of 
 the Industrial Revolution, w^hen Britain was 
 making herself the w^orkshop of the world, it was 
 no unicjue spectacle to see the earlier capitalists 
 making cent per cent on their investments. The 
 workman, pressing into the towns from the 
 countryside, saAv his capacity for wealth-produc- 
 tion being so rapidly enhanced, that he sought 
 for ways and means of protecting himself against 
 the worst forms of competition between man and 
 man for a j ob. 
 
 Bereft of anything approaching human decency, 
 w^orking fourteen or more hours per day to the 
 point of exhaustion, suffering the unspeakable 
 horrors of workshop and factory conditions, living 
 upon a standard of life which barely provided 
 for his elementary human needs, he sought to 
 substitute the individual contract between him- 
 self and his employer by collective bargaining 
 through some form of trade union combination. 
 The Liberal politicians of the period, having 
 broken the power of the aristocracy, and full of 
 their new-born economic power, resisted every 
 attempt upon the part of the worker to secure 
 
 c
 
 34 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 some tangible improvement in his economic 
 status. Factory legislation was resisted by the 
 Manchester School of Gradgrind Economists as 
 an unwarrantable limitation of the right of the 
 employer to do what he pleased with his own 
 property. Trade unionism in its initial stages 
 was unrelentingly opposed, and the pioneers of 
 the Trade Union Movement, to whom so much 
 credit is due for their zeal and self-sacrifice, were, 
 upon discovery, victimised and denied the means 
 of obtaining their livelihood, persecuted and pro- 
 secuted by law, and subjected, in cases too 
 numerous to mention, to deportation from the 
 land of their birth like common felons. It re- 
 mained, however, for far-sighted and apparently 
 public-spirited philanthropists to oppose legally 
 the unrestricted individualism of the early half 
 of the Nineteenth Century. This unrestricted 
 individualism, if allowed to proceed with its 
 possibility of spreading disease and causing the 
 devitalisation of the human stock from which 
 capitalism derived its cent per cent profit, would 
 destroy not only the morality but the physique 
 of those who supplied the privileged classes with 
 their wherewithal — and more — upon which to 
 live. Efibrts towards trade unionism, moreover, 
 and the growing solidarity of the work-people in 
 their respective industries and occupations, were
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 35 
 
 exercising such a growing pressure upon the 
 public mind that some legislative provisions had 
 to be made for its logical development. The 
 attitude of mind of the employing class was 
 determined from time to time by material and 
 economic considerations, as, in fact, was that of 
 the worker. So moderate were the demands of 
 the trade unionists that the employers withdrew 
 eventually much of their opposition. 
 
 We see that Cobden, himself, the arch-apostle 
 of utilitarian economics, was an advocate of 
 Peace, Eetrenchment and Reform, understanding 
 that foreign wars interrupted the trading oppor- 
 tunities of Lancashire, and its sale of cotton in 
 the world market. While preaching peace, he 
 continued to advocate a big navy, in order to 
 protect the mercantile marine, and thus secure 
 that continuity of trade and commerce upon 
 which his own and his confreres' interests de- 
 pended. The growth of capitalist industry went 
 forward at a tremendous pace, and, as has already 
 been shown in the Introductory Chapter, the 
 workman was constrained to look for some form 
 of mutual protection in his trades' combinations. 
 He understood, more by intuition or instinct 
 than by reason, that he was poor because his 
 employer was rich ; and his employer was rich 
 because he was poor. It was as Tolstoy has
 
 36 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 said : " The rich will do anything for the poor 
 except get off their backs." It must not be 
 imagined for a moment that the working-class of 
 that time had any ambition to thrust the rich 
 from the backs of the poor — they merely wished 
 to lighten the intolerable load with which they 
 were burdened. Statisticians have computed 
 that for every £1 worth of wealth produced by 
 human labour, 5s. went into the pockets of the 
 productive classes in the form of wages, while 
 15s. found its way into the pockets of the re- 
 cipients of rent, interest and profit. 
 
 The earlier struggles of those who did the 
 pioneer work in the Trade Union Movement 
 should be an encouragement to those of us who 
 in these days enjoy opportunities few, if any, of 
 them possessed. They, certainly, were deemed 
 to be extremists, and the propertied classes feared 
 blindly for their own interests if trade union 
 combination were allowed to continue unchecked 
 and unchallenged. The fact remains, that in 
 every period and in every country the privileged 
 and propertied classes, while prating of patriotism 
 and of progress, have not only not assisted in the 
 development of progressive institutions, but have 
 bitterly and unrelentingly opposed their growth. 
 Small wonder was it that the majority of the 
 workers remained in a condition of almost abject
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 37 
 
 despair. The lethargy of the people was to be 
 deplored even more than the resistance of the 
 master-class ; but slowly and inexorably there 
 came the pressure of not only nation-wide but 
 world-wide capitalist development. So generous 
 were the workers to their employers in allowing 
 them three-fourths of the total wealth which 
 their labour produced, that try as the exploiters 
 might, sate themselves with whatever luxury 
 they would, be their lives never so splendid and 
 affluential, they could not possibly absorb this 
 abounding wealth upon their own desires. Now 
 is offered an outlet, even more tempting and 
 remunerative, by foreign investments in the un- 
 developed and partially developed parts of the 
 world. 
 
 It is not as though an outlet could not be found 
 in the Black Country, in Lancashire, in Lanark- 
 shire, Ayrshire, Glamorgan or in Monmouthshire, 
 for this surplus value, vouchsafed to them by the 
 workers' apathy and indifference, but money in- 
 vested in Egypt, India, South America and the 
 Colonies provided more satisfactory returns than 
 investments in house property and the demolition 
 of slums and insanitary hovels throughout Great 
 Britain as a prelude to adequate house construc- 
 tion. With the struggle for conquest of the 
 world's markets we get our frequently recurring 
 
 14 4340
 
 38 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 industrial crises, and their consequent unemploy- 
 ment and under-employment on a tremendous 
 scale. The machine influence, which should have 
 brightened the lives of the workers and lightened 
 their load, was itself a cause of disaster and dis- 
 may to the unorganised and partially organised 
 masses of urban labourers. 
 
 A detached spirit from another world, making 
 an impartial investigation into economic affairs 
 on this planet, would have been impressed by the 
 apparent contradiction in things. It would be 
 thought that with our mercantile marine carrying 
 millions of tons per year, with the ocean-going 
 steamer, luxuriously appointed, superseding the 
 old wind-propelled sailing vessel, with the great 
 industry and commerce, producing wealth beyond 
 the dreams of avarice, with the construction of 
 palatial buildings in our modern cities — hotels, 
 banks, counting-houses, insurance offices, great 
 distributive stores — with the streets splendidly 
 lighted and substantially paved, with the erection 
 of universities, libraries, museums, art galleries, 
 theatres and opera-houses, the era of material 
 poverty would be at an end. But the spirit from 
 another world would have been perplexed beyond 
 words upon realisation of the harsh and unpala- 
 table truth that with the advance in material 
 prosperity, we were confronted with poverty
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 39 
 
 and destitution relatively without parallel in the 
 history of the world. With the palatial resi- 
 dences, we have slums and hovels ; with the mag- 
 nificent hotels, we have the stand-up gin palaces 
 and whisky saloons ; with the library, university 
 and museum, we have the gaol, work-house, 
 doss-house and penitentiary; with the luxuriously 
 appointed motor-car, with its splendidly attired 
 chauffeur, and the well-projDortioned police officer, 
 directing the traffic, we have procurers and 
 prostitutes, and young children and grown-up 
 human derelicts eagerly earning a few pence by the 
 sale of matches and newspapers on our modern 
 thoroughfares. Whilst being a nation that could 
 engage upon an imperialist war and spend 
 £250,000,000 in order to serve the economic 
 interests of the gold bugs of the Eand, we find 
 ourselves unable as a State to guarantee that 
 every able-bodied man and woman shall be pro- 
 vided with either work or maintenance. 
 
 This, it can therefore be asserted, was the school 
 in which militant labour mentality was being- 
 formed long before the outbreak of the World 
 War. 
 
 The fact remains, and has not been shaken 
 by the experiences of the World War ; the gap 
 between the rich and the poor grows continu- 
 ally wider.
 
 40 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 The problem of wealth production has been 
 more than solved, Kropotkin and others having 
 shown during the latter portion of the last cen- 
 tury that if the means of production then in 
 operation were only eflfectively and rationally 
 organised, there could be assured for every family 
 of five a standard of life procurable by £1 per 
 day, at the then purchasing value of money ; and 
 to do this it would be essential to employ only 
 the healthy adults between the ages of eighteen 
 and fifty. Demagogues there were in consider- 
 able numbers, who ofi"ered various remedies for 
 the manifest ills under which the major portion 
 of the community was labouring. The present 
 Prime Minister was all too fond of bidding for 
 popular support by vote-catching phrases, such 
 as that of " robbing the hen-roosts " of the land- 
 owning fraternity. With the circumscribed out- 
 look of the little country attorney, he and his 
 like were unable or unwilling to realise the com- 
 plications of the modern commercial system, 
 based upon individual greed and personal cupid- 
 ity. Socialists, realising the facts and implica- 
 tions of modern industry, were far too wise to 
 advocate robbing the hen-roosts, or any other form 
 of robbery. They were not thieves and burglars 
 practising or advocating theft, but constituted 
 themselves into a judiciary, advocating restitu-
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 41 
 
 tion to those who had suffered under an age- 
 long system of spoliation and robbery. Socialists 
 desired, not to rob the rich to give to the poor — 
 as exemplars of Robin Hood — but, on the other 
 hand, proclaimed steadfastly in favour of a system 
 which would prevent the rich from robbing the 
 poor. 
 
 Mallock, and his kind, hearing the rumblings 
 of industrial revolt and insurrection, defended 
 the system of capitalism by saying that rent, 
 interest and profit were the outcome of superior 
 brains and the result of the possession of directive 
 ability. A brief glance at the facts will show that 
 all this is mere claptrap : the history of the 
 inventors of the last century is one long story of 
 their exploitation by the capitalists. Inventions 
 requiring diligent thought and study, necessitat- 
 ing outlay on materials, involved the inventor in 
 serious financial loss ; and in nearly every case 
 the results of the benefits accruing from the 
 invention went to the great employer, who could 
 afford to buy up the brains of the inventor, 
 rather than to the inventor himself. It is w^ell 
 known that great commercial establishments, 
 both in Europe and America, make it a condition 
 of employment that any of their workmen design- 
 ing an improvement to a machine, or introducing 
 some advantageous change in a process, shall give
 
 42 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 an undertaking, and sign such undertaking with 
 his employer, to the effect that he shall forgo 
 the right to any of the results of his inventive 
 ingenuity. Brains are, therefore, bought up as 
 easily by the great commercialists and industri- 
 alists as labour of hand and muscle is bought at 
 the bare cost of subsistence of the labourer. 
 
 On the other hand, those who have derived 
 vast incomes from land and capital have, in the 
 main, proved themselves rather dull and unin- 
 telligent, and have relied much more upon the 
 capacity for organisation on the part of their 
 captains and lieutenants of industry, and their 
 stewards of land, than from any mother-wit or 
 capacity of their own. Politicians and statesmen 
 who have prided themselves upon their capacity 
 to govern have only to be met in order to expose 
 their inefficiency as governors and administrators, 
 their outstanding ability being that of vote- 
 catching dexterity, and the willingness to serve 
 and subserve their capitalist and landlord pay- 
 masters. 
 
 Ferdinand Lassalle once stated that modern 
 Society consists of 96 per cent, of proletarians 
 and 4 per cent, of capitalists. The facts have 
 been somewhat altered since the period in which 
 he wrote, because the number of proletarians has 
 proportionately rapidly dwindled, and between
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 43 
 
 the 4 per cent, of the capitalists and the 60 or 
 70 per cent, of proletarians there now stands 
 as an intermediary buffer class the flunkey and 
 apologist tribe, who live by the grace of the 
 lords of land and industrial capital. 
 
 There is no gainsaying the fact that while the 
 evils and anomalies of the private ownership of 
 land and capital were visible to every discerning 
 eye and mind, the broad mass of the people 
 appeared to accept as an unchangeable system 
 that which had its birth in this country at the 
 commencementof the Nineteenth Century. Rest- 
 less and energetic proletarians sought for various 
 ways and means of modifying if not superseding 
 the system which, to them, was almost intolerable. 
 The Co-operative Movement of the Rochdale 
 pioneers and others was based upon opposition 
 to the sweating, adulteration and double-dealing 
 inseparable from the capitalist system, and it 
 was held earnestly and confidently that if the 
 workers w^ere to divert the spending powder of 
 the wages they obtained to co-operative trading 
 and co-operative production, this would, of itself, 
 show us the road to the millennium. But after 
 more than half a century of fairly well- organised 
 and well-directed co-operative effort, as the tail 
 of the Co-operative Movement grows to greater 
 and greater dimensions, it fails almost completely
 
 44 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 to wag the steadily-growing capitalist dog, or 
 drastically to change the conditions of its vast 
 membership. 
 
 Concurrently with the growth of the Trade 
 Union Movement efforts were made to promote 
 direct working-class representation on publicly 
 elected bodies, and we find, even before the forma- 
 tion of the old Labour Representation Committee, 
 which was first established in 1900, the mine- 
 workers in the various mining constituencies, 
 together with other trades, had succeeded in 
 returning their own working-class nominees to 
 the British House of Commons. They were, in 
 the main, elected as Liberal Labour members, 
 and in many cases their policy was no different 
 from that of ordinary Radicals in the House. A 
 significant fact attaches itself to the pioneer 
 work of the mine-workers' organisations in this 
 direction. The constituencies which these Liberal 
 Labour members represented were chiefly, and in 
 some cases almost entirely, mining in character ; 
 and in pursuance of the theory of the Economic 
 Interpretation of History, this can be readily 
 understood. 
 
 There is no industry in the world where the 
 underlying solidarity of the workers is more 
 marked than in the mining industry. The mine- 
 workers in a particular pit have to descend and
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 45 
 
 ascend the same pit-shaft, and a mass-psychology 
 is thus superimposed upon a human solidarity, 
 which precedes and even transcends the class 
 solidarity of those workers. In the gloom of 
 the underworld each man's safety is dependent 
 largely upon the caution and mutual support of 
 every other man : the fall of a roof in consequence 
 of faulty timbering ; the flooding of a working ; 
 an explosion — the effects of after-damp ; or one 
 of the other numerous perils which beset the 
 lives of the mine-workers, render it absolutely 
 essential that rescue work should be undertaken 
 instantly by the comrades who have escaped 
 injury. There has thus been created a spirit 
 of human fellowship, which preceded the later 
 manifestation of class solidarity, amongst them- 
 selves and their fellow-workers in other industries. 
 Paid upon output and by piece rates, as the mine- 
 workers were — and largely are at the present 
 time — there arose frequent disputes because 
 of the charges, too often substantiated, that the 
 mine-owner and his manager were cheating 
 the workmen of the results of their labour upon 
 the piece-work scale of payments; and after con- 
 siderable agitation it was rendered necessary for 
 check-weighmen to be appointed at every pit, in 
 order to ensure that the men at the coal-face 
 should receive all to which they were legitimately
 
 46 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 entitled, in accord with the terms decided upon 
 between the unions and the employers. The 
 mine-worker being an intelligent individual asked 
 himself why, having failed to repose any con- 
 fidence in the mine-owner and the mine manager 
 at the pit-head, he should continue to repose 
 confidence in either of them to represent him and 
 his interests at St Stephen's, Westminster, and so 
 we find that the miners were the first to promote 
 direct working-class representation, although at 
 that stage the miners' nominees called themselves 
 Liberal Labour members. Keir Hardie — himself 
 an ex-miner — was the most outstanding figure 
 in the British working-class movement in the 
 demand for independent Labour representation in 
 Parliament and on other publicly- elected bodies. 
 A conflict raged subsequently between the 
 schools of " industrials " and " politicals " regard- 
 ing the use of the trade unions exclusively for 
 one or the other purpose. There was that school 
 which said that politics should not be introduced 
 into the trade unions, and which declared that 
 the trade unions should be maintained purely 
 and simply for the purpose for which they were 
 formed, namely, to discover and rectify industrial 
 grievances. With the growth of the political 
 school there was a tendency to make the unions 
 mere instruments for returning Labour members
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 47 
 
 to the House of Commons, and this school urged 
 that strike action was played out, and should 
 be substituted by political and parliamentary 
 activity. For at least twenty years before the 
 outbreak of the war a fierce struggle was main- 
 tained in the Labour Mo.vement between the 
 exponents and advocates of these two rival schools 
 of thought, and now and again the Movement 
 swayed in favour of one policy and then the 
 other, " Strikes are hopeless and are played out 
 in view of the vast concentration of power in the 
 hands of the capitalist class," said the advocates 
 of parliamentary action; "strikes are costly to 
 those who engage in them, and especially to their 
 dependents ; they are barbarous means of settling 
 disputes, and even when they temporarily succeed, 
 the losses are greater to the working-class pro- 
 ducers than the gains which are realised in increase 
 of wages or reduction in hours. Conduct, there- 
 fore, an unceasing propaganda in favour of direct 
 working-class representation ; and the social 
 system under which you suffer can be drastically 
 ameliorated by legislative measures and by the 
 results of political action in general." " Parlia- 
 mentary action solves nothing," loudly proclaim 
 the industrial direct-actionists. " You send your 
 nominees to the green benches of Westminster, 
 and they become corrupted by association with
 
 48 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 the master class. Those who set out upon a 
 campaign of vote-catching have to make their 
 views so amenable to the middle-class voters, 
 that they are rendered impotent by reason of the 
 speeches of their election campaign before they 
 reach St Stephen's. Moreover, to whom do you 
 offer a seat in the House of Commons ? It is 
 to the veterans of the Industrial Movement, who 
 have, perchance, grown grey in the Movement, 
 or who have lost their militant characteristics by 
 a decade or generation of work in a trade union 
 office. Who are the nominees for the suitably 
 situated constituencies, but those who have 
 grown impotent in the service of the Cause ? 
 Tom, Dick and Harry are to be elected to 
 Westminster, not because of any revolutionary 
 work they may accomplish, but as a reward for 
 services rendered in years gone by." 
 
 Popular education has been limited to enable 
 the workers greedily to swallow the hashed-up 
 nonsense which appears in the columns of the 
 Capitalist Press. In the factory, in the mine, 
 workshop, or on the docks or railways, your 
 proletarian understands the facts of his every- 
 day life. But in politics he becomes obsessed 
 with the interminable wrangles of free trade and 
 tariff reform ; the single tax ; leasehold enfran- 
 chisement ; big navies and little navies ; and he 
 is carried away from all the inherent realism of
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 49 
 
 his everyday life, and is made increasingly help- 
 less by the loud-mouthed spokesmen of the two 
 rival factions which stand as the custodians of 
 the interests of landlords and capitalists. In 
 industrial affairs the active and intelligent pro- 
 letarian leavening of one man in ten is the deter- 
 mining factor. He organises dissension against 
 low wages and long hours ; he is the spirited 
 advocate who makes his influence felt on the multi- 
 tude in the great industries of the country, and 
 nine out often follow his lead, not so much because 
 of any clearly defined and logical processes of 
 the mind, but because of an intuitive or instinctive 
 understandino; of the facts of life. At the ballot- 
 box the vote of the active proletarian is cancelled 
 by the votes of his own fellow- workmen, who 
 have failed to translate the facts of their every- 
 day lives into the region of politics, and to show 
 an aptitude for parliamentary or political dis- 
 crimination, " and," says the syndicalist or indus- 
 trial unionist, " our bounden duty is to organise 
 upon an industrial or class basis, in order by indus- 
 trial action to overthrow^ the hateful capitalist 
 system which cramps and stultifies our lives, and 
 denies us any degree of real improvement in 
 social status." And thus it is contended, each 
 side convinced it has on its own part the germs 
 of truth and accuracy regarding immediate and 
 ultimate tactics to be employed.
 
 50 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 There arose the need for international organi- 
 sation as time went on, both politically as well 
 as on the industrial field, and International 
 Socialist Congresses played at least some part 
 in teaching the workers and their leaders the 
 implications of international working-class soli- 
 darity. Capitalism had advanced with giant 
 strides in Germany, America, and to a lesser 
 degree in France, Austria - Hungary, and in 
 Russia, and it was found essential to eliminate 
 the lowest conceptions of national antagonisms 
 and fraudulent patriotisms by means of inter- 
 national conferences and congresses. " Prole- 
 tarians of all Countries, Unite ! You have 
 nothing to lose but your chains : you have a 
 world to win ! " was the ringing appeal of Marx 
 and Engels in the "Communist Manifesto"; 
 and the propaganda work conducted through 
 the International Socialist organisations had 
 the effect of promoting international industrial 
 organisation. The workers of one country were 
 invariably informed by their employers that 
 workers in the same industry in other countries 
 were enabling their employers to compete on 
 more advantageous terms, and, therefore, placing 
 them in the position of being able to secure 
 trade in the struggle for the world market. The 
 workmen in the respective industries having to
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 51 
 
 some extent overcome competitive influences 
 within the confines of their own country, sought 
 more and more to overcome international com- 
 petitive influences ; and thus metal - workers, 
 wood - workers, transport - workers and mine- 
 workers, to mention but a few, had their inter- 
 national organisations supplying statistics of 
 wages and conditions, fighting for the extension 
 of factory legislation, and seeking in every way 
 to improve the status of the working people 
 throughout the world. 
 
 Of course the confidence in international 
 working-class solidarity and belief in the sin- 
 cerity of the many quondam resolutions passed 
 was severely shaken by the developments in 
 1914 and afterwards ; but the fact remains that 
 there were millions in the belligerent nations 
 who were opposed to the war, who remained 
 steadfast to the underlying principles of the 
 class-struggle, and whose bitterest disappoint- 
 ment lay in witnessing the frantic zeal of the 
 so-called Labour and Socialist " Leaders," who 
 became in this and other countries more royalist 
 than the King, more militarist than the War 
 Office, and more imperialistic than those whose 
 sentiments they repeated with parrot - like 
 reiteration. 
 
 The Older Outlook was clear here and confused
 
 52 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 there, but was becoming appreciably clearer as 
 the driving force of economic and industrial 
 development was making itself more and more 
 manifest. It is true working-class organisation 
 followed — much more slowly, perhaps, but, 
 nevertheless, followed — the concentration of 
 power of finance and industrial capital; the chief 
 obstacle beino; the inherent conservatism of the 
 human mind as expressed through the indiffer- 
 ence and hesitancy of the masses and the vested 
 interests of the permanent officials. 
 
 The supersession of craftsmanship by the 
 operations of the machine attendant; the growth 
 of unemployment ; the increasingly recurrent 
 industrial crises ; these taught inexorably that 
 which the vocal and literary propagandists had 
 failed to prove. The Movement in favour of 
 industrial groupings and amalgamation went on 
 stage by stage ; but the effect w^as countered 
 during wage disp'utes by the closer co-operation 
 between great industrial undertakings. Eeason 
 was baffled again and again, and sometimes the 
 hatred of the crushing system of wage slavery 
 was found venting itself in forms of violence, 
 which were easily suppressed by the police or 
 military. Strikes, if accomplishing nothing 
 more, at least drove home forcibly the lesson 
 of the class antagonism inseparable from the
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 53 
 
 capitalist S3^stem. They engendered mutual 
 solidarity, and awakened the mind and heart to 
 the need for a revolutionary change; they showed 
 more and more, too, the need for political soli- 
 darity as well as industrial solidarity, and offered 
 to Socialist propagandists abundant opportunity 
 to expose the hollow pretence aifd blatant hum- 
 bug of politicians who imposed Insurance and 
 similar Acts of Parliament with their *' rare 
 and refreshing fruit." 
 
 During the two decades before the outbreak of 
 the World War millions of pamphlets, brochures 
 and books were distributed, and there were many 
 Socialist and Labour periodicals indicating and 
 proving the confrontation of rich and poor. 
 
 Can anyone, who knows the facts .of industrial 
 history, doubt, that by means of militant trade 
 unionism, through the intensive revolutionary 
 propaganda, through the enlightened self-interest 
 of the possessing classes, who know exactly when 
 to concede and how much (and may it be 
 parenthetically observed that no section of the 
 possessing classes is to be compared with the 
 astute British section), and by that process of 
 gradual all-round development, which may be 
 likened not to a vicious circle, as some foolishly 
 imagine, but to a spiral, each revolution of which 
 brings us higher and higher, we are rapidly
 
 54 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 approaching the period of human emancipation. 
 I, for my own part, have no hesitation in 
 declaring that from my own knowledge of 
 conditions among the working-class, there was 
 a distinct tendency towards material improve- 
 ment. Every reform was beaten out on the 
 anvil of strife ; no concession was conceded 
 except by the pressure of force, or as the result 
 of craven fear on the part of the privileged and 
 propertied sections of the community. The 
 active and intelligent among the proletarians 
 had no delusions about the master class ; they 
 knew that while conditions tended to improve, 
 the improvements paled into the merest insig- 
 nificance compared with the increased and in- 
 creasing capacity for wealth production. In the 
 industrial centres of South Wales, the Midlands, 
 the Potteries, Lancashire, Yorkshire, in Scotland 
 and elsewhere, while the industrial capitalists 
 and financiers were making more in profits from 
 the sale of by-products than would assure a 
 return on the invested capital, to say nothing of 
 the profits derived from the principal commodi- 
 ties produced, the workers were frequently com- 
 pelled to live under conditions which were a 
 denial of our proud claims to call ourselves a 
 civilised people. Housing conditions were, and, 
 indeed, still are, as Robert Smillie showed before
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 55 
 
 the Coal Industry Commission, so deplorable, 
 that the wealthy coal magnates, who are chiefly 
 responsible, would refrain from stabling their 
 horses or kennelling their dogs in the habitations 
 which have to suffice for the beings fashioned in 
 the Divine image. 
 
 Small wonder that there was "Labour Unrest" : 
 the difficulty was to understand why the entire 
 edifice of the self-condemned system of private 
 greed and organised cupidity did not fall because 
 of its own inherent contradictions. That which 
 passes for " public opinion " was only compelled 
 to realise some aspects of the horrors and 
 iniquities of the system when its sheltered 
 members were deprived of coal, or compelled to 
 exist on more precarious supplies of other neces- 
 saries, or again embarrassed by transport stoppage 
 and dislocation. The "middling " class, together 
 with their social superiors, having lost any 
 capacity for independent thinking, because they 
 have for so long ' ' put out " their thinking to 
 the Press, as their wives have "put out" their 
 washing, were at all times opposed to the strikers 
 in any conflict between workers and employers. 
 Heaven be praised, however, this brand of so- 
 called public opinion has about as much eff"ect 
 on the men's minds during a strike as water on 
 the back of a duck.
 
 56 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Events just before the outbreak of the war 
 were shaping themselves for an embittered 
 struggle between "haves" and "have-nots." 
 Scientific Socialism had for half a century pre- 
 dicted the intensification of the Class Struggle, 
 following on the international attempts on the 
 part of rival capitalisms and their attendant 
 militarisms andnavalisms,to control and dominate 
 the World Market. True to the writing of Marx 
 and his followers, the old-time Peace, Retrench- 
 ment and Reform of Victorian Liberalism had 
 to make way for the strident and inevitable 
 imperialism of Joseph Chamberlain and his 
 school of modern statesmen. Manchester, with 
 its cotton, desiring only " peaceful penetration " 
 through the agency of missionaries, accompanied, 
 incidentally, by a handful of rifles and much 
 gin, gives way to Birmingham, with its "brazen" 
 outlook, its " forceful penetration," and its un- 
 hesitating will to thrust its metal productions 
 upon a willing or unwilling world. This is the 
 titanic period when Labour, growingly informed 
 and gathering strength in order to challenge the 
 exploiting class in every country, is demanding 
 with more and more insistence its own place in 
 the sun. 
 
 How far the war itself was the result of the 
 fear in the minds of many of the statesmen of
 
 THE OLDER OUTLOOK 57 
 
 the various countries must remain a matter for 
 conjecti:lTe. TJiere need be no surmise, however, 
 regarding the attitude of most of the Leaders 
 of organised Labour. In Germany, France, and 
 similarly in Britain, when "Peace" and "Dis- 
 armament " were blessed words to trip off the 
 tongue, how our Labour Leaders and at least a 
 few revolutionary Socialists used to wax eloquent 
 on the measures to be adopted against the war. 
 But when the great ones of the earth began to 
 vomit their specious pleas to the workers that 
 their services were required to fight for King 
 and Country, when the entire bourgeois Press 
 echoed and re-echoed the " sob stuff" about Poor 
 and Gallant Little Belgium, the protection of 
 our dear little homes ad nauseam, observe our 
 erstwhile pacifists, our Nonconformists, and 
 especially our sometime teachers and preachers 
 of International Working-class Solidarity, urge 
 upon the workers of this country the supreme 
 need to destroy the ^vorkers of other countries, 
 who also were duped and deluded by the new- 
 born zeal for militarism of their own particular 
 mis-leaders. 
 
 These instances are given to show that men's 
 minds are governed by economic factors, and not 
 to anticipate what will be said later regarding 
 war motivet and psychology. The classical
 
 58 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 instance of economic determinism is to be found 
 in the precious antics of Mr Samu^el Go&ipers of 
 the American Federation of Labour. During 
 the earlier stages of the war — before America 
 had entered, and, as one of her own writers has 
 said, while President Wilson was periodically 
 " baring his gums " — Gompers maintained a 
 more or less correct attitude, impartial and anti- 
 militarist and most decidedly non-interventionist, 
 but when the American dollar-worshippers had 
 pumped so much money into the Allies, in the 
 shape of food and war munitions (they would 
 have done the same for Germany had we not 
 maintained our own tolerant version of the 
 Freedom of the Seas), there was no course open 
 to America but to come right in for the sake of 
 her investments and her own skin. Now the 
 egregious Mr Gompers becomes more unbalanced 
 than any European super-working-class patriot, 
 and for the perfectly clear reasons I have already 
 indicated. 
 
 Having touched on the Older, or pre-World 
 War Outlook, the changing, or transitional, out- 
 look will be dealt with in the following chapter.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Changing Outlook. 
 
 It has been well written that Revolution is 
 simply accelerated Evolution. Karl Marx and 
 the principal advocates of Marxism foresaw the 
 possibility of war as the midwife of social revolu- 
 tion. There were, in the old order, the seeds of 
 its own destruction. Well might Mr Asquith 
 speak of the "precarious equipoise" of the Bal- 
 ance of Power. The equipoise of the capitalist 
 system of production, distribution and exchange 
 was just as precarious as that of the Balance of 
 Power, which was really a product of the clash- 
 ings of competing capitalisms and their resultant 
 militarisms and navalisms. 
 
 One result of the war was to teach many of us 
 geography and ethnology. Did not Mr George 
 frankly admit he did not even know of the 
 existence, to say nothing of the whereabouts and 
 economic and strategic importance, of Teschen, 
 when adjusting the rival claims of Czech- Slovakia 
 and Poland ? War teaches economics more effec- 
 tively than all the puerile and pedantic professors 
 occupying their fatuous chairs at the modern 
 universities, and shakes islanders like ourselves
 
 60 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 out of our complacent insularity. It takes pro- 
 letarians out of the ruts in which they have spent 
 their lives ; and once over the short-lived spasm 
 of patriotic ecstasy which induced them to "join 
 up," they were given ample opportunity during 
 military training and subsequent military opera- 
 tions to see life outside their immediate homes, 
 and during the enforced leisure of trench warfare, 
 to ponder over the facts and implications of war. 
 
 Every allowance must be made for the workers 
 who were, for a time, deceived by the trumpery 
 devices ado|)ted by super-patriots, when we bear 
 in mind the recreancy of their leaders, who time 
 and time again had declared that it was the 
 bounden duty, iu the event of war threatening 
 to break out, to use every effort within their 
 power to prevent it. This was the spirit under- 
 lying innumerable resolutions passed at Inter- 
 national Labour and Socialist Congresses, to say 
 nothing of the Socialist propaganda conducted 
 amongst the various nationalities. War, says 
 Trietschke, is only the logical extension of political 
 policy. 
 
 Looking at Europe to-day, we see that four 
 and a half years of war, and the armed truce 
 and furtive warfare which have followed the sign- 
 ing of the Armistice, have exercised a more pro- 
 found effect upon the mentality of the toiling 
 masses than twenty years and more of sedulous
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 61 
 
 and well-directed propaganda on the part of the 
 revolutionary Socialist. If the hands of the 
 clock could be put back, and Nicholas, Wilhelm 
 and their crowned confreres placed back on the 
 respective thrones from which they have been 
 shaken ; if their ministers and chancellors had 
 possessed themselves of some semblance of pro- 
 phetic insight, how they would have laboured, 
 might and main, in order that the incident of 
 Sarajevo should have been a matter for diplo- 
 matic adjustment, and thus give effect to the 
 pious wishes which brought into being the Hague 
 Tribunal ! But they, poor figure-heads, w^ere 
 creatures — not creators — of the inexorable facts of 
 the system of modern capitalism and imperialism. 
 In the numerous frontier wars and punitive 
 expeditions, together with the enterprise of the 
 Boer War, the overwhelming mass of the people 
 of this country were only slightly involved. 
 Defenders of the existing order used fondly to 
 declare that another war was necessary to show^ 
 our nation-wide solidarity against the mischievous 
 class influences of the workers, w^hich found ex- 
 pression from time to time in labour upheavals, 
 threatening to reach greater magnitude and more 
 widespread complications. Even the workers 
 themselves, obsessed with the constant fear of 
 unemployment and under-employment, attributed 
 many of the evils of their lives, as did Malthus,
 
 62 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 to over-population, and one heard again and again 
 amono;st members of the working-class that a 
 war would be a good thing, in order to thin out 
 the ranks of the working people and thereby 
 eliminate the worst effects of the struggle for 
 a job. 
 
 The present writer was a speaker from the 
 Nelson Column in Trafalgar Square on that fate- 
 ful Sunday of 2nd August 1914, during the great 
 Demonstration of protest against the possibility 
 of war and Britain's participation on the side of 
 France and Russia. This vast Demonstration, 
 representing the intelligent workmen of Greater 
 London, expressed its serious alarm at the prospect 
 of the then imminent European War, into which 
 many of the Great Powers would be drawn in 
 consequence of the alliances and commitments of 
 the various Secretaries of War and Chancellors 
 in the respective countries. It went on to declare 
 that only the efforts of the International Working- 
 class by cohesion and proletarian solidarity could 
 prevent their Governments from entering upon 
 war ; it protested against any steps on the part 
 of the British Government to support Russia, 
 either directly or in consequence of an under- 
 standing with France. This was the tenor of 
 working - class speeches delivered before war 
 became absolutely inevitable. 
 
 What about the possibility of a general strike
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 63 
 
 against war, asked the enthusiastic, working-class 
 questioner ? This had been a matter for con- 
 sideration at International Socialist and Trade 
 Union Congresses for a number of years, but it 
 was realised that while a good deal of zeal and 
 enthusiasm existed in the minds of the minority 
 in favour of this policy, any kind of strike, partial 
 or general, national or intern-ational, would prove 
 abortive unless there were a formidable majority 
 in favour of such a policy. Robert Smillie, 
 speaking at the International Mine-workers' Con- 
 ference at Karlsbad in July 1913, said : "There 
 is sufficient strength in the organised Labour 
 Movement of Great Britain and the Continents 
 of Europe and America to prevent any threatened 
 war taking place, by the calling of an Inter- 
 national Conference and the carrying of a Resolu- 
 tion that all work should be stopped in the nations 
 concerned until they agreed to arbitration," It 
 is, moreover, on record that at the Newport 
 Conference of the National Transport Workers' 
 Federation, held in 1913, there was an instruction 
 to the Federation to place upon the Agenda of 
 the then forthcoming International Transport 
 Workers' Conference the following Resolution : — 
 
 That this Convention of Transport Workers of 
 all nations views with alarm the rapid growth of 
 armaments, and the ever-present menace of war. 
 
 We are convinced that there is no quarrel between 
 the workers of the various nations, and look upon
 
 64 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 the war-fever which is created by the Capitalist 
 Press and by the financial interests, which alone 
 profit by the increased expenditure on armaments 
 and munitions of war, as an attempt to pervert the 
 minds of the people from their increasing desire to 
 improve their economic status. 
 
 In the event of international war being imminent, 
 in consequence of the criminal conduct of the war 
 factions, and without the consent of the overwhelm- 
 ing majority of the people involved, we recommend 
 a general stoppage of work among all transport 
 workers who are engaged in the transportation of 
 troops and munitions of war. 
 
 We, therefore, instruct the General Council to take 
 the necessary steps to make this Resolution operative, 
 and call on the leaders of the Transport Workers in 
 all countries to prepare for an International strike of 
 our members as a means to prevent the fratricidal 
 war which is constantly threatening us. 
 
 Keir Hardie for Great Britain and Villiant 
 for France strongly supported the general strike 
 aorainst war at the International Socialist Con- 
 ference in Copenhagen in August 1910, and in 
 theory and on principle the leaders of the working 
 people have an infinitely greater right to commit 
 and to pledge their followers in favour of a 
 general strike against war than had Grey, Sazanofi", 
 Bethman - Hollweg and others to commit the 
 workers to cut each other's throats in the interests 
 of the financiers, bond-holders, industrial land- 
 lords and capitalists of their respective countries. 
 The organised and ofiicial will-to-peace in our
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 65 
 
 own country in particular, and in the other 
 countries in general, as expressed by Resolutions 
 and in the speeches of the leaders of the organised 
 masses, proved to be, indeed, short-lived. 
 
 The overrunning of " Gallant Little Belgium " 
 by the German legions was the pretext which 
 brought Great Britain into the World War, but 
 everyone in the know realised at the time, and 
 now admits, that had the Liberal Government 
 failed to take the necessary steps to join in the 
 universal fratricide in 1914, a Coalition of the 
 Imperialist Liberals, including the present Prime 
 Minister, and the Unionist Party was in process 
 of formation and would have been ready to act 
 had the Liberal Party, as a Party, attempted to 
 remain true to many of its old-time traditions. 
 
 The crudest display of innocent credulity on 
 the part of many of the leaders of organised 
 Labour was shown in the declaration in favour 
 of an industrial truce, decided upon on 24th 
 August 1914 by the Joint Committee of the 
 General Federation of Trade Unions, the Trades' 
 Union Congress and the Labour Party. The 
 Resolution was as follows : — 
 
 That an immediate effort be made to terminate all 
 existing trade disputes, whether strikes or lock-outs, 
 and whenever new points of difficulty arise during 
 the war period a serious attempt should be made 
 by all concerned to reach an amicable settlement 
 before resorting to a strike or lock-out. 
 
 s
 
 66 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 The trusting and docile individuals who were 
 responsible for the promulgation of this policy 
 soon found that the Government was more than 
 anxious to take advantage of this willingness on 
 the part of the lamb to lie down with the lion, 
 and shortly afterwards passed legislation making 
 strikes, and agitation in favour thereof, a penal 
 offence. These complacent mis-leaders of Labour 
 had forgotten the whole history of the class 
 struggle, and were foolish enough to imagine that 
 the capitalist lion would change its skin and 
 desist from its age-long efforts to crush the 
 workmen's organisations, or, better still, rob 
 them of all their fighting possibilities. 
 
 The one body which, however, endeavoured 
 to maintain the prestige of the Working-class 
 Mov^ement was one hastily convened, and called 
 the War Emergency Workers' National Com- 
 mittee. This body had to keep before its mind's 
 eye constantly during the war period the need 
 for well-informed and pungent criticism of the 
 Grovernment, and to do its utmost in order to 
 maintain the workers' standard of life. At first 
 it was felt that the war would lead to a tremen- 
 dous industrial crisis, with vast and growing un- 
 employment and under-employment. This was, 
 indeed, the case, until there were such calls upon 
 the man-power of the country, by persistent 
 recruiting, and latterly by the application of
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 67 
 
 military conscription, as to remove any possi- 
 bility of unemployment during thewar's duration. 
 
 Following upon the industrial truce, there was 
 a political truce, given effect to and cemented by 
 the entry of certain well-known Labour members 
 into the first, and later the second, Coalition 
 Government. The treason of political associa- 
 tion with the Liberal and Conservative Parties 
 was on a par with the treason of giving away 
 the right of the workman to withdraw his labour, 
 which had been effected under the industrial 
 truce. But, pledge the workers as they liked, 
 no body of leaders had any assurance that the 
 workers w^ould themselves forgo their long- 
 established right to withdraw their labour in 
 order to maintain and, if possible, improve their 
 economic status. 
 
 Popular recruiting was assisted by Labour 
 members throughout the country, and it is now 
 clearly seen, as so many of us foresaw, that the 
 Eegistration Scheme of 1915, and the subsequent 
 "Derby" Scheme of the same year, with its 
 policy of attestation, were only the preliminary 
 steps to destroy organised antagonism and to 
 break the resistance to military conscription on 
 the part of the workers themselves. Those who 
 did join up in 1914 and 1915, and those who 
 w^ere conscripted later, following upon the dupli- 
 city of the politicians and the muddle-headedness
 
 68 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 of the Trade Union Leaders, were beginning to 
 realise the consequences of the war as it pro- 
 ceeded month by month. 
 
 Prices were increasing rapidly, while wages 
 remained stationary, and the separation allow- 
 ances, fixed at a time when food prices had risen 
 but 15 per cent., became a danger to the well- 
 being of the dependents of soldiers and sailors, 
 as prices mounted to 30, 40 and 50 per cent, 
 above the pre-war level. It was first due to the 
 spirited advocacy of the War Workers' National 
 Committee, and the unrelenting criticism of the 
 small number of anti-war Labour and Liberal 
 members in the House of Commons, that the 
 separation allowances were gradually increased. 
 In the first few months of the war prices in- 
 creased 30 per cent, before a single penny was 
 added to the wages of the work-people — had 
 increased, not because commodities had cost one 
 single penny per pound or per ton more to be 
 produced and distributed, but because, taking 
 advantage of the shortage of supplies, and in 
 consequence of the increased demand upon those 
 supplies by food hoarders and speculators, pro- 
 fiteering had become general. This word " pro- 
 fiteering," which has received universal currency 
 during the war, was a word largely confined to 
 the vocabulary of Socialists before the war, and 
 is itself a sign of the changing mentality of the
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 69 
 
 workers, and of their growing bitterness towards 
 the privileged and propertied classes. 
 
 As a member of the War Emergency Workers' 
 National Committee, I was asked to give evidence 
 before a Departmental Committee on Food Prices 
 in October 1916. In order to show the influence 
 of high freights on high prices, the Departmental 
 Committee were informed that prior to the out- 
 break of war the freights from the Argentine 
 Kepublic to the United Kingdom on cargoes of 
 grain were anything between 10s, and lis. per 
 ton, but in February 1915 freights for the same 
 class of merchandise, and for the same journey, 
 had risen to 60s. and 70s. per ton, and that in 
 the summer of 1916 they had increased to the 
 stupendous amount of 160s., compared with the 
 pre-war figure of 10s. An instance was quoted 
 in a capitalist newspaper that ships sailing 
 from South Wales, outward-bound with coal at 
 75s. per ton and homeward-bound with grain, 
 could make enough profit on one single voyage 
 to pay the entire capital charge of the ship. 
 Well might Mr Asquith declare in the House of 
 Commons, and in his speeches on the recruiting 
 platforms, that " No sacrifice could be too great 
 when freedom and honour are at stake." In the 
 annual review of the freight market for 1915, 
 the Syre7i and Shipping, which is an organ 
 run in the interests of the ship-owning fraternity,
 
 70 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 made the following significant announcement : — 
 
 We anticipated further record rates for 1915, but 
 that freights should ever have reached the giddy 
 heights of to-day was beyond the expectation of the 
 most sanguine shipping man. The year just ended 
 has been almost from beginning to end a cause of 
 breathless surprise to the ship-owner, and at times 
 the rises have been so rapid as to make record rates 
 look comparatively poor in a few days. . . . With 
 the exception of outward freights to the West, there 
 is no market in the world which does not show 
 freights which are hardly short of appalling. 
 
 Except for considerations of space one might 
 enumerate a thousand instances of the scandalous 
 manner in which the propertied classes of this 
 country took advantage of the patriotic zeal of 
 the work-people during the period of the war. 
 It is on record that a representative Conference 
 was held at the Memorial Hall, at which the 
 Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union 
 Congress tabled a Kesolution calling upon the 
 Government to requisition all the available 
 shipping tonnage, and themselves become pur- 
 chasers of the necessary supplies of food in the 
 available markets of the world, and to sell such 
 at the cost of production and distribution, and 
 thus eliminate any possibility of further plunder 
 and profiteering whilst the war was .on. An 
 amendment to the Kesolution was submitted, 
 declaring that should the Government refuse to 
 take the necessary steps to supply food at the
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 71 
 
 bare cost 73f production and transportation, the 
 Unions be instructed to take the only course 
 open to them, namely, to demand increases in 
 wages commensurate with the increase in the 
 cost of living. This policy at the time was 
 derided by the frothily patriotic section, who 
 declared that this would be of more advantage 
 to the Germans than twenty divisions in the 
 field. Be that as it may, the workers were 
 forced by the inexorable pressure of events to 
 realise that their only hope lay, not in Press or 
 in politicians, but in the industrial strength of 
 their right arm, and in the capacity to threaten 
 and, if necessary, take strike action for the 
 enforcement of their demands. 
 
 Another factor which had a profound effect 
 upon the mentality of the workers during the 
 war w^as the unscrupulous campaign of opposition 
 towards the Unions for the shell shortage, to 
 which much prominence was given in the Press 
 during 1915. Those of us who were present at 
 the various Conferences convened by the present 
 Prime Minister, both when he was Chancellor of 
 the Exchequer and subsequently when he became 
 Minister of Munitions, will remember the resent- 
 ment shown by the loyal custodians of the 
 integrity of the Trade Union Movement. Mr 
 Lloyd George declared on more than one occasion 
 that there were three enemies : Austria-Hungary,
 
 72 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Germany, and — Drink, and of the three the latter 
 was more formidable than either the first or 
 second. No device was too mean on the part of 
 the lying and deceitful politicians in their efforts, 
 eagerly seized upon by the Capitalist Press, to 
 show that some dereliction of duty on the part 
 of the workers was chiefly responsible for the 
 shortage of high-explosive shells. As an inter- 
 esting commentary upon that, some useful purpose 
 may be served by quoting a letter which, at the 
 time, was of a private and confidential character, 
 and which was sent to the Chairman and members 
 of the National Advisory Committee, and to 
 which the writer received no acknowledgment. 
 The letter is as follows : — 
 
 Gentlemen, 
 
 Everyone who listened to Mr Lloyd George's 
 speech yesterday was made fully aware of the magni- 
 tude of the problem which confronts the nation and 
 which will test the administrative ability of those 
 ajDpointed to find a solution. As you know, there 
 was little or no time for adequate discussion, and 
 all who valued the importance of time remained 
 silent. 
 
 The Minister of Munitions spoke with becoming 
 candour and removed much of the darkness which 
 prevailed regarding the supply of suitable ammuni- 
 tion. You will remember that he commenced by 
 saying with conspicuous clearness that he was 
 quite willing to assume for both the late and the 
 present Government a large share of the respon- 
 sibility for the now generally admitted shortage 
 ^ of high-explosive shells. He said that our Higher
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 73 
 
 Command had taken until some time this year 
 to realise what the French Command had learned 
 as far back as last October. Further, he told 
 us that the War Office officials had not spread 
 their orders, as it would have been better they had, 
 regarding the desired quantities. It was further 
 frankly admitted that contractors had not yet 
 delivered supplies promised as far back as February 
 last. 
 
 With regard to all this, and the statement regard- 
 ing the crumpling iip of Russia, we were one and all 
 enjoined to secrecy, which I am convinced is only 
 proper in the national interest. You must all know 
 how the workers, and especially the organised 
 section, have been condemned and maligned by a 
 large section of the Press and public, because of some 
 alleged slackness on their part to produce the 
 necessary supplies of ammunition. There has been 
 growing steadily a tendency to pass the entire re- 
 sponsibility on to the Trade Unionists for most of the 
 enormous casualties which have occurred since the 
 Allies have definitely assumed the aggressive. Those 
 in high places have not been averse to the reptUe 
 Press countenancing the idea that the men at the 
 front have been deprived of the necessary means of 
 defending their lives because of the apathy, laziness 
 and greed of the men employed in the production 
 and distribution of munitions of war. A contri- 
 butory factor to this has been the excerpts from 
 Mr Lloyd George's speeches. There has been a 
 persistent rumour that the appalling losses sustained 
 at Neuve Chapelle were largely due to a supply ship 
 loaded at Liverpool being held up by the dispute 
 which took place there quite recently. 
 
 We have to remember that there are at present 
 something like 750,000 Trade Unionists serving with 
 the armed forces. The bulk of the information 
 supplied to them comes through a source not merely
 
 74 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 averse to Trade Unionism, but tainted with the 
 vilest reaction. 
 
 In order to protect ourselves and those we repre- 
 sent, it is manifestly incumbent upon us to give the 
 lie to the unjust reproaches levelled against us and 
 the workers from time to time. Mr Lloyd George 
 is a man of courage. He asks us to take our courage 
 in our hands to deal with those who are persistently 
 losing time. We shall do our share, and I would 
 urgently ask all to induce the Minister of Munitions 
 to do his. 
 
 This is, in regard to the facts he revealed to us 
 yesterday. We naturally do not wish to embarrass 
 the Secretary of State for War, or anyone else, but 
 Mr Lloyd George can, without attaching blame to 
 any single party, remove a vast amount of mis- 
 apprehension concerning the workers and their part 
 in the production of war supplies. 
 
 I trust that you will give this matter your serious 
 consideration. I have spoken to my colleague, 
 Harry Gosling, and he agrees with me that Mr 
 Lloyd George should act generously to those who 
 have been calumniated without justification. I 
 have to regret trespassing upon your time. I have 
 been briefer than I "wished to be, and can only hope 
 that you will press this matter home, as it wall help 
 enormously more than it will hinder. 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 Robert Williams. 
 
 " It is well to bear in mind the things to 
 which this letter relates, more especially in view 
 of the malicious and unsubstantiated charges of 
 the Minister of Munitions in September 1915 at 
 Bristol and elsewhere. Moreover, we are given 
 a clearer idea as to why Mr Lloyd George is a
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 75 
 
 new convert to Industrial and Military com- 
 pulsion." Thus, in another connection, wrote 
 the present writer, in referring to the letter. 
 
 As the war continued with its fearful casualty 
 lists, as the legal grip upon the workmen's 
 organisations became tighter and tighter, there 
 grew a sullen resentment against the continued 
 prosecution of the war and an implacable will to 
 destroy the growing power of the bureaucracy 
 in this and other countries. It must not be 
 assumed for a moment that antagonism to the 
 war was confined to British soldiers, sailors and 
 workmen. We have since received evidence 
 that in Germany munition strikes took place on 
 even larger dimensions than those which occurred 
 in this country, and the existence of four million 
 Social-Democratic voters, taught or schooled in 
 the writings of Marxian Socialism, must have 
 had its effect upon the mentality of the German 
 fighters and workers. 
 
 Those of us who are revolutionists, and who 
 during the war maintained an unabated hostility 
 to it because of the growing and ever-menacing 
 aggressionist designs of our own Government — 
 which have been abundantly reflected in the 
 Peace Treaty of Versailles — were enthused 
 beyond words at the outbreak of the Russian 
 Revolution. Here was an historical landmark 
 destroying, fortunately, any remote possibility
 
 76 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 of a separate peace between Austria-Hungary, 
 Germany and Russia, and the creation of an 
 alliance of the three autocratic and militarist 
 empires of Central and Eastern Europe. At 
 last the solid ice of militarism and imperialism 
 was breaking ; and the first visible rent appeared 
 in the formation of Workers', Soldiers' and 
 Peasants' Councils throughout Kussia, with the 
 magnificent organisation in Red Petrograd. 
 
 On 31st March 1917 Mr George Lansbury, 
 Mr Robert Smillie and the present writer, 
 together with a number of others, promoted a 
 Demonstration which took place in the Albert 
 Hall to welcome the overthrow of the Tsarist 
 Government and the establishment of a Revo- 
 lutionary Republic in Russia. The Manifesto 
 issued by the Council of Russian Workmen 
 and Soldiers' Delegates to their fellow-workers 
 throughout the world was read and tremendously 
 applauded. 
 
 Brothers of the Proletariat, 
 
 Russia will steadfastly defend her own liberty 
 from all reactionary onslaughts, within and without. 
 The time has come to begin a decisive struggle 
 against the conquest aspirations of the Governments 
 of all countries. The time has come for the peoples 
 to take into their hands the decision of the questions 
 of war and peace. Conscious of its revolutionary 
 strength, Russian democracy proclaims that it will 
 combat in every way the riiling classes' policy of 
 conquest, and it calls on the peoples of Europe to
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 77 
 
 take common decisive action in the interest of peace. 
 Workers of all countries, in extending to you a 
 fraternal hand over mountains of brothers' corpses, 
 across rivers of innocent blood and tears, and through 
 the smoking ruins of toAvns and villages and the 
 destroyed treasures of civilisation, we summon you 
 to a renewal and strengthening of international 
 unity. Therein lies a gage of our victory and of our 
 complete freedom. 
 
 The Russian Eevolution, with all it implied 
 and involved, was the turning-point in the atti- 
 tude of the internatioual proletariat towards the 
 war-mongering of the proprietary classes. Even 
 the leaders, who were, maybe, themselves misled, 
 and who in turn certainly misled the w^orkers, 
 were beginning to realise the imminence of a 
 change in the mentality of the people and a grow- 
 ing revolutionary outlook. In spite of national 
 servitude, felicitously described as "national 
 service," in spite of repressive legislation, not- 
 withstanding our broken-up meetings, risking 
 the consequences of Munitions Acts and other 
 forms of legal embargoes, the workers — or at 
 least the militant section thereof — displayed an 
 unrelenting opposition to the continued pro- 
 secution of the w^ar, to the combing - out of 
 members, hitherto protected in the reserved and 
 exempted occupations, and fought strenuously 
 for peace by meaiis of the proposed Stockholm 
 International Conference — and, in fact, by means 
 of every opportunity which presented itself.
 
 78 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Going as far back as 1915, when the Munitions 
 Acts were first introduced, there arose spontane- 
 ously a strong movement of Shop Stewards in 
 the engineering and allied trades, which dis- 
 played more unceasing vigilance on behalf of 
 working-class and trade-union liberties than was 
 shown by most of the officials. The dilution 
 proposals of the Government were resisted, not 
 because of any unwillingness to produce the 
 necessary lethal weapons, but because the workers 
 valued their rights as skilled trade unionists,^ 
 just as much as proprietors valued their property. 
 The most signal instance of zeal on behalf of 
 industrial liberties was shown by the South 
 Wales miners who, being unable to compel the 
 coal-owners to accede to their application for an 
 advance in wages, withdrew their labour and 
 brought about an automatic cessation of coal 
 production in the whole of the South Wales 
 coalfield. They were solemnly and portentously 
 proclaimed under the Munitions of War Act, with 
 all its pains and penalties, to which they took as 
 much or as little notice as they would to a cen- 
 sorious leader in the columns of Mr Bottomley's 
 newspaper. In spite of all the threats, condign 
 and legal, the solidarity of the South Wales 
 miners defeated the Munitions of War Act and 
 the consequent Royal Proclamation, and they 
 were eventually able to impose their own terms
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 79 
 
 upon the owners and to obtain the concessions 
 demanded in their wages movement. It only- 
 required the unwavering and unhesitating trade 
 union pressure to show that the Munitions of 
 War Act w^as no more formidable than a house 
 of cards, and could be knocked down by one blow 
 from Labour's Strong Eight Arm. 
 
 While their leaders had either sold themselves 
 or handed themselves over gratuitously to the 
 militarist rulers, the militant members of the 
 rank and file continued to show an aptitude for 
 taking advantage of every revolutionary contin- 
 gency, and in July 1917 an attempt w^as made 
 (which it has been subsequently discovered had 
 the most far-reaching efifects upon Russian revo- 
 lutionary prospects) to form a British Workers', 
 Soldiers' and Sailors' Council. We were excep- 
 tionally fortunate in obtaining the services of 
 Mr Robert Smillie to preside at the Unofiicial 
 Conference held in Leeds. Robert Smillie, be it 
 noted, refused point-blank to accept any office 
 in the bourgeois Coalition Government, although 
 in consequence of the growing unrest of the 
 workers he had been off'ered by Mr Lloyd George 
 the post, either of Food Controller, Controller 
 of Mines, or Pensions Minister. Smillie could 
 have enjoyed the magnificent income of £5000 
 per annum, and could have had access to any 
 of the ducal palaces, like Grosvenor House, if
 
 80 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 only he would have acted disloyally to the class 
 from which he has sprung, and which he has 
 always so ably represented. Smillie was, by 
 means of a boycott, denied hospitality in any 
 hotel in Leeds during the Conference, because 
 of his unwavering loyalty to the Working-class 
 Movement and his willingness to preside over the 
 Leeds Convention. At this Leeds Convention, 
 at which were Representatives of Socialist organi- 
 sations, Trades and Labour Councils, Labour 
 Parties and Trade Unions branches, there were 
 four Resolutions. 
 
 The first, moved by Mr J. Ramsay Macdonald : 
 
 This Conference of Labour, Socialist and Demo- 
 cratic organisations of Great Britain, hails the 
 Russian Revolution. With gratitude and admira- 
 tion it congratulates the Russian people upon a 
 Revolution which has overthrown a tyranny that 
 resisted the intellectual and social development of 
 Russia, which has removed the standing menace of 
 an aggressive imperialism in Eastern Europe, and 
 which has liberated the people of Russia for the 
 great work of establishing their own political and 
 economic freedom on a firm foundation, and of taking 
 a foremost part in the international movement for 
 workmg-class emancipation from all forms of 
 political, economic and imperialist oppression and 
 exploitation. 
 
 The second, moved by Mr Philip Snowden : 
 
 This Conference of Labour, Socialist and Demo- 
 cratic organisations of Great Britain, hails with the 
 greatest satisfaction the declaration of the foreign
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 81 
 
 policy and the war aims of the Russian Provisional 
 Government, and it shares with them the firm con- 
 viction that the fall of Tsardom and the consolidation 
 of democratic principles in Russia's internal and 
 external policy will create in the democracies of other 
 nations new aspirations towards a stable peace and 
 the brotherhood of nations. In that belief we 
 pledge ourselves to work for an agreement with the 
 international democracies for the re-establishment 
 of a general peace which shall not tend towards 
 either domination by or over any nation, or the 
 seizure of their national possessions, or the violent 
 usurpation of their territories — a peace without 
 annexations or indemnities and based on the rights 
 of nations to decide their own affairs ; and as a first 
 step towards this aim we call upon the British 
 Government immediately to announce its agreement 
 with the declared foreign policy and war aims of 
 the democratic Government of Russia. 
 
 The third, moved by C. Gr. Ammon : 
 
 This Conference calls upon the Government of 
 Great Britain to place itself in accord with the demo- 
 cracy of Russia by proclaiming its adherence to and 
 determination to carry into immediate effect a 
 charter of liberties establishing complete political 
 rights for all men and women, unrestricted freedom 
 of the Press, freedom of speech, a general amnesty 
 for all political and religious prisoners, fuU rights 
 of industrial and political association, and the 
 release of labour from all forms of compulsion and 
 restraint. 
 
 The fourth, moved by the late W. C. Anderson 
 — then M.P. for AtterclifFe, and seconded by the 
 present writer : 
 
 The Conference calls upon the constituent bodies 
 at once to establish in every town, urban and rural
 
 82 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 district, Councils of Workmen and Soldiers' Dele- 
 gates for initiating and co-ordinating working-class 
 activity in support of the policy set out in the fore- 
 going Resolution, and to work strenuously for a peace 
 made by the people of the various countries, and for 
 the complete political and economic emancipation 
 of international labour. Such Councils shall also 
 watch diligently for and resist every encroachment 
 upon industrial and civil liberty ; shall give special 
 attention to the position of women employed in 
 industry and generally support the work of the 
 Trade Unions ; shall take active steps to stop the 
 exploitation of food and all other necessaries of life, 
 and shall concern themselves with questions affecting 
 the pensions of wounded and disabled soldiers and 
 the maintenance grants payable to the dependents 
 of men serving with the Army and Navy ; and the 
 making of adequate provision for the training of 
 disabled soldiers and for suitable and remunerative 
 work for the men on their return to civil life. And, 
 further, that the conveners of this Conference be 
 appointed a Provisional Committee, whose duty 
 shall be to assist the formation of local Workmen's 
 and Soldiers' Councils and generally to give effect to 
 the policy determined by^this Conference. 
 
 In seconding this Resolution the writer made 
 the following remarks, and the fact that both 
 those and the terms of the Resolution were 
 received with unqualified enthusiasm goes to 
 show the temper of the Movement at the 
 moment and the remarkable change that was 
 rapidly manifesting itself : 
 
 I second the Resolution for what it suggests and 
 for what it implies. I want to read one significant 
 line, the line apparently that has incurred the wrath
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 8S 
 
 of the Morning Post that Anderson refers to — that 
 the purpose of this Committee is to work " for the 
 complete political and economic emancipation of 
 international labour." I want to accept the Resolu- 
 tion in its very fullest implication. The Resolution, 
 if it means anything at all, means that which is con- 
 tained in the oft-used phrase from Socialistplatforms: 
 the dictatorship of the proletariat. I am glad that 
 the Press, the competent Press, the subtle Press, the 
 sinister Press which represents the proprietary 
 interests of this country, have allowed their case 
 against the first three Resolutions to go by default, in 
 order to fix themselves steadfastly to the implica- 
 tion of the fourth. My friend Smillie said we have 
 come here to talk not treason but reason ; but I 
 would remind Smillie, if he needs it, that under the 
 Defence of the Realm Regulations reason has becomii^ 
 treason. We stand steadfastly by this Resolution, 
 and we are not going to weaken it by one jot or 
 tittle. If the governing classes in this country are 
 convinced that you are going to give full and ade- 
 quate effect to this Resolution, they will give effect to 
 Resolutions one, two and three in order to defeat you. 
 You have got the most competent, the most capable 
 governing class of the whole world in this country. 
 (A voice : " We have beaten them.") You have not 
 beaten them. They have taken your own leaders 
 from your ranks and used them against you. 
 (Voices : "Not Smilhe.") After they found that Lord 
 Devonport was unable to deal with the profiteers 
 of this country, they wanted to cover up their 
 slimy tracks by putting Bob Smillie into Grosvenor 
 House. They will make every conceivable sacrifice 
 and concession short of getting off your backs. 
 Mr Tupper demanded that we should fight for 
 indemnities in order to provide adequate sustenance 
 for the dependents of men who have lost their lives 
 in the mercantile marine. If you want restitution,
 
 84 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 reparation and guarantees, in God's name get it 
 from the profiteers of your own country. We want 
 a mandate from you to proceed with this Resolution, 
 and if there are many amongst you who have got 
 cold feet about this, slip out before the Resolution is 
 put. (Laughter.) We want to break the reaction- 
 ary influence of the industrial and political labour 
 " machine," and this Convention is our attempt to 
 do so. To-day hundreds and thousands of miners, 
 engineers, transport workers, railwaymen and the 
 rest are represented here through their Trade Union 
 lodges. We want these men to go back to their con- 
 stituents and convince them to use the power that 
 lies in their hands to give or withhold their labour 
 in the place where wealth is produced. Parliament 
 will do nothing for you. Parliament has done 
 nothing for you for the whole period of the war. 
 The work-people have sacrificed in blood and treasure 
 at all times for their country, and the country is 
 theirs by right of those very sacrifices. They say 
 that you will hamper the production of munitions, 
 that control by the work-people would mean that 
 our national affairs would be less well managed. 
 Smillie referred to Mr Lloyd George's indictment of 
 the old gang ; but every word of Mr Lloyd George's 
 indictment of the old gang applies even more per- 
 tinently to the new gang. The work-people have 
 been called upon to make sacrifice after sacrifice ; 
 the engineering and highly-skilled occupations have 
 had to dilute and water down their highly-skilled 
 labour ; you have been called upon to forgo your 
 holidays and work long, tedious hours of overtime. 
 We want to assert our right to the ownership and 
 control of the country. We want to demand the 
 representation of the soldiery, of the millions of 
 organised working people in the Army, which, in the 
 words of Mr Ben Tillett, contains 95 per cent, of the 
 working-classes of this country. We are competent
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 85 
 
 to speak in the name of onr own class, and damn 
 the Constitution. Had the Russian revolutionaries 
 been disposed to be concerned with the Constitution of 
 Holy Russia, the Romanoffs would have been on the 
 throne to-day, and I say to you : Have as little con- 
 cern for the British Constitution as the Russians you 
 are praising had for the dynasty of the Romanoffs. 
 You have a greater right to speak in the name of 
 our people, ci\Tlian and soldiers, than have the 
 gang who are in charge of our political destinies at 
 this moment. It has been said by a German intel- 
 lectual that the proletariat is the rock upon which 
 the church of the future shall be built. It is the rock 
 upon which the reactionary forces will break them- 
 selves. If you are really sincere in sending greetings 
 to Russia, I say to you : " Go thou and do like- 
 wise." The need for far-reaching, for revolutionary 
 changes is as great in this country as it was in 
 Russia. The work-people have assumed the direc- 
 torate of matters in Russia. " Workers of the world 
 unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains : 
 and you have the world to win." 
 
 Looking back, one sees the Leeds Convention 
 as having merely indicative value. Its promoters 
 built better than they knew foundationally. 
 The conquest of political and economic power 
 by the workers of Great Britain must arise when 
 conditions made it inevitable. The superstruc- 
 ture upon the foundations laid down at Leeds 
 will be erected when the results of the economic 
 collapse are more manifest. 
 
 A sign and a portent on the industrial horizon 
 was the Deputation sent to the Government 
 in 1916, in the name of the Triple Industrial
 
 86 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Alliance, to prevent the importation of indentured 
 coloured labour into this country, nominally and 
 ostensibly to supplement ithe depleted man- 
 power, but actually to reduce the Western 
 standard of life, promoted and achieved by 
 generations of working-class efifort. Mr Arthur 
 Henderson, a Labour Minister of the Coalition 
 Government, had been so maladroit as openly 
 to advocate the need and desirability for this 
 unwarranted proposal. The Triple Alliance had 
 considered the matter in all its aspects and had 
 instructed its Sub-Committee to warn Mr Lloyd 
 George and his colleagues that if they dared to 
 proceed with the introduction of the contemplated 
 importation of 100,000 coloured labourers there 
 would most certainly be the most drastic form of 
 direct action resorted to by the three constituent 
 bodies, namely. Miners, Railway -workers and 
 Transport- workers. The Prime Minister in his 
 specious replies to the Deputation made a great 
 to-do of the apparent colour bar thus raised — we 
 who had struggled for the abolition of the slave 
 system in the United States, we who govern an 
 Empire of some four hundred millions of Indian 
 subjects. But the Delegation insisted that the 
 introduction of coloured workmen into this 
 country, with their lower standard of life, would 
 inevitably tend to reduce the standard of life of 
 the workers in Western countries and especially
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 87 
 
 of this country. The effect of this threat was 
 materially to modify the policy of the Govern- 
 ment, and in fact to divert the ship-loads of 
 coloured labourers, who should have arrived at 
 Southampton, to Marseilles, where thousands of 
 them were subsequently used behind the lines 
 in France. This was the reassertion of power 
 OL the part of the Triple Alliance which had 
 remained dormant since its formation in 1914, 
 immediately preceding the outbreak of war. 
 
 Even the most blatant jingoist and militarist 
 had to admit that the war could not proceed 
 until the end of time, and that Labour in 
 particular should be devoting its thoughts, even 
 during the war, to the period following upon 
 the cessation of military and naval hostilities. 
 
 In 1918 Mr G. H. Roberts, who was then 
 Minister of Labour, acting upon Cabinet instruc- 
 tions, empanelled a Committee called the Labour 
 Resettlement Committee, to discuss and report 
 upon, among other things, the resettlement of 
 soldiers and sailors, following upon the termina- 
 tion of the war, into the industries and occupa- 
 tions from which they had been withdraw^n. 
 Clandestine feelers towards peace we know had 
 been made in 1917, when the Government sent 
 Representatives to Switzerland to meet Repre- 
 sentatives of the Austro-Hungarian Government. 
 This, while stoutly denied at the time, we now
 
 88 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 know to be an admitted fact ; so that it would 
 be readily understood the Government was 
 beginning to concern itself regarding trade and 
 industrial prospects, and, perchance, insurrec- 
 tionary possibilities when millions of men were 
 demobilised and dispersed with small chance of 
 their obtaining immediate employment. Ths 
 Labour Resettlement Committee included Repre- 
 sentatives of the employers and the workers in 
 the chief industries of the country, namely, 
 building and constructional, engineering, clothing 
 and textile, printing, boot and shoe manufactur- 
 ing, iron and steel production, agriculture, trans- 
 port, railways and so on. The terms of reference 
 to the Unemployment Insurance Sub-Committee, 
 of which the writer was a member, were as 
 follows : — 
 
 To consider whether it is advisable to make 
 further provision by means of a contributory scheme 
 of unemployment against the possibility of un- 
 employment during the period immediately following 
 the war, and, if so, to make recommendations 
 with regard to the general principles on which 
 such a scheme should be based, taking into account 
 the existing scheme of Unemployment Insurance 
 under the National Insurance (Unemployment) 
 Acts, 1911 to 1916. 
 
 After considering exhaustively the subject of 
 unemployment likely to arise on a large scale 
 following the termination of the war, the Sub- 
 Committee, including five Representatives of
 
 THE CHANGLVG OUTLOOK 89 
 
 Labour — wliose names I shall mercifully with- 
 hold — delivered themselves of a Eeport, in which 
 at that period they advocated the establishment 
 of a compulsory and contributory Insurance 
 Scheme, which should guarantee to the workers 
 the truly munificent sum of 15s. per week 
 for the payment of a weekly contribution of 
 6d. At least a few Labour men, who have 
 not forgotten their obligations to their own 
 class, believe that Labour Representatives who 
 meet with the employers' Representatives and 
 Government ofl&cials behind the closed doors of 
 Government Departments, should not lack the 
 temerity to say in private what they constantly 
 say when addressing their own constituents in 
 public. Striving to represent his own class, the 
 writer oflfered a point-blank refusal to the recom- 
 mendations of the Sub-Committee, and submitted 
 the following as his reasoned refusal, in the form of 
 a Minority Report, his name standing in splendid 
 isolation and he having to submit himself to the 
 virtual repudiation of his Labour colleagues, who 
 appeared to be more anxious to find favour in 
 the eyes of the patronising employers' Represen- 
 tatives than to make a stand for the class they 
 claimed to represent : — 
 
 I find myself unable and unwilling to agree to 
 this Report. In Clause 2, page 1, I am disposed to 
 agree with the findings of the Sub-Committee that it
 
 90 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 is necessary that " all practicable steps " should be 
 taken " to facilitate and expedite the reorganisation 
 of industry upon a peace footing." Prospects of 
 wide-spread unemployment there undoubtedly are. 
 Millions of men will need to be reabsorbed into the 
 occupations and industries from which they have 
 been drafted, owing to the circumstances and 
 exigencies of war. For the purpose of insuring all 
 these employees, both men and women, during the 
 resettlement period following upon the resumption 
 of peace, against unemployment, over which they 
 cannot be held responsible, I am profoundly opposed 
 to any scheme of contributory msurance. 
 
 On 10th April I submitted a Memorandum to the 
 Main Committee calling attention to a Deputation to 
 the Right Honouralale H. H. Asquith, then Prime 
 Minister, as far back as 3rd August 1916. This 
 Deputation represented the Triple Industrial Alliance 
 of Miners, RaUwaj^men and Transport Workers. 
 It was suggested to Mr Asquith " that all workers, 
 whether men or women, who have been employed as 
 substitutes, shall be, on their disemployment, 
 provided either with work at standard living rates 
 or with full maintenance by the State." At the 
 Trade Union Congress held at Blackpool a Resolution 
 was carried with acclamation demanding " State 
 maintenance of the returned soldiers and displaced 
 workers pending their re-employment at a scale 
 equalling the rates of any trade to which they were 
 attached, in all cases on the basis of adequate living 
 conditions." Speaking, therefore, with the mandate 
 of two of the most important Labour organisations 
 in this or any other country, I am of the unalterable 
 conviction that it is of no use attemj)ting to patch 
 up miserably inadequate insurance schemes pro- 
 viding for such a beggarly sum as 15s. per week, 
 such only to be paid after one week's unemployment 
 has elapsed, I am well aware of the formidable
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 91 
 
 charge to the State involved in the provision of an 
 adequate scheme of non-contributory insurance — 
 but I am not personally dismayed at any such 
 charge upon the Imperial revenues. If the war 
 contiaued for another year, we should have to meet 
 the cost of continuing same, a sum totalling over 
 one thousand millions sterlmg. The modern State, 
 resourceful as it has shown itself to be, must render 
 the mass of our industrial population immune at 
 least from the poverty consequent upon unemploy- 
 ment, especially as and when that unemployment 
 arises from causes over which the workers them- 
 selves have little or no control. 
 
 The whole trend of the foregoing Report indicates 
 a wish merely to perpetuate, with slight alleviations, 
 the horrible conditions existing prior to the war, 
 wherein wages were depressed to the bare sub- 
 sistence level in consequence of the ever-impending 
 fear of unemplo3"ment. Organised labour seeks 
 more and more to make the industrial citizen, man 
 or woman, free from the worries of unemploj^ment 
 and consequent impdverishment to the point of 
 starvation. The resoiu-ces of the State to meet the 
 demands which reason dictates are practically 
 without limit. We have carried on the nation's 
 affairs during the war with some seven millions 
 of our adult population either actually engaged in 
 war or preparing the munitions and material of war. 
 Such being the case, it is possible when the bulk of 
 these are returned to some productive occupations, 
 that we can easUy double the pre-war standards of 
 life of the working-class only by using intelligent and 
 rational methods equitably to distribute the wealth 
 produced by human labour and human effort. 
 
 For these and other manifold reasons which I need 
 not dilate upon, I am unshakably and flatly opposed 
 to the scheme proposed. 
 
 Robert Williams.
 
 92 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Whilebeing compelled to fraternise with Repre- 
 sentatives of the War Office and the Admiralty, 
 we were impressed, among other things, by the 
 precautions adopted in all the proposals for 
 demobilisation and dispersal, that the soldiers 
 should give up all their arms and ammunition 
 upon proceeding to the dispersal camps ! The 
 lessons of the Russian Revolution, which had 
 been materially influenced by the fact that the 
 soldiers of Red Petrograd and the sailors of the 
 Red Navy from Kronstadt proved the most 
 formidable force in creating the Second, or Soviet, 
 Revolution, had been well learned, and every 
 precaution was taken by the authorities in this 
 country to ensure that the soldiers, who during 
 the earlier stages of the war had been petted and 
 pampered and proclaimed 'as the saviours of their 
 country, should be deprived of any opportunity 
 of becoming their own saviours at the time of 
 demobilisation. Serious technical matters were 
 discussed and reported upon, and the whole 
 question of the orders for their release and re- 
 instatement in industry, the use of the labour 
 exchanges, the question of pivotal men and 
 kindred matters were also reported upon at great 
 length. 
 
 On another Sub-Committee the writer found 
 himself again in a minority of one, and in order 
 to demonstrate that never-ending vigilance is
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 93 
 
 the price of liberty, proletarian as well as social 
 and economic, it may be of some avail to set out 
 the minority observations made in reply to the 
 Majority Report. An interesting commentary 
 upon the attitude of mind of some Labour 
 Leaders may be found in the fact that one 
 colleague, at least, went so far as to suggest, in 
 the presence of Sir Reginald Brade, K.C.B., then 
 Secretary of the War Office, that it would be 
 better in the interest of the country if I were 
 arrested under the Defence of the Realm Regula- 
 tions. Again charity suggests that the name of 
 this estimable gentleman, the Secretary of a well- 
 known Federation of Labour, should be withheld. 
 The Minority Report reads as follows : — 
 
 In consequence of my representations made at the 
 meeting of the Main Committee (Labour Resettle- 
 ment) on Thursday last, the 24th instant, and 
 following upon the suggestion made by the Chair- 
 man, Lord Burnham, that I should offer any objec- 
 tions to the Report in the form of a Minority Memo- 
 randum, I accordingly do so as follows : — 
 
 Personally, I totally reject that portion of the 
 Report of the Montagu Committee, First Report, 
 paragraph 20 {a), as amended by Second Report, 
 paragraph 19 (6) and (c). 
 
 This goes on to recommend that discharged and 
 demobilised soldiers shall be entitled to "a free 
 unemployment insurance policy," assuring " pay- 
 ment of unemployment benefit to provide for a flat 
 rate of 10s. a week as a muiimum, with power to 
 the Ministry of Labour, on the recommendation of
 
 94 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 the Labour Resettlement Committee, and with the 
 consent of the Treasury, to increase the flat rate if 
 the circumstances should be deemed to make it 
 necessary." 
 
 I share the opinions of the Sub-Committee when 
 they state " that a flat rate of 10s. a week to be 
 inadequate " ; 10s. a week with the purchasing 
 power as in pre-war times was merely a beggarly 
 allowance for any adult. Various decisions of 
 important Labour organisations — the Trade Union 
 Congress, the Labour Party and the greater and 
 lesser Trade Unions have called repeatedly for the 
 Unemployment Benefit to be such as to afford the 
 standard of life comparable with that of the industry 
 or occupation with which the discharged soldier 
 was associated. The State, therefore, should provide 
 remunerative employment or adequate subsistence 
 allowance. In paragraph 9, a reference was made 
 to the Chelmsford Local Advisory Committee and a 
 Resolution passed by that body. This Committee 
 urges " that full pay and allowances should be 
 continued until the recipient had been provided 
 with permanent work at which he could earn an 
 adequate living." 
 
 The Majority Report goes on to say : " This 
 proposal is, in our view, clearly impracticable." 
 In my view, and in the view of organised labour, 
 this proposal is not only practicable but imperative 
 if the country is to stave off something approaching 
 universal insurrection. Further, during the period 
 of re-adaptation from mflitary service to trade and 
 industrial employment, many soldiers and saflors 
 will find it impossible to revert immediately to their 
 customary manual and physical efficiency. In 
 those cases, I am of opinion that some elastic 
 methods must be devised that where discharged 
 and demobilised soldiers and sailors are unable to 
 work full time in consequence of the nerve and
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 95 
 
 body-shattering effects of war, they must be partially 
 assisted by under-employment grants. 
 
 In paragraph 10, " The use of the Exchanges," 
 the Majority Report states : "In both cases, the 
 right to benefit will depend on the applicant not 
 having refused suitable employment." Herein I 
 would insert a proviso that any discharged soldier 
 should be deemed to have the right to unemploy- 
 ment benefit when the rates and conditions of 
 employment are not the Trade Union or standard 
 ones in the industry or occupation, and that no 
 such employment offered shall be arising from or 
 connected with any labour or Trade Union dispute. 
 I share the opinions of the majority when they say : 
 " We are, of course, aware that the conduct of the 
 Exchanges in the past has been the subject of a 
 certain amount of criticism." This criticism, from 
 the view of organised labour, has been well merited. 
 In the case of dock and waterside labour, where 
 little or no use has been made hitherto of the Labour 
 Exchanges by emploj^ers or by work people, I 
 trust that the system in operation before the war 
 may be adhered to. This, of course, refers to the 
 methods of " taking-on," rather than the casual 
 nature of the occupation. 
 
 Regarding the matter of reinstatement dealt with 
 in Clause 11, I cannot accept the decision of the 
 Sub-Committee I find myself cordially in agree- 
 ment with the recommendation of the Second 
 Interim Report, commencing '" We recommend." 
 Whatever the difficulty, it is incumbent upon the 
 State to provide re-employment for those who have 
 left their normal employment to take service with 
 the colours. The alternative, where there are two 
 or more applicants for the same position in conse- 
 quence of successive enlistment or enforced calling- 
 up, is to provide every returned soldier or sailor 
 with his old job or -^-ith full maintenance at the
 
 96 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Trade Union or standard rates as if he were employed. 
 In paragraph 17, deaUng with the order of release, 
 this is a matter largely in the hands of the War 
 Office, and its Department of demobilisation. There 
 will naturally be a widespread desire on the part of 
 the armed forces to return to civilian life, subject, 
 of course, to military consideration. 
 
 It appears that those who have been prisoners of 
 war, or those who have been longest in the respective 
 services, either Army or Navy, have the first claim 
 for a return to civilian life. My own opinion is, 
 that as rapidly as the men can be demobilised and 
 dispersed this should be done. There is no reason 
 why hundreds of thousands of men should be main- 
 tained in military encampments awaiting dispersal, 
 especially when they could relieve the State of 
 certain responsibilities by returning to their homes 
 with their full pay, separation allowances, and the 
 cost of maintenance as an offset to the total cost of 
 maintenance now in operation. 
 
 There is a widespread fear in the minds of organ- 
 ised labovir that an unduly large army will be main- 
 tained in this country for no other purpose than 
 of being held in readiness for the suppression of 
 industrial disputes. Everything possible must be 
 done to reassure the working-class, and the soldiery 
 who have been trade unionists themselves, that the 
 Government are not contemplating the use of any 
 members of the armed forces who have risked their 
 lives abroad, to suppress genuine and well-considered 
 attempts of organised labour at home to improve 
 their economic status in some measure comparable 
 with the sacrifices they have made in the military 
 and civilian service. 
 
 Robert Williams. 
 29th October 1918.
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 97 
 
 The two documents from which these extracts 
 have been made are Official Governmental publi- 
 cations marked M. 1114 and D.R. 3 respectively. 
 Although every effort was made to utilise His 
 Majesty's Stationery Office as a means of publi- 
 cation of Labour and working-class propaganda, 
 the Ministry determined to prevent these receiv- 
 ing wide publicity by marking both documents 
 Confidential. 
 
 Well might the workers' outlook take revolu- 
 tionary tendencies during those six years of war 
 and its aftermath. On every occasion upon 
 which the Government were beset with difficulties 
 an approach was made to the leaders of the 
 Labour Movement to assist the Government in 
 extricating themselves. When the shell-shortage 
 occurred, all those who were credited with the 
 possession of superior brains found themselves in 
 a hopeless muddle, and highly-skilled labour in 
 the engineering and metal-working trades was 
 called upon to dilute its technical capacity as the 
 distillers diluted their whisky. Opportunities 
 were provided for the entry of lesser-skilled and 
 unskilled men and women, by short-term periods 
 of training, in order that the supply of highly- 
 skilled technical labour might be eked out in the 
 most suitable manner. 
 
 When transport facilities, coastal and overseas, 
 were being seriously imperilled by the havoc of
 
 98 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 the submarine campaign, seamen and firemen, 
 dockers and stevedores, warehousemen and porters, 
 were urged to intensify their labour efforts in order 
 to surmount an urgent and pressing difficulty. 
 As the work of bringing in the necessary food 
 and raw material became increasingly difficult, 
 agricultural workers, men and women, were 
 urged to apply themselves more diligently to 
 the work of food production ; and town-dwellers 
 were pressed to utilise every inch of available 
 soil to cultivate small allotments. 
 
 When Liberal and Tory statesmen were forced 
 to display their mental bankruptcy in meeting 
 pressing needs occasioned by the war, Labour was 
 called in to assume its share of responsibility 
 for the government of the country. I was present 
 at most of the Conferences convened by Mr Lloyd 
 George following upon the disclosure of the shell- 
 shortage, and I have no hesitation in declaring 
 that Mr Arthur Henderson did more — infinitely 
 more — than the Prime Minister to promote the 
 creation of adequate machinery for the rapid pro- 
 duction of increased supplies of high explosives 
 and other munitions and materials of war. 
 Whether this is to be placed to Henderson's 
 credit must depend on the outlook of the reader. 
 
 In order to allay the urirest and increasing 
 misgivings in the minds of the workers, every 
 Jack-in- ofiice declared that Labour must never
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 99 
 
 be allowed to sink back to its pre-war status, but 
 that, in consequence of the measure of the sacri- 
 fices which Britain's sons had made in the field 
 and in their civilian duties at home, Britain 
 owed it to herself, in the era of prosperity which 
 was to follow the war, to give those sons and 
 daughters conditions of life worthy of their sacri- 
 fices. Conferences of employers and employed 
 met again and again, and in co-operation with 
 heads of Government Departments, and these 
 meetings ofttimes resolved themselves into com- 
 mittees of mutual admiration, each section vying 
 with the other in declaring that Labour's status 
 in the future must be equal to .Labour's power 
 and responsibility in the present. 
 
 The Russian Revolution had forced the pro- 
 prietary classes to realise the insecurity of their 
 tenure of power, and the one hope of the soldiers 
 was that they should return to enjoy the princely 
 wages which they were informed the workers 
 were earning at home. The active and insurgent 
 spirits of the rank and file placed all the vapour- 
 ings of the employers and the bemused trade 
 union ofiicials at their proper valuation, and 
 resolved to continue more implacably than ever 
 the age-long fight for material improvement. 
 
 For some time, preceding the Armistice, as I 
 have previously shown, the Minister of Labour 
 had adopted a plan to introduce a compulsory and
 
 100 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 contributory unemployment insurance scheme 
 providing for the "splendid" benefit of 15s. per 
 week. In order to show how men's minds are 
 moved by national and international occurrences, 
 let me indicate the inner significance of the 
 kaleidoscopic series of events at that particular 
 period. The rumblings of revolt had forced the 
 abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II., and signs were 
 not wanting that the German Kevolution would 
 become as definitely proletarian in character as 
 had the Russian. Soldiers home on leave had 
 made a violent demonstration at Folkestone, and 
 had refused to return to their units abroad, and if 
 the War Office had not been prompt in granting 
 the men's full requests for prompt demobilisa- 
 tion, this would have given rise to the gravest 
 and most far-reaching complications throughout 
 the whole of the Western Front. Note, now, 
 the celerity of the Government in offering much 
 more substantial payments to discharged and 
 demobilised soldiers and sailors, and disemployed 
 civilian workers, than had been provided for by 
 the Ministry of Labour Insurance Scheme. Mr 
 Winston Churchill, then occupying the position 
 of Minister of Munitions, announced that muni- 
 tion workers immediately thrown out of employ- 
 ment on the signing of the Armistice would be 
 entitled to 29s. per week for men, with an addi- 
 tional allowance for dependent children, and
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 101 
 
 25s. per week for women. This was, moreover, 
 on a non-contributory basis. Revolution was in 
 the air, and revolutions are infectious things. 
 Observe, moreover, that the individual who was 
 responsible for this project was the same gentle- 
 man who started the 12j per cent, increase for 
 plain-time munition workers, which subsequently 
 went the whole ambit of Great Britain's entire 
 industry. If the reader will cast his mind back 
 to the embittered controversy which followed 
 the application of the 12|^ per cent, principle, it 
 will be remembered that this occupied the atten- 
 tion of the employed classes for well over six 
 months. It is now a notorious fact that although 
 Mr Churchill's colleague in the War Cabinet, Mr 
 G. N. Barnes, hotly denounced the concession of 
 the 12| per cent, at the time it was made by Mr 
 Churchill, but subsequently made a halting, and 
 equivocating, apology for what he had said, the 
 present War Minister at the time made it his 
 proud boast that although he had involved the 
 country in the expenditure of many millions of 
 pounds by the concession, he had turned the 
 minds and attention of the working-class from 
 the matter and the manner of the prosecution of 
 the war. 
 
 Having tided themselves over the most trouble- 
 some period, the Government announced little 
 by little the cutting-down of the unemployment
 
 102 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 donation, both for discharged service men and 
 disemployed civilians, and, having discovered 
 that revolutionary possibilities of a dramatic 
 character are becoming apparently less and 
 less, they are determined, in the teeth of 
 Labour opposition in Parliament and in the 
 country, to reintroduce their precious Unemploy- 
 ment Insurance Scheme, based upon a fourpenny 
 contribution with a benefit of 15s. per week. 
 
 The soldiers and sailors are now back at their 
 workaday affairs, that is, when they have work 
 to do ; but trickery and double-dealing, such as 
 that which has been played upon the work- 
 people, will have certain effect, ultimately if not 
 immediately. It can therefore be urged and 
 repeated that the temper of the militant section 
 of the proletariat became enormously more revo- 
 lutionary in consequence of the circumstances 
 created by the war upheaval. It may be that 
 the militant leavening in the vast proletarian 
 lump will not have due effect for some time to 
 come. No divinely inspired leader, no one 
 capable of gauging the forces making for insurrec- 
 tionary possibilities, no one with even the most 
 clarified outlook upon industrial and economic 
 history, no body of men, however militant in 
 themselves, can create a revolution until there is 
 economic and moral preparedness. This chapter 
 is concluded by the foregoing indication of all
 
 THE CHANGING OUTLOOK 103 
 
 those tendencies which help to create the revolu- 
 tionary possibilities, and there can be no doubt 
 that the economic pressure of events operating 
 during the war has performed an imponderable 
 and incalculable volume of work in preparing for 
 the supersession of capitalism by a system based 
 upon the social ownership of the means of pro- 
 duction, distribution and exchange. 
 
 The next chapter, The Newer Outlook, will 
 deal with world-wide possibilities as we are 
 confronted by them to-day, and as they have 
 steadily developed since the Armistice.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Newer Outlook. 
 
 The Armistice of 11th November 1918 will be 
 looked upon as a date as significant in the 
 industrial and political history of this country as 
 4th August 1914, the date of the formal declara- 
 tion of war against Germany. The resumption 
 of peace, on the whole, raised greater problems 
 than the outbreak of war. The period following 
 the signing of the Armistice hastened the process 
 of disillusionment, and the returning soldiers and 
 sailors on coming again into contact with the 
 civilian population and with a growing realisa- 
 tion of the underlying facts and circumstances 
 of the workaday affairs to which they had for so 
 long been strangers, realised the pretentiousness 
 of the Wilsonian creed of making the world 
 "safe for democracy." For, so far as it could 
 be done, every conceivable device, every cunning 
 ingenuity in the minds of the master class, every 
 suggestion, suppression, implication and distor- 
 tion by the slaves of the Press which served 
 capitalism, was employed to make the world 
 safe for plutocracy. 
 
 The Prime Minister, a political weathercock 
 
 104
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 105 
 
 himself, accurately poised and capable of judging 
 the direction from which the wind w^as blowing, 
 hastened to snatch his momentary victory at 
 the polls, before the process of disillusionment 
 and awakening had travelled too far. He is now 
 the embodiment of the spirit of victory. He is 
 " The Man who Won the War." Susceptible to 
 the pressure of events, as his facile mind un- 
 doubtedly is, Mr Lloyd George flits first from 
 one theory and then to another. When he was 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, he told us that the 
 war would be won by " silver bullets," meaning, 
 of course, financial resources. That was the 
 impression conveyed to his alert but superficial 
 mind w^hile his time was occupied at the 
 Treasury. Proceeding from there to the newly- 
 created Ministry of Munitions, he receives 
 another urge. Now it is a war, not of money 
 or financial resources, but of mechanical and 
 engineering resources. It is, in fact, not a 
 financiers' w^ar, but an engineers' war. Every 
 appeal was made to employers and employed in 
 the various industries providing munitions and 
 the lethal weapons of war to accelerate output. 
 Again with that susceptibility of the Noncon- 
 formist conscience and willingness to listen to 
 an appeal in the form of a " higher call," his 
 energies are transferred from the Ministry of 
 Munitions to the War Oftice ; and now money
 
 106 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 and mechanical apparatus are forgotten in the 
 insatiable demand for more and more men to 
 repair what the militarists callously term the 
 "wastage" of human material. "Everybody 
 who is able to crawl must get into khaki," is the 
 echo of the War Minister's sentiments, echoed 
 in the bleating voice of Colonel Repington, much 
 like that of the fraudulent tipster of the race- 
 course who gives every runner with the certainty 
 of having thus tipped the winner. 
 
 No one could possibly deny his own claim 
 that Mr Lloyd George is endowed with political 
 sagacity. The politician of yesteryear who 
 " Limehoused " to his heart's content, and told 
 us so eloquently that a Duke cost more than a 
 Dreadnought, and whose one desire was to make 
 political capital out of the material poverty of 
 the multitude of the common people, before 
 he accepted the higher call of statesmanlike 
 responsibility, now realised that those who had 
 been duped before by his specious pledges and 
 promises could be duped yet again by the 
 horrible spectre of Bolshevism, which was said 
 to be looming over Central and Eastern Europe. 
 Following the course of his sometime Radical 
 predecessor, Mr Joseph Chamberlain, he showed 
 how he could out-Herod Herod and serve the 
 great capitalist interests represented in the 
 Coalition, more effectively than Mr Chamberlain,
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 107 
 
 who transferred the balance of British political 
 power from Manchester to Birmingham. Even 
 his Lal)our friends — Henderson and a number 
 of others — who had been faithful henchmen 
 during the war, were opposed at the polls by 
 the possessors of the fraudulent Coalition coupon. 
 Faint-hearted Labour men, pacifist Liberals who 
 had gravitated towards the LL.P. and the Labour 
 Party, were alleged to be wreckers of homes and 
 would-be destroyers of happy firesides. Amiable 
 reformists who resisted war, just as they had 
 condemned strikes, were held to be supporters 
 of the policy falsely attributed to the Soviet 
 Government, of " nationalising women " : that 
 Soviet Government which has abolished pros- 
 titution in Eussia, while the morality of 
 Piccadilly and the West End generally is the 
 promiscuity of the poultry-yard. Playing upon 
 the lingering credulity of the soldiers who still 
 remained in the various theatres of war — and 
 who could know nothing of the atmosphere of 
 the political contests taking place in the con- 
 stituencies to which their votes were forwarded 
 — and resorting to every mean and contemptible 
 subterfuge that his own and his colleagues* 
 minds could devise, Mr Lloyd George felt con- 
 fident of victory, and even his wildest expecta- 
 tions were more than realised by the sweeping 
 return of the place-hunters and gerrymanderers
 
 108 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 of our present Government. Under any system 
 of proportional representation the forces of 
 Labour, on the votes cast in its favour, would 
 have been entitled to nearly two hundred seats 
 in Parliament, but in consequence of an anti- 
 quated political system which is said to be 
 democratic. Labour was denied three-fourths of 
 its electoral influence. 
 
 Labour is therefore compelled to turn its mind 
 more and more to industrial or direct action, as 
 against what is termed constitutional action. As 
 has been shown already, a strong, intelligent and 
 self-reliant worker, possessed of the elements of 
 political teaching and economic knowledge, is 
 a very formidable influence in his trade union 
 branch, or lodge ; and the active spirits of the 
 rank and file were fully determined that what 
 they could not do with the left hand of politics 
 they would do with the right hand of industrial 
 action. 
 
 Labour has been compelled to realise from 
 age-long experience that when men are plentiful 
 and jobs are scarce, men become cheap and wages 
 fall below the usually accepted level of subsist- 
 ence. Some six million soldiers and sailors were 
 to be demobilised and a million and half men and 
 women transferred from the munitions industries 
 in which they had found employment during the 
 war. Now is the winter of our discontent made
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 109 
 
 glorious summer, said the employers ; with an 
 abundance of labour we can reasonably look 
 forward to a rapid reduction of wages in conse- 
 quence of the pressure of the unemployed upon 
 the existing volume of employment. No, said 
 Labour ; and without much regard to the con- 
 stitutional policy urged upon it by many Labour 
 leaders, the effective w^ay of minimising the 
 imminent effects of widespread unemployment 
 is appreciably to reduce the hours of labour and 
 thus absorb the men returning; from the various 
 theatres of war to industry. On the Clyde and 
 in Belfast a rank and file movement was com- 
 menced in the engineering and shipbuilding 
 industries to reduce the hours of labour to forty 
 per week, and every credit is due to the insur- 
 gent spirit manifested — even if criticism of the 
 methods be oflered — and the magnificent stand 
 made for some three or four weeks. Without 
 strike pay, and largely discountenanced by their 
 trade union executives, receiving little or no 
 support from the workers of England and Wales, 
 these men fought manfully on, and there could 
 be no gainsaying the fact that the forty-seven 
 hours ultimately established was conceded because 
 of the brave fight made for the forty hours. 
 
 The Miners' Federation, the militant section 
 of which had for years demanded a six-hour day 
 and a five-day week, now launched its policy,
 
 110 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 but in this instance with the concurrence of their 
 ablest leaders like Smillie, Hodges, Hartshorn, 
 Herbert Smith, and in fact with the active and 
 loyal support of most of their officials. Realising 
 the danger of the then existing position, Mr 
 Lloyd George, who had condemned and vilified 
 the workers' Representatives at the polls two 
 months before, was now on his knees begging 
 the trade unionists and the employers to settle 
 their differences amicably through the hastily - 
 empanelled National Industrial Conference. Who 
 can forget the plaintive appeal made by the 
 Premier, speaking with sobs in his voice, asking 
 that all eff'orts possible should be made, and 
 promising that all should be done to make this 
 " a country fit for heroes to live in " ? The Triple 
 Industrial Alliance, however, comprising between 
 a million and a half and two million mine 
 workers, railway workers and transport workers, 
 would have nothing to do with this body, pre- 
 dicting that the promises it suggested were 
 no more likely of fulfilment than the abundant 
 pledges of social improvement made by Mr George 
 and his paymasters — the landlords, financiers, and 
 great capitalists of the Coalition Government — 
 on many previous occasions. The Sub-Committee 
 of the Triple Industrial Alliance, while the miners 
 were in the thick of their campaign for an increase 
 of three shillings per shift advance in wages, and
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 111 
 
 the reduction of hours to six per shift, together 
 with the Nationalisation of the Mines, would not 
 countenance any suggestion that participation on 
 their part in the work of the Joint Industrial 
 Conference should be used as a sort of lightning- 
 conductor for the clamorous pressure of the 
 demands of the miners and other militant workers. 
 It might, therefore, be useful to quote here the 
 speech which, on 27th February 1919, Mr J. H. 
 Thomas was directed by the Sub-Committee to 
 make on behalf of the threefold Alliance of Mine 
 Workers, Railway Workers and Transport Workers 
 to the National Industrial Conference, after the 
 delivery of which the Representatives of the three 
 organisations withdrew from the Conference : — 
 
 I have been deputed to make the following 
 observations for and on behalf of the Executive 
 Committees of the Miners' Federation of Great 
 Britain, the National Union of Railwaymen and the 
 National Transport Workers' Federation. The 
 Government, through the Ministry of Labour, have 
 asked the officials of the Trade L^nion Movement 
 to put before the Government and the Country any 
 views which the Representatives may have as to 
 the causes of the present unrest, and as to any 
 remedies or suggestions they may have to offer. 
 
 In the judgment of my colleagues and m3'self, 
 the organised workers of Great Britain have made up 
 their minds to procure for themselves an increasing 
 share of the wealth which their labour has produced 
 and produces. The workers, moreover, and I speak 
 more especially for the members of our threefold 
 organisation, are determined to shorten materially
 
 112 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 the hours of labour in their respective industries. 
 They are dissatisfied with a system of society wliich 
 treats their labour-power as a mere_^ commodity to be 
 bought, sold and used as though they were machine- 
 like units in the process of wealth, production and 
 distribution ; and they therefore demand that they 
 shall become real partners in industry, jointly 
 sharing in the determination of working conditions 
 and of management. Labour becomes increasingly 
 alive to its sovereign power, and will shirk no 
 responsibilities, and will be denied none of its rights 
 and privileges. 
 
 Regarding the prevailing unrest, this must be 
 attributed to varied and manifold causes, probably 
 the foremost and chief cause being the scandalous 
 profiteering deliberately countenanced by theGovern- 
 ment during the period of the war. The Excess 
 Profits Tax has not mitigated the effect of profiteer- 
 ing in the slightest degree, its only use being to 
 make the profiteers the tax-collecting agents of 
 the Treasury (where the incidence of the Tax has not 
 been avoided), and to pass on the burden of paying 
 for the war from the shoulders of the rich to the 
 general body of the community, and all too frequently 
 upon the shoulders of the very poor, including the 
 dependents of soldiers and sailors. 
 
 It will probably be urged that after the losses and 
 ravages of four and a half years of war, with its 
 tremendous waste of the wealth-producing energies 
 of our young and virile manhood, the nation is 
 unable to grant the material advancement in the 
 lives and working conditions which the workers 
 are increasingly demanding. The nation's wealth- 
 power cannot be expressed in money values. The 
 only limit to be placed upon our collective capacity 
 to produce and equitably share abounding wealth 
 is the limit of our collective labour-power.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 113 
 
 The experience of the war proves that never 
 before has the nation been asked to co-ordinate 
 measures and devise means to speed up production, 
 and, despite all the greed and cupidity of the vested 
 interests, we have come out of the supreme trial of 
 the war in such a way as belied all the prophecies 
 of the political economists. 
 
 Realising these facts and the inferences therefrom, 
 the workers have resolutely set their faces towards 
 some order of society which will improve their lives 
 and conditions in accord with the new valuation 
 they set upon themselves. No longer are they 
 prepared to content themselves with every wage 
 advance being thrust upon the consumer, and con- 
 sequently cancelling every improvement mstantly 
 and automatically. Rent, interest and profit are 
 not inviolable : statesmen of every party must make 
 up their minds that there is going to be a drastic 
 change. Wise men will allow and provide for it. 
 The others will be convinced only by the compelling 
 power of events. In every country we see world- 
 shaking changes. We in this country may be able 
 to see these changes brought about peacefully and 
 orderly. The present discontents are not the work 
 of agitators. They are the product of age-long 
 experience accelerated by the developments of the 
 war. We therefore ask the Government to use its 
 influence in the direction indicated. The organised 
 work-people want redress for their manifold griev- 
 ances, and, moreover, they want something like 
 immediate redress. 
 
 The reader who has proceeded so far must be 
 assisted by further detailed and chronological 
 information regarding the march of events since 
 the promotion of the National Industrial Con- 
 ference in February 1919. Oh that the entire
 
 114 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 working-class might take long views and culti- 
 vate long memories ! Immediately preceding the 
 date of the Industrial Conference the Miners' 
 Federation had launched their twofold wages 
 and hours programme ; the Dock and Waterside 
 section of the Transport Workers' Federation were 
 in the midst of their negotiations to secure a forty- 
 four hours' week, and the Railwaymen, despite 
 the Government's promise through the mouth of 
 Mr Churchill during the recent General Election, 
 to introduce a forty-eight hours' week on the 
 railways, were unable to come to any satisfactory 
 arrangement. These three partners in the Triple 
 Industrial Alliance had entered into a solemn and 
 binding compact that there should be no definite 
 and final settlement of the programme of any one 
 section unless and until there was a certainty 
 of a complete and all-round concession of the 
 demands of all three, this being ordinarily intel- 
 ligent tactics on the part of the leaders, fully 
 approved, and, in fact, encouraged in every way 
 by delegates of the rank and file. It was in the 
 midst of such an atmosphere, charged with the 
 most far-reaching possibilities, that Mr Lloyd 
 George and Sir Robert Home promoted their 
 specious National Joint Industrial Council. 
 
 The rapidly moving events have since abun- 
 dantly demonstrated the wisdom of the component 
 parts of the Triple Industrial Alliance in remaining
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 115 
 
 outside the National Joint Council of Employers' 
 and Workers' Representatives. The Government 
 were obviously anxious to propitiate the forces 
 of organised Labour by promises, platitudes and 
 pledges. Mr Lloyd George made a speech of 
 great length in order to show how concerned 
 were he and his colleagues to give effect to his 
 political promises to make Britain a country fit 
 for heroes, but his mind, and the minds of those 
 with whom he was associated, were constantly 
 set in the direction of once more deluding the 
 Trade Unionists and of destroying their ever- 
 increasing militancy. After a good deal of speech- 
 making and with an abundance of good- will on the 
 part of the Representatives of the employees, other 
 than Miners, Railwaymen and Transport Workers, 
 the following Resolution was passed : — 
 
 That this Conference bemg of the opinion that any 
 preventable dislocation of industry is always to be 
 deplored, and, in the present critical period of 
 reconstruction, might be disastrous to the interests 
 of the Nation, and thinking that every effort should 
 be made to remove legitimate grievances, and 
 promote harmony and good-will, resolves to appoint 
 a Joint Committee, consisting of equal numbers 
 of employers and workers, men and women, to- 
 gether with a Chairman appointed by the Govern- 
 ment, to consider and report to a further meeting of 
 this Conference on the causes of the present unrest 
 and the steps necessary to safeguard and promote 
 the best interests of employers, work-people and the 
 State, and especially to consider : —
 
 116 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 1. Questions relating to Hours, Wages and General 
 
 Conditions of Employment ; 
 
 2. Unemployment and its prevention ; 
 
 3. The best methods of promoting co-operation 
 
 between Capital and Labour. 
 
 A subsequent meeting was held on 4tli March 
 1919, and again the Prime Minister " hot- 
 gospelled" to the Joint Committee; and Sub- 
 Committees were appointed with the following 
 terms of reference : — 
 
 1 . To make recommendations concerning : — 
 
 (a) The methods of negotiation between 
 employers and Trade Unions, including 
 the establishment of a permanent Indus- 
 trial Council to advise the Government on 
 industrial and economic questions, with a 
 view to maintaining industrial peace ; 
 
 (6) The method of dealing with war advances ; 
 and 
 
 (c) The method of regulating wages for all 
 classes of workers, male and female, by 
 legal enactment or otherwise. 
 
 2. To make recommendations as to the desir- 
 
 ability of legislation for a maximum number 
 of working hours and a minimum rate of 
 wages per week. 
 
 3. To consider the question of unemployment, and 
 
 to make recommendations for the steps to be 
 taken for its prevention, and for the main- 
 tenance of the unemployed in those cases in 
 which it is not prevented, both during the present 
 emergency period and on a permanent basis. 
 Note. — Unrest and output to be discussed by the 
 whole Committee at its next meeting on state- 
 ments previously submitted by the parties.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 117 
 
 The Labour Representatives, having joined 
 with those of the employers in signing a general 
 report, took the liberty of meeting separately in 
 order te- make a well-considered and thought- 
 out report of their own in relation to the unrest 
 existing at the time ; and it is well worth while 
 to note some of the contents of the Memorandum 
 submitted by those representing the workers, so 
 far back as 4th April 1919. The report refers 
 to the speech made by the Prime Minister in 
 reply to a Labour Party Deputation, in which he 
 said : 
 
 I am not afraid of the audacity of these proposals. 
 I believe the settlement after the war will succeed 
 in proportion to its audacity. . . . Therefore, 
 what I should be looking forward to, I am certain, 
 if I could have presumed to have been the adviser 
 of the working-classes, would be this : 1 should say 
 to them audacity is the thing for you. Think out 
 new ways ; think out new methods ; think out 
 even new ways of dealing with old problems. Don't 
 always be thinking of getting back to where you were 
 before the war ; get a really new world. 
 
 Having thus reminded Mr Lloyd George of his 
 own " audacious " statements, the signatories to 
 the Labour Memorandum pointed out that : 
 
 Throughout the war the workers have been led to 
 expect that the conclusion of hostilities would be 
 followed by a profound revolution in the economic 
 structure of society. Not onlj^ social theorists, 
 but also the most prominent;^ spokesmen of the 
 Government, and not a few employers, have con-
 
 118 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 stantly told the workers that we should never 
 revert to the old conditions of industry and that an 
 altogether higher standard of life and an altogether 
 superior status for the worker in industry would be 
 secured as soon as the immediate burden of hosti- 
 lities was removed. ... At the present moment 
 the workers find themselves face to face with dis- 
 appointment. There is also no sign that any 
 comprehensive policy has been prepared, or even 
 contemplated, by the Government or by the em- 
 ployers, with a view to bringing about any drastic 
 change in industry. Everywhere the workers find 
 either the determination to revert as soon as possible 
 to pre-war conditions in the operation of commerce 
 and manufacture, or, where the question of reverting 
 to pre-war conditions does not arise or concerns 
 primarily Labour, they find that few, if any, pre- 
 parations have been made for the introductions 
 of real changes. The lack of any comprehensive 
 industrial or economic policy on the part of the 
 Government or the employers must therefore be 
 regarded as one of the principal factors in the 
 present Labour unrest. 
 
 Following the terse and incisive sentences 
 read by Mr J. H. Thomas, who acted as spokes- 
 man for the Triple Industrial Alliance at the 
 earlier meeting of the National Joint Council — 
 from which, subsequently, the Alliance withdrew 
 — the Labour Memorandum goes on to demand 
 equality of control of industry by the work- 
 people ; it comments upon the high prices and 
 the profiteering, which had not diminished to 
 any degree since the signing of the Armistice. 
 It deals at very great length with the subject-
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 119 
 
 matter of unemployment, which, at that stage, 
 was comparatively negligible when compared 
 with the proportions it has reached at the time 
 of writing. On unemployment, it reports as 
 follows : 
 
 We are of the opinion that a general increase in 
 wages by imiDioving the purchasing power of the 
 workers would have a general and permanent effect 
 in the direction of limiting continuous unemploy- 
 ment, by bringing consummation up to something 
 more like equilibrium with production. 
 
 Among its conclusions we have statements in 
 keeping with the general tenor of the present 
 book : 
 
 The fundamental causes of Labour unrest are to be 
 found rather in the growing determination of Labour 
 to challenge the whole existing structiu-e of capitalist 
 industry than in any of the more special and smaller 
 grievances which come to the surface at any par- 
 ticular time. 
 
 These root causes are twofold — the breakdown of 
 the existing capitalist system of industrial organisa- 
 tion, in the sense that the mass of the working- 
 class is now firmly convinced that production for 
 private profit is not an equitable basis on which to 
 build, and that a vast extension of public o^Miership 
 and democratic control of industry is urgently 
 necessary. It is no longer possible for organised 
 Labour to be controlled by force or compulsion 
 of any kind. It has grown too strong to remain 
 within the bounds of the old industrial system, and 
 its unsatisfied demand for the reorganisation of 
 industry on democratic lines is not only the most
 
 ]20 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 important, but also a constantly growing cause of 
 unrest. 
 
 It is not enough merely to tinker with particular 
 grievances or to endeavour to reconstruct the old 
 system by slight adjustments to meet the new 
 demands of Labour. It is essential to question 
 the whole basis on which our industry has been 
 conducted in the past, and to endeavour to find, in 
 substitution for the motive of private gain, some 
 other motive which will serve better as the founda- 
 tion of a democratic system. This motive can 
 be no other than the motive of public service, which 
 at present is seldom invoked save when the workers 
 threaten to stop the process of production by a 
 strike. 
 
 These admirable sentiments were signed by 
 Arthur Henderson, Chairman, and G. D. H. 
 Cole, Secretary. 
 
 The foregoing brief historical resume is 
 inadequate as a commentary upon the change 
 of front manifest by the G-overnment unless 
 reference were made to the conditions under 
 which the Government ignored not only the 
 Memorandum of the trade unionists, but the 
 Joint Report, signed by Sir Allan Smith repre- 
 senting the employers, and Mr Arthur Henderson 
 representing the workers, and countersigned 
 by Sir Thomas Munro, K.B.E., who acted as 
 Chairman. 
 
 Between February and April of 1919, the 
 three sections of the Triple Alliance, thanks to 
 their own sagacity, and supported by the 
 clamorous pressure of the members of the three 
 organisations, had settled their immediate diffi-
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 121 
 
 culties, and, industrial peace appearing to be 
 
 established — at least for the time being, the 
 
 Government could afford to treat both the Joint 
 
 Report and the Memorandum drawn up by the 
 
 Labour side as mere waste paper. It is on 
 
 record that the Miners' strike notices were 
 
 withdrawn in consequence of Smillie and Hodges 
 
 and their responsible colleagues urging the 
 
 acceptance of the Sankey Commission, they no 
 
 doubt feelino' satisfied that no Government and 
 
 ® . . . 
 
 certainly no Prime Minister, who had, if not 
 
 specifically, at least by implication, led the 
 miners to believe that he and his Government 
 would accept the findings of such Commission in 
 respect of the nationalisation of the mines, would 
 fail to carry out the promises made, but again, 
 with unending repetition, the trust of the work- 
 men and their leaders was betrayed by this, the 
 most discreditable Government of modern times. 
 Space does not permit anything like an ample 
 opportunity to chronicle all that has occurred 
 since that period, except that it should be said 
 that no section of Labour which has wrung, froni" 
 the employers, or the Government, any appreci- 
 able benefit would, or could, have achieved the 
 slightest modicum of success without the most 
 resolute determination to press their demands 
 by the actual or threatened withdrawal of their 
 labour power. As dismay follows rapidly upon dis- 
 illusionment, the workers show increased and ever- 
 increasing revolutionary tendencies. Cheated by 
 adequate representation in Parliament, they are
 
 122 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 constrained to think more and more in terms of 
 mass industrial action. 
 
 The Triple Industrial Alliance, ever in the fore- 
 front of the revolutionary working-class move- 
 ment, watched the attempts of the international 
 capitalists and financiers to crush the Soviet 
 power in Russia, and direct action afforded to 
 them the only possible solution of the problem 
 of compelling the Allied and Entente Powers 
 to refrain from interference in Russian affairs. 
 The movement in favour of direct action for 
 definitely and avowedly political purposes has 
 sprung chiefly from an implacable hatred of 
 British interference in the affairs of Socialist 
 Russia, and I have no hesitation in declaring that 
 every attempt to destroy the Soviet power in 
 Russia has contributed in an immeasurable degree 
 to the destruction of bourgeois institutions, not 
 only in Britain, but throughout Western Europe. 
 Following upon a campaign initiated by the 
 Triple Alliance in favour of a complete with- 
 drawal of labour on the part of Miners, Railway- 
 men and Transport Workers, in the event of the 
 Government refusing to alter its Russian policy, 
 the Labour Party Conference at Southport in 
 June 1919, in that part of the Executive Com- 
 mittee's Report read by Mr Henderson, the 
 Secretary, said : — 
 
 The general view of the Executive Committee is 
 that if the British Labour Movement is to institute 
 a new precedent in our industrial history by initiating 
 a general strike for the purpose of achieving not 
 industrial but political objects, it is imperative
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 123 
 
 that the Trade Unions, whose members are to fulfil 
 the obligations implied in the new policy and whose 
 finances it is presumed are to be involved, should 
 realise the responsibilities such a strike movement 
 would entail, and should themselves determine the 
 plan of any such new campaign. 
 
 This was a tactical move on the part of the 
 Executive Committee to deny any responsibility 
 whatsoever for the programme of Direct Action 
 or revolutionary strike action for a clear and 
 unmistakable political object. The present 
 writer, being a member of the Executive Com- 
 mittee of the Labour Party, challenged that 
 portion of the Executive Report, so that its 
 acceptance by the Conference would not pre- 
 judge the direct action Resolution which came 
 up later on the Agenda. He said, among other 
 things, he was trying to voice the sentiments 
 which were increasing in strength among intel- 
 ligent men throughout the entire Labour Move- 
 ment, and in which they wanted to know whether 
 the working-class was ready to alter its tactics, 
 and he thought something should be done at 
 Southport to give trade unionists some oppor- 
 tunity of discussing, and, perchance, deciding, 
 whether they were prepared to adopt strike 
 action in order to achieve their political objects. 
 They had discussed in another place and within 
 another organisation that matter as recently as 
 the previous night, and had decided to arrange 
 a properly-convened Conference of the Delegates 
 of the three organisations of the Triple Alliance, 
 who were then represented.
 
 124 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Much has been said of the power in the hands 
 of that threefold organisation, but he was con- 
 vinced that there were men in other trades and 
 other industries — organised in other Unions — 
 who were as anxious upon the matter of war 
 against Soviet Russia as were the transport 
 workers, the miners and the railwaymen. They, 
 had been told over and over again that certain 
 forms of action were unconstitutional in character, 
 but it must be borne in mind that the constitu- 
 tion of the Labour Party, the Trades' Union 
 Congress and the entire Labour Movement was 
 on every occasion what circumstances might make 
 it. Therefore, his fixed conviction was that 
 inexorable circumstances had compelled them to 
 revolutionise their tactics with regard to these 
 things. It was said that their action was likely 
 to be unconstitutional in character, but was the 
 war against Russia a constitutional war ? Had 
 war been formally declared, had the credits been 
 voted ? One day, when it appeared that the 
 reactionar)'' Koltchak was making a success, the 
 scion of the House of Marlborough — that would- 
 be military dictator, Mr Winston Churchill — 
 applauded and exulted over the success of the 
 reactionaries who were trying to crush the 
 Workers' Republic. When the tide turned and 
 Koltchak was in full retreat before the Red 
 Army of Soviet Russia, Mr Churchill stammered 
 and equivocated, and said : 
 
 We are not engaged in war, we are not sending 
 many men, we are only supplying them with
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 125 
 
 quantities of munitions and materials of war which 
 we cannot use. 
 
 In that way he dissembled his lies. It was im- 
 perative therefore, he, the speaker, urged, that an 
 opportunity be given to those who represented 
 Trade Unions there, to express their opinion as to 
 whether direct action for these political objects 
 was warranted or desirable. His desire was that 
 an ample opportunity should be given to the 
 workers of this country to say whether they were 
 in favour of military intervention directed to 
 crush the Workers' Republic in Russia. If some- 
 thing on these lines could be done, if action came 
 properly, formally and constitutionally from the 
 responsible leaders of Labour in this country, 
 he was convinced that the workers would take 
 action, as they had every indication they would 
 do, throughout the length and breadth of the 
 country. 
 
 Mr Robert Smillie, thereupon, in a motion to 
 move the reference of the paragraph back, said : 
 
 Mr Williams has spoken of Mr Churchill giving a 
 direct challenge to the Labour Movement at the 
 present time. He took it that the Executive Com- 
 mittee of the Labour Party had given a direct 
 challenge in this paragraph to the Labour Movement 
 of the country. The fact that Mr Henderson was 
 called upon by the Chairman to read the paragraph, 
 in order to emphasise it, struck him as being a 
 direct challenge on the question of whether, what 
 is called Trade Union action ought, or ought not, 
 to assist their members in the House of Commons on 
 what were called political questions. It was rather 
 strange that the Executive Committee of the
 
 126 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Labour Party should have taken up exactly the 
 position of every exploiter and capitalist and poli- 
 tician in this country at the present time. They 
 feared more than anything else what had come to be 
 called direct action. But he wanted to put it that 
 direct action might be constitutional action. . . . 
 
 But they were told their action was unconstitu- 
 tional. He would like to follow Mr Williams' state- 
 ment as to whether the action of the Government of 
 this country was constitutional. Had they not 
 deceived the people ? Were they not returned to 
 power under false pretences ? Did not every 
 member of their Committee believe that the present 
 Government was sitting in its place through fraud ? 
 If they believed that the Government deceived and 
 lied to the people in order to get returned, if that 
 was true, was the great Labour Movement not to 
 take any action to get rid of a Government that was 
 sitting there through fraud and deceit ? 
 
 At a later stage of the Conference proceedings, 
 the following Resolution was moved andseconded, 
 and carried by 1,193,000 votes to 935,000 : 
 
 This Conference protests against the continued- 
 intervention by the Allies in Russia, whether by 
 force of arms, by supply of munitions, by financial 
 subsidies, or by commercial blockade ; it calls for 
 the immediate cessation of such intervention ; it 
 demands the removal of the censorship, so that an 
 unbiased public opinion may be formed upon the 
 issues involved ; it denounces the assistance given 
 by the Allies to reactionary bodies in Russia as 
 being a continuation of the war in the interests of 
 financial capitalism, which aims at the destruction 
 of the Russian Socialist Republic, and as being a 
 denial of the rights of peoples to self-determination ; 
 and it instructs the National Executive to consult
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 127 
 
 the Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union 
 Congress, with the view to effective action being 
 taken to enforce these demands by the unreserved 
 use of their political and industrial power. 
 
 From this moment onward the Direct Action 
 Movement developed in intensity as it increased 
 in volume. At the Trades' Union Congress in 
 Glasgow in the same j^ear — 1919 — the Parliamen- 
 tary Committee received unmitigated censure 
 for refusing to convene a special congress follow- 
 ing upon the request made in person by a Delega- 
 tion from the Triple Alliance. The Conference, 
 moreover, fully endorsed the principle of direct 
 action for political purposes by a majority more 
 striking in character than that of the Southport 
 Labour Party Conference. There can be no 
 gainsaying the fact that Labour in its industrial 
 sphere is far more ready to take revolutionary 
 action than would appear from the number of 
 votes cast at election times, although it must be 
 stated that increased militancy on the industrial 
 field, by reason of the constant challenging of 
 the status of the employing class, does create a 
 class solidarity which in turn finds expression in 
 the ballot-box. 
 
 It will be now readily admitted by friend and 
 foe alike that the formation of the Council of 
 Action in 1920 was the result of the painstaking 
 and ceaseless propaganda in favour of revolu- 
 tionary direct action throughout 1919 on the 
 part of the Triple Alliance. Hatred of war and 
 a fear of the Government's reactionary policy 
 inspired the rank and file of the Trade Union
 
 128 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 Movement to demand general strike action against 
 the declared and threatened policy of the Govern- 
 ment to send military aid to Poland in July and 
 August 1920. In those early days of August 
 1920 a similar atmosphere was being created 
 to that which obtained in August 1914 ; and 
 on Saturday, 7th August 1920, the following 
 Memorandum, signed by the undermentioned 
 leaders of the Labour Movement, was published 
 throughout the Press of the country : 
 
 We, the undersigned, being occupied chiefly in 
 the organisation of Labour, both industrially and 
 politically, feel it our duty to warn the British public 
 of the possibility of drifting into another war. 
 
 The war party in this country are using their most 
 supreme efforts to put themselves into the saddle 
 and to involve us in a war against Russia and those 
 who may become her Allies, which will drive us over 
 the precipice of bankruptcy, on the edge of which we 
 now stand . Britain has a National Debt of something 
 like eight thousand millions, and the failure to estab- 
 lish trade relationships again between ourselves and 
 other countries makes for complete economic break- 
 down and national and international disaster. We 
 have spent already more than one hundred million 
 pounds in a futile effort to challenge and destroy 
 Russia's right to her own form of Government. 
 
 Soviet Russia has been not only willing but anxious 
 to make peace on mutually satisfactory terms with 
 her neighbour the Polish State, but we are convinced 
 that all the friendly overtures made by Russia 
 towards a Peace Treaty and a peace settlement were 
 deemed — both by Poland and the French Government 
 in particular — to be a sign of weakness on Russia's 
 part, to be exploited in the most relentless manner.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 129 
 
 Russia faced all the horrors of a Polish invasion 
 of admittedly Russian territory, and braced herself 
 • once more for a supreme effort to resist the domineer- 
 ing intentions of the new Poland. The Soviet 
 authorities are increasingly anxious to make peace 
 with the countries who are openly or covertly at 
 war \Adth her in order to restore her internal situation, 
 but every effort on her part is thwarted first by one 
 and then another. 
 
 The Russian Soviet Government has given clear 
 proof on every occasion that it will agree to Polish 
 independence on even more favourable terms than 
 those suggested by the Allies at Versailles, and to 
 give Poland frontiers better than the suggested 
 " ethnographical line." 
 
 The mischievous article by the present Secretary 
 for War only serves to widen the breach between 
 people of moderate opinion in this country and in 
 Russia, and we have to call attention to the decision 
 of a recent Special Trades' Union Congress, repre- 
 senting some six millions of organised workers, on 
 the peace relationships between Poland and Russia. 
 The following Resolution, moved by Mr Tom Shaw 
 and seconded by Miss Margaret Bondfield, was 
 carried unanimously and ^vith acclamation : — 
 
 That this Trades' Union Congress learns with 
 amazement the new demands submitted to the 
 Russian Government before peace negotiations, 
 on the terms of the Krassin document, are 
 proceeded with. 
 
 The Conference is heartily in favour of any and 
 all action which may lead to peace in Eastern 
 Europe, but warns the British Government and 
 the Spa Conference that anj^ attempts of a 
 clandestine nature to secure the support of the 
 British democracy in order to give military 
 assistance to Poland, is foredoomed to failure. 
 
 I
 
 130 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 The Conference therefore calls upon the Govern- 
 ment to adhere to the terms submitted to and 
 accepted by the Moscow Government as a basis 
 of a lasting peace between Britain and Russia. 
 In our judgment, there is no possibility of any 
 whole-hearted co-operation between the organised 
 work-people and the Government if, and when, any 
 effort is made to involve us in another calamitous war. 
 We think the workers will be thoroughly justified 
 in refusing to render labour services in a war waged 
 in support of a nation which has attempted conquest, 
 spoliation and self -aggrandisement. 
 
 Every visible indication points to the workers 
 desiring only that Russia should conduct her own 
 Government in her own way, leaving Poland, and in 
 fact all other countries, to act similarly ; that is, 
 govern themselves in their own way. 
 
 At the present time we can ill afford to spare even 
 a few thousand men or a few million pounds from our 
 depleted national resources to suit the whims and 
 caprices of the French military faction who are at the 
 back of this Polish enterprise. Houses are lament- 
 ably short, and the prime necessaries of life are 
 becoming increasingly difficult to obtain because of 
 two further years of warfare following upon the 
 Armistice of November 1918. The people in every 
 country want only to devote themselves more and 
 more to rational and peaceful reconstruction in 
 order that the world with its teeming miUions may 
 be made a brighter and more habitable place for the 
 workers and those dependent upon them. 
 
 We have therefore to warn the responsible 
 Governments, the diplomats, and the various foreign 
 ministers, that Labour in this country will not co- 
 operate in a war as the allies of Poland, after the 
 conduct of that country, against which our own 
 Prime Minister has warned the Polish Government 
 again and again.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 131 
 
 By demonstration of their will to peace, their will 
 to settle equitably these interminable quarrels, the 
 British public in general, and the working-class in 
 particular, can make it clear to all whom it may 
 concern that now more than ever we want peace — a 
 real peace, a lasting peace, rather than endless wars 
 and threats of wars. 
 (Signed) Ernest Bevin. Margaret Bondfield. 
 
 C. W. BOWERMAN. J. R. ClYNES. 
 
 C. T. Cramp. Arthur Henderson. 
 
 George Lansbury. William Lunn. 
 
 Tom Mann. James Grady. 
 
 A. A. Purcell. John Robertson. 
 
 Ben Spoor. Stephen Walsh. 
 
 James Wignall. Robert Williams. 
 
 So critical was the position that thousands of 
 Resolutions literally swamped the Offices of the 
 Labour Party, Trades' Union Congress, and 
 found their way into the capitalist as well as 
 the Labour Press. Official Labour of all shades 
 of opinion could not but respond to the imperious 
 demands expressed in every part of the country. 
 " Not a man, not a gun, not a sou," was Labour's 
 watchword at this time, and on 9 th August a 
 General Conference, representing the Parliamen- 
 tary Committee of the Trades' Union Congress, 
 the Executive Committee of the Labour Party 
 and the members of the Parliamentary Labour 
 Party was held in — of all places — the Grand 
 Committee Room of the House of Commons. 
 Labour's policy was made unmistakably clear in 
 the Resolution passed without one dissentient 
 voice or vote ; and revolutionary fervour and 
 proletarian instincts are expressed with indubit-
 
 132 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 able clarity therein. The Resolution was as 
 follows : — 
 
 That this Joint Conference, representing the 
 Trades' Union Congress, the Labour Party and the 
 Parliamentary Labour Party, feels certain that war 
 is being engineered between the Allied Powers and 
 Soviet Russia on the issue of Poland, and declares 
 that such a war would be an intolerable crime 
 against humanity ; it therefore warns the Government 
 that the whole industrial power of the organised loorkers 
 ivill be used to defeat this war. 
 
 That the Executive Committees of afl&liated 
 organisations throughout the country be summoned 
 to hold themselves ready to proceed immediately 
 to London for a National Conference. ' 
 
 That they be advised to instruct their members to 
 " down tools " on instructions from that National 
 Conference. 
 
 And that a Council of Action be immediately 
 constituted to take such steps as may be necessary 
 to carry the above decisions into effect. 
 
 Arising out of the foregoing Resolution, the 
 Council of Action was formed, atid on Friday, 
 13th August 1920, a Special Labour Conference 
 was held at the Central Hall, Westminster, when 
 Delegates to the number of 1044, consisting of 
 689 Representatives of Trade Unions and 355 
 representatives of Local Labour Parties and 
 Trades' Councils, were present. The utmost 
 enthusiasm and unanimity was manifest through- 
 out the whole of the proceedings, and after the 
 Delegates had signified their approval of the 
 formation of the Council of Action, the following, 
 which was the chief Resolution, was put to the 
 Conference and carried with acclamation : —
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 1S3 
 
 That this Conference of Trade Union and Labour 
 Representatives hails Avith satisfaction the Russian 
 Government's declaration in favour of the complete 
 independence of Poland as set forth in their Peace 
 Terms to Poland, and realising the gravity of the 
 international situation, pledges itself to resist any 
 and ever}^ form of military and naval intervention 
 against the Soviet Government of Russia. 
 
 It accordingly instructs the Council of Action to 
 remain in being until they have secured : — 
 
 L An absolute guarantee that the armed forces 
 of Great Britain shall not be used in support 
 of Poland, Baron Wrangel, or anj^ other 
 military or naval effort against the Soviet 
 Government . 
 
 2. The withdrawal of all British naval forces 
 
 operating directh' or indirectly as a blockad- 
 ing influence against Russia. 
 
 3. The recognition of the Russian Soviet Govern- 
 
 ment and the establishment of unrestricted 
 trading and commercial relationships between 
 Great Britain and Russia. 
 
 This Conference further refuses to be associated 
 with any Alliance between Great Britain and France 
 or any other country which commits us to any 
 support of Wrangel, Poland, or the supply of 
 munitions or other war material for any form of 
 attack upon Soviet Russia. 
 
 This Conference authorises the Council of Action 
 to call for any and every withdrawal of Labour 
 which circumstances may require to give effect to 
 the foregoing policy, and calls upon ever}' Trade 
 Union official, Executive Committee, Local Council 
 of Action, and the membership in general, to act 
 swiftly, loyally, and courageously in order to sweep 
 away secret bargaining and diplomacy, and to assure 
 that the foreign policy of Great Britain may be in
 
 134 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 accord with the well-known desires of the people for 
 an end to war and the interminable threats of war. 
 
 Direct action has, therefore, left the propa- 
 ganda stage and has become part of the explicit 
 plan and avowed programme of the British 
 Labour Movement. Those of us who have not 
 been content with the declarations expressed in 
 pious resolutions, but who have desired to impreg- 
 nate the Labour Movement with a spirit of 
 iron resolution, were satisfied, while being amazed, 
 to hear the " moderate " men who had hitherto 
 denounced direct action, readily declare their 
 devotion to this Resolution. Mr J. R. Clynes, 
 Mr J. H. Thomas, Mr Tom Shaw and a host of 
 others placed their hands on their hearts and 
 testified to their conversion to the principle, 
 and they hastened in every way to oppose the 
 impending war on the side of Poland against 
 Soviet Russia, realising full well that every 
 efi'ort to crush Sovietism in Russia was acceler- 
 ating the advent of Sovietism in Great Britain. 
 
 To those of my readers who are opposed to 
 direct action, I make a present of the fact that 
 the principle was turned down at the Special 
 Conference to consider joint strike action in 
 favour of the nationalisation of mines. This 
 can be readily understood, for there never was 
 any deep-rooted desire to risk revolutionary 
 strike action in favour of nationalisation or 
 socialisation in respect of one single industry, 
 important though the principle may be in con- 
 nection with mining affairs.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 135 
 
 Notwithstanding the allegations of sordidness 
 frequently made against the workers of this and 
 other countries, they are never more prepared to 
 make great sacrifices and to fight resolutely than 
 for some great far-reaching question of principle. 
 As a matter of fact, the biggest fights in the 
 industrial history of this country have been more 
 for principle than for material gain. 
 
 The Transport Strike in 1911 was fought for 
 the principle of the abolition of the infamous 
 "ticket" of the Shipping Federation, which 
 imposed a slave status upon the men in the 
 mercantile marine. The Eailway Strike of the 
 same year was fought for — and did actually 
 achieve — a recognition of the Railwaymen's 
 Union. In 1912 the great Miners' Strike was 
 conducted for the purpose of establishing the 
 minimum wage, but it largely arose out of the 
 inability of one section — that in South Wales — 
 to deal with the problem of abnormal places. 
 Noteworthy strikes in the railway world were 
 fought for the reinstatement of two unjustly 
 treated members of the Railwaymen's Union. 
 The first, which took place on the North-Eastern 
 Railway, was due to the unwarrantable dismissal 
 of Driver Knox, who had been involved in some 
 Police Court proceedings which were subse- 
 quently revokecl, thus holding the legal process 
 up to the derision of the work-people. In the 
 other case, which concerned Guard Richardson 
 of Shefiield, an employee of the Midland Railway 
 Company, the workers struck in sympathy with
 
 136 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 a colleague who had been unwarrantably dis- 
 missed, owing to some alleged dereliction of duty. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that the workers are 
 never more prepared to throw the whole of their 
 position into the melting - pot than on some 
 question of justice or for some great principle. 
 
 Restrictions on space prevent one from offer- 
 ing more than a brief summary of recent events, 
 in order more than sufficiently to prove the 
 justification for, and the utility and effectiveness 
 of, direct action on the part of the workers. 
 
 The present chapter would be incomplete 
 were some reference not made to the Railway 
 Strike which took place in September- October 
 1919. Here again the Railwaymen were at 
 variance with the Government on two questions 
 of principle, namely, those of stabilisation of war 
 wages and of the standardisation of the condi- 
 tions amongst similar grades on different lines. 
 Although the Railwaymen might have avoided 
 the Strike, had they relied upon the accession 
 of strength which their association with Mine 
 Workers and Trans20ort Workers gave to them, 
 they inadvertently, and, I contend, unadvisedly, 
 went into the Strike without consultation with 
 their partners in the Triple Alliance. Political 
 ineptitude and double-dealing on the part of the 
 brothers Geddes was the most provocative factor 
 to the employees' side, and as a last resort, and 
 without the support of the Miners and Transport 
 Workers, which had been of such assistance in 
 the previous year, the Strike, with its consequent
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 137 
 
 dislocation of transport and industry, was form- 
 ally declared. 
 
 The Eailwaymen, who throughout the war 
 had been most peaceful and law-abiding, had 
 now, in the words of the Prime Minister, become 
 a body of men who either were themselves, or 
 w^ere influenced by, a number of "anarchist 
 conspirators." 
 
 Members of the Transport Workers' Federa- 
 tion were immediately involved, by reason of 
 the collateral transport services — coastal, canal 
 and road and highway — which they operated 
 being thrown in a state of dislocation. Despite 
 the fact that as partners in the Triple Alliance 
 they should have been consulted, class solidarity 
 would not allow them to offer fine-spun criticism 
 at such a crucial moment, and they, therefore, 
 took it upon themselves to organise a Conference 
 of Unions already involved and likely to be 
 involved, with a view to going to the assistance 
 of their friends and colleao;ues of the National 
 Union of Railwaymen. On 1st October the 
 Conference of the above-mentioned Unions was 
 held, and immediate representation was made to 
 the Government to the effect that the Negotiat- 
 ing Committee, acting on behalf of the Confer- 
 ence, were anxious to interview the members of 
 the Cabinet with a view, either to the promotion 
 of a settlement likely to meet with the satisfac- 
 tion of the N.U.E,. or with a view to the extension 
 of the dispute, on account of the identity of 
 interests of the workers as a class. A situation
 
 138 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 of the utmost gravity had arisen, and the Nego- 
 tiating Committee used its good offices in order, 
 if possible, to promote an amicable settlement. 
 The Prime Minister and those who were advising 
 him had hitherto assumed an absolutely irre- 
 sponsible attitude, and spent tens of thousands 
 of pounds of the ratepayers' money in vilifying 
 the Railwaymen's organisation, and in attempt- 
 ing to seduce other sections of the working-class 
 from their allegiance to the cause of their com- 
 rades on the railways. All possible steps were 
 taken by the authorities, in their own hypocritical 
 parlance, to utilise the resources of the State, 
 which meant, of course, all the means at the 
 disposal of those who represent the propertied 
 interests, in order to defeat the Strike. 
 
 Volunteers were enrolled to supply a skeleton 
 service, especially on the Underground Railways 
 of the Metropolis, and to a lesser extent on the 
 great railways of the country. 
 
 The Negotiating Committee representing the 
 informal Conference had fully convinced them- 
 selves that the Strike was just an ordinary one 
 for themaintenance of the economic status secured 
 by years of organised effort on the part of the 
 Railwaymen, and they repeatedly warned the 
 Government that unless they adopted a more 
 reasonable attitude it w^ould be impossible to 
 avert a widespread extension to other industries, 
 thus creating the gravest industrial crisis with 
 which this or any other country had been con- 
 fronted. Faced with a new situation and being
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 139 
 
 fully aware of the revolutionary possibilities likely 
 to be involved in tbe event of an extension of 
 the dispute, the Government adopted a far more 
 tractable attitude, and in consequence of the 
 changed view-point, which itself was the outcome 
 of the declaration of policy on the part of the 
 Negotiating Committee, speaking in the name 
 of some four millions of organised workers, the 
 Government efiected the settlement upon which 
 a resumption of work took place. 
 
 All my experience in these matters has con- 
 veyed to me the conviction that when the workers 
 are negotiating with the employers, or with the 
 Government, which invariably represents the 
 employers, they exercise an incalculably greater 
 influence when they speak in terms of industrial 
 strength and power, than when they speak politi- 
 cally on the floor of the House of Commons or 
 elsewhere. The most able of our Parliamentary 
 exponents, if and when he relies upon mere 
 political influence, is treated with derision by the 
 Government and its spokesmen. Those of us, 
 however, who are enabled to speak with the in- 
 dustrial mass movement implicitly and inexorably 
 behind us, can make the Government change its 
 plans as readily as we are told the chameleon 
 changes its skin. This present Government, like 
 most Governments, respects only force. They 
 will deny it, as is their wont ; they will profess 
 they will not yield to it, as has ofttimes been 
 the case ; but in every instance, according to my 
 own knowledge and as the outcome of my own
 
 140 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 experience, the Government will eat their own 
 words and will go down on their knees, as they 
 have done so frequently, and make every possible 
 concession, if only the forces of organised Labour 
 will make the necessary economic and industrial 
 demonstration. 
 
 We see, therefore, the revolutionary leavening 
 as it works upon the hitherto inert mass, influ- 
 enced by underlying economic and industrial 
 conditions. The mind of the workers is being 
 thus prepared by revolutionary tendencies for 
 revolutionary purposes and possibilities, for the 
 evidence of the industrial and economic fact is 
 infinitely more eff'ective than the propaganda of 
 the spoken or written word. 
 
 Who is there, except the paid hack of the 
 Capitalist Press, who can deny the inalienable 
 right of the workers to use every means at their 
 disposal for the purpose of securing their 
 economic and industrial freedom ? Did the 
 Barons who wrung the Magna Charta from King 
 John split dialectical hairs in the process of 
 applying direct action ? A re the workers, who 
 can exercise far more relative strength than 
 could the Barons against King John, going to be 
 deterred by appeals to constitutional procedure ? 
 
 Well might the members of the British 
 Delegation to Russia rub their eyes when they 
 saw flaunted before them over the Opera House 
 in Moscow the declaration of the Soviet authori- 
 ties : "Direct Action is the Short Cut to the 
 Dictatorship of the Proletariat." It is not in
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 141 
 
 Kussia alone that the truth of that slogfan is 
 vindicated, for in the British War Office all the 
 implications of massed industrial action are 
 realised more than is the case in many Trade 
 Union Offices. In Russia they are realists, and 
 the world-wide proletarian tendencies are watched 
 with the most painstaking diligence. The organ- 
 ised workers in Denmark, by means of their 
 General Strike, brought the occupant of the 
 throne and his reactionary counsellors to a sense 
 of responsibility. During the time of the infamous 
 Kapp Putch in Germany, while the politicians — 
 social-democrat as well as bourgeois — were in 
 full flight from the capital, the organisations of 
 the workers fought the Junkers and militarists 
 and brought them finally to their knees. Of 
 what avail were the wordy protests of the time- 
 serving politicians against the display of armed 
 force by the Baltic and East Prussian militarists, 
 anxious to restore the Hohenzollern dynasty ? 
 The political citadel fell before a shot was fired. 
 But how much less eff'ective were the operations 
 of the military against the will and determina- 
 tion of Germany's organised millions. Eailway, 
 mining and metallurgical industries were paralysed 
 as though by the stroke of a wizard's wand. 
 Even the grave-diggers refrained from their task 
 of burying the dead I 
 
 When the w^orkers dare, they can do. Chan- 
 cellors and foreign ministers can declare for 
 wars, Parliaments may vote the credits, but it 
 remains for the mass of the common people to
 
 142 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 give or to withhold their sovereign labour power. 
 General Strike is immeasurably more powerful 
 than General Ludendorff or General Foch : before 
 the General Strike, the General Election pales 
 into insignificance ! Compare the achievements 
 of parliamentary action with industrial action in 
 this or any other country. The Parliamentary 
 Labour Party has used its collective strength, 
 since its success in 1906, to reduce the tax on 
 tea by twopence in the pound. One of its most 
 able financial experts, Mr Philip Snowden, has 
 made speech after speech on the Budget Debate, 
 proving by the most remorseless logic the need 
 to place taxation on those shoulders best able to 
 bear it. Yet speeches, debates and parliamentary 
 " action " have proved impotent. Industrial 
 action, on the other hand, has made it possible 
 for the organised workers to obtain the necessary 
 purchasing power with which to buy tea, and 
 now and then to add sugar and milk. Truly 
 could Karl Marx say the British working-class 
 were the pugilists of the proletariat of Europe. 
 
 We have learned the lesson that without 
 industrial power and influence politics are worse 
 than useless. Political activity can do no more 
 than reflect the economic strength of the opponents 
 waging the war of the classes. The rivalries of 
 class interests are more conspicuous than ever 
 before in human history, and these rivalries, these 
 diametrically opposed interests, receive their 
 clearest expression in mine, factory and work- 
 shop. They flow from underlying economic and
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 143 
 
 industrial factors. Church, Press and Parlia- 
 ment cannot counteract the impelling force of 
 class solidarity. Pevolutionary Labour and 
 Socialism alone can direct these new-world forces. 
 
 I was amused when visiting the Putiloflf 
 Engineering Works, near Petrograd, to see that 
 the Bolshevists had allowed the sacred icons 
 which the bourgeois management in the Tsarist 
 days had placed in numerous entrances and exits 
 in the hope that the workers would be induced 
 to tolerate their hell -on -earth existence in 
 expectation of reward in Heaven, to remain. 
 Religious icons have as much effect on the 
 mentality of the workers in a modern engineering 
 establishment as the dorne of St Paul's Cathedral 
 or the front of Westminster Abbey have on the 
 mind of a London bus driver. 
 
 Modern wealth production has become an 
 intricate and delicate social process. The problem 
 of production has been already solved, but we 
 are now faced with the problem of ensu ring- 
 that the wealth that is socially produced shall be 
 equitably distributed. " From each according to 
 his ability : to each according to his needs." Those 
 who are able but unwilling to work shall starve. 
 
 " Faint in the East, behold the dawn appears!" 
 says Edward Carpenter in one of his beautiful 
 Socialist poems. This is prophecy as well as 
 allegorical allusion. Russia provides us with 
 the epoch-making example of Socialism at work. 
 Not some-day social reconstruction ; not fifty- 
 years-hence amelioration of wage-slavery ; not
 
 144 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 high-sounding phrase-mongering; not revolution- 
 by-easy-gradual- and- imperceptible-accretions-of- 
 social-reform ; but to-day, right-now, Socialism 
 or Communism. Russia, which, contrary to 
 much of what scientific Socialism taught, is over- 
 whelmingly agricultural, and not having gone 
 through the industrial transition, proceeds to 
 unroll the great world-drama of Class War, 
 proletarian dictatorship and social revolution. 
 Never let it be forgotten that revolution cannot 
 succeed unless and until moral and economic 
 preparedness have made themselves manifest. 
 Russia stumbles through 1914, 1915, 1916 and 
 a small portion of 1917. Notoriously backward, 
 industrially and agriculturally, she is unable to 
 withstand the strain of the long-drawn-out 
 war. The tottering Tsarist bureaucracy cannot 
 give the populace bread, nor could Kerensky's 
 bourgeois Government stabilise capitalism on 
 the Western basis. 
 
 During 1915 and 1916 one could only dare 
 hope that it might be possible to avert a suc- 
 cessful alliance of the three great reactionary 
 empires — Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia 
 — emerging from the war. How we rejoiced when 
 in February 1917 there came news of the first 
 soul-stirring Revolution and the abdication of 
 the Tsar. Who amongst revolutionaries cared 
 which country should dictate the terms of peace, 
 so long as they knew that the people of Russia 
 were coming into their long-delayed heritage ? 
 History must testify that this, the Russian
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 145 
 
 Revolution, is the great turning-point of the 
 Twentieth Century — the break-up of capitalism 
 and landlordism and the eventual conquest of 
 power by the resolute Bolshevik Party in Russia. 
 Lenin, the implacable revolutionary, will be 
 honoured by posterity when the names of the 
 various individuals who " won the war" will be 
 bidden in a merciful oblivion. 
 
 I have already made reference, in the chapter 
 on The Changing Outlook, to the collapse of 
 what is called the " Second International." It 
 was an International built, not upon the im- 
 pregnable rock of international working-class 
 solidarity, but upon the shifting sands of political 
 exigency and parliamentary expediency. Its 
 slogan, uttered faint-heartedly, was " Death to 
 Militarism " ; and during the tumultuous period 
 of declarations of war and the mobilisation of 
 the armed forces in the various countries, the 
 leaders of the Second International, if they had 
 been true to the cause which they nominally 
 espoused, would have resisted by every means in 
 their power the preparations which the militarists 
 and imperialists were making to plunge the 
 workers of Europe into the cauldron of war. It 
 was as true in August 1 9 1 4 as it was in 1913, and 
 as it is in 1921 : the workers have no fatherland, 
 the workers' interests in Great Britain are not 
 opposed to those of the workers in Germany — in 
 fact their interests are identical. Their eman- 
 cipation from age-long wage-slavery can only be 
 achieved by the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the 
 
 K
 
 146 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 landlord and capitalist class, together with their 
 flunkeys and hangers-on, Noske, Schiedemann 
 and Legien in Germany ; Appleton, Henderson 
 and Barnes in Britain ; Renaudel and Jouhaux 
 in France ; Vandervelde in Belgium, and a host 
 of others too numerous to mention, conveniently 
 forgot all they had ever said regarding inter- 
 national working-class solidarity, and became 
 social patriots of the most pronounced kind. 
 Instead of ofi'ering the stoutest and most un- 
 yielding opposition to the voting of the credits, 
 to the production of war material and to the 
 mobilisation and transport of troops and muni- 
 tions of war, they took part in the recruiting 
 campaigns, the campaigns for the increase of the 
 production of munitions and the subordination 
 of working-class interests to the prosecution 
 of their masters' war. Men who, before the 
 war, had predicted the downfall of European 
 capitalism, and who by lip-service championed 
 the cause of the oppressed of all lands, men like 
 Hyndman, Guesde, Plekanhov, Schiedemann and 
 Vandervelde, themselves the champions of the 
 Second International, delivered the death-blow 
 to that International during the period of the 
 war. Notwithstanding the palpable recreancy, 
 not to say treachery, of these erstwhile social- 
 revolutionaries, these class-war advocates, others 
 remained loyal to the cause of international 
 working-class solidarity. Even during the war, 
 when efforts in that direction were made by the 
 Socialists in the neutral countries, Renaudel,Van-
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 147 
 
 clervelde, and especially the chauvinistic section 
 of the British Working-class Movement, strongly- 
 opposed each and every attempt to re-establish 
 the Second International, So early in the war as 
 September 1914, the Swiss Socialist Party under- 
 took to make tentative overtures to the Socialists 
 in the belligerent countries with a view to Socialist 
 and proletarian reconciliation. Again in April 
 1915 there were further conferences and inter- 
 views, to which, of course, wide publicity could 
 not be given, because of the repressive methods 
 adopted by Governments. The first definite and 
 now widely-known attempt to re-establish the 
 International was made in May 1915, the out- 
 come of which was, that in September of the 
 same year a conference was held at Zimmerwalde, 
 which was the renaissance of the International, 
 Again, a further conference was held, this time 
 at Kienthal, in April 1916, which was attended 
 by Lenin and members of the Revolutionary 
 Left of the International Socialist Movement. 
 
 The most clearly defined aspiration of the 
 Russian Revolutionary Movement, after the 
 break-up of the Tsarist Government in February 
 1917, was the effort to hold the Stockholm Con- 
 ference in the same year, which effort was so 
 strongly opposed by the Governments of the 
 belligerent countries. Russia offered a way out 
 of the war by declaring in favour of peace with- 
 out annexations, indemnities and with the right 
 of self-determination of peoples. But the possi- 
 bilities of the Stockholm Conference were de-
 
 148 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 stroyed, not so much by the Governments, as by 
 the collusion of the Socialist leaders of the Right, 
 who were still obsessed with the desire to carry 
 on the war to the bitter end. 
 
 The Second International bled slowly to death 
 because of the complete inability of its most 
 prominent advocates to carry out the implica- 
 tions of their earlier Socialist principles. After 
 the Second, or Communist, Revolution in Russia, 
 the Bolshevik Party gradually became the 
 strongest Communist Party in the world. The 
 members realised that as the Second International 
 had superseded the First, so must the " Third 
 International " supersede the Second, and accord- 
 ingly, in March 1919, at Moscow, the First 
 Congress of Communist Parties was held, based 
 upon an immediate Socialist Revolution in all 
 countries, and the establishment of the Dictator- 
 ship of the Proletariat as a means of effecting the 
 final and decisive overthrow of the International 
 bourgeoisie. No illusions concerning Interna- 
 tional Capitalism were entertained by the Russian 
 Communist Party ; they must either destroy 
 capitalism in Western Europe, they declared, or 
 themselves be destroyed. 
 
 War has been waged against the Soviet institu- 
 tions by Koltchak, Denikin, Yudenitch, Ironside, 
 Wrangel and by Poland, each and every counter- 
 revolutionary action being supported, either 
 jointly or in their respective turns, by the repre- 
 sentatives of International capitalism, and particu- 
 larly by the assassins of the British Government.
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 149 
 
 Tiie first business of the directors of Soviet 
 policy was to searcli the archives of their own 
 Foreign Office, in order to discover the facts and 
 the inferences obtainable from the documents 
 concerning the secret treaties made between 
 Tsarist Russia and her Allies. There is abundant 
 documentary evidence proving the complicity of 
 the British Government especially, and the Allied 
 G-overnments in general, in the various efforts 
 to overthrow the Soviet regime. Mr Churchill, 
 the War Minister, conspired, over the heads of 
 the " sovereign people " of Great Britain, and 
 behind the backs of many of his colleagues in the 
 Government, for the purpose of giving all the 
 help possible to the counter-revolutionaries who 
 have from time to time attacked Soviet Eussia. 
 While the British Labour Delegation were in 
 Moscow they were placed in possession of a 
 document proving that Churchill conspired with 
 Lieut. -General Golovin, who was acting as a 
 kind of liaison officer between the Allied Govern- 
 ments and Sazanoff, the ex-Tsarist Minister of 
 Russia, then resident in Paris. This document, 
 sent by Golovin to Sazanoff, was in turn sent to 
 Koltchak at Omsk, to the White Government at 
 Archangel, which was controlled in a military 
 sense by General Ironside in the name of Great 
 Britain, and also to Denikin's forces operating in 
 the Crimea. In the report of the interview 
 between himself and Churchill, which Golovin 
 presents, Mr Churchill has placed it on record 
 that —
 
 150 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 1. The question of giving armed support was for 
 himself the most difficult one ; the reason for this 
 was the opposition of the British working-class to 
 armed intervention. But even in this matter, 
 without promising anything, he would try to help. 
 He had declared in the House of Commons that 
 fresh forces were necessary for the purpose of 
 evacuating the North. 
 
 2. As far as giving us material support was 
 concerned, Churchill said that he is already giving 
 such, and that he will continue to do so to the fullest 
 possible extent ; for this he intends to ask for twenty- 
 four million pounds sterling for the supply of all our 
 fronts, and if the circumstances will require it, he 
 is willing to supply armaments and other materials 
 for the Northern Army and for General Yudenitch 
 for another £100,000. 
 
 Here we have the fullest and most satisfactory 
 proof of the utility of the direct action campaign 
 initiated by the Triple Alliance in 1919. 
 
 The Russian Communists realise, as indeed all 
 Communists realise, that if Russia is allowed to 
 divert her younger and more virile manhood from 
 the various fighting fronts, into what she calls 
 her "bloodless front," namely, industrial and agri- 
 cultural operations, she will be able to establish a 
 state of affairs, wherein conditions of life of the 
 working-class in Russia will gradually improve, 
 as they are gradually worsening, because of the 
 economic collapse, in all the capitalist countries ; 
 and it is because of these attacks from without, and 
 the conditions obtaining elsewhere, that the Third 
 International has set its mind on the practicability 
 of World Revolution. All the factors which 
 operated in Russia to bring about the final over-
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 151 
 
 throw of capitalism are operating to a greater or 
 lesser degree throughout Europe and America. 
 
 In Britain a numerically weak, but morally 
 influential Communist Party is already in being, 
 and every day brings an accession of strength to 
 its ranks. Periodically, Mr Ramsay Macdonald 
 and his colleagues of the Second International 
 may make an appeal on behalf of that body, 
 which rejects the principle of the Dictatorship 
 of the Proletariat and an armed insurrection on 
 the part of the workers. Every manifesto issued 
 on behalf of the Second International receives 
 the fullest approval of the Capitalist Press, and 
 that approval and the patronage bestowed by 
 leader writers on Mr Ramsay Macdonald and 
 his colleagues hastens its collapse, and that of 
 such of its adherents as remain. In Germany 
 the Left section of the Independent Socialists 
 and the Communist Party have held their Unity 
 Conference, and to-day they go forward from 
 success to success, with over half a million 
 members, pledged to all the implications of 
 Communism and the forcible overthrow of the 
 bourgeoisie by the working-class. In France 
 the Leaders of the Centre as well as those of 
 the Right have refused to accept the principles 
 upon which the Third International has been 
 established, but the Communist Party remains, 
 and will develop in proportion to the collapse 
 of the superstructure of French capitalist society, 
 and the hastening process of disillusionment of 
 the French workers and smaller peasants. 
 
 The Third International is an organisation of
 
 152 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 deeds and not words ; its leaders and its Executive 
 are fully aware that a Revolution cannot be actu- 
 ally brought about entirely by agitation, but 
 they declare unhesitatingly that the forces which 
 operated to bring about the destruction of the 
 Tsarist Government in Russia, and eventually 
 the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, are operating 
 to a greater or lesser degree in every country 
 where capitalist institutions are dominant. Un- 
 employment, destitution, ruin and starvation 
 face the working-class under bourgeois misrule. 
 
 Is it to be imagined that the German work- 
 people are going to pay rent, interest and profit 
 to their own landlord and capitalist class, and 
 then furnish to the Allies the indemnities 
 demanded under the Peace Treaty of Versailles ? 
 The German working-class must eventually 
 become Red, as did the Russian working-class. 
 
 While the Revolutionary Movement in Western 
 Europe will derive additional strength from the 
 worthy object-lesson of the Russian experiment, 
 so, on the other hand, however well the reaction- 
 ary forces arm and prepare to resist a repetition 
 in their respective countries, the development of 
 the Third International will increase with the 
 growth of economic pressure. It does not admit 
 the rights of property or of hereditary privileges ; 
 it contemplates the salvation of the toiling masses 
 of the world, who have been hitherto enslaved by 
 the capitalist system, and whose lot has been de- 
 graded and dehumanised by war and the aftermath 
 of war. The Third, or Communist, International
 
 THE NEWER OUTLOOK 153 
 
 repudiates bourgeois democracy. It says plainly 
 and unmistakably that to resist the dictatorship 
 of the workers is to accept the dictatorship of 
 the exploiters; it neither shudders at nor shrinks 
 from the implications of an armed uprising, with 
 the possibility, nay, certainty, of sanguinary 
 casualties ; its exponents, realising the havoc of 
 war and the horrors of industrial peace, are 
 prepared to take every risk, to make every 
 sacrifice and to suffer any ordeal, in order to 
 bring about proletarian emancipation. Better 
 one death in the glorious cause of the social 
 revolution, than a hundred in a bond-holders' war. 
 
 The corpse of the Second International has 
 been brought to London, but the guile and 
 subterfuge of its champions and the patronage 
 of the bourgeois Press and politicians cannot save 
 it from decay and putrescence. Bourgeois social 
 democracy is as dead as Manchester Liberalism ; 
 and the now energetic and pulsating Third 
 International is destined to grow as unemploy- 
 ment and destitution make themselvesincreasingly 
 manifest in Western Europe. Capitalism cannot 
 restabilise itself, and despite the frantic efforts 
 of its avowed supporters, as well as those of others 
 who attempt to curry favour by allying them- 
 selves therewith, a new order, based upon pro- 
 letarian brotherhood, must supersede capitalism. 
 
 The Second International is Dead : Long live 
 the Third Internatfonal !
 
 IN CONCLUSION 
 
 To summarise tlie foregoing chapters, one has 
 pointedly to declare one's own beliefs regarding 
 immediate and ultimate developments. 
 
 We social revolutionaries do not ask ourselves 
 whether the Revolution is cominsc, although we 
 speculate as to how it will come. Nor do we 
 testify everlastingly to our oAvn studied modera- 
 tion by discussing how easy matters will be for 
 the exploiter " when Labour rules." Socialism 
 or Communism to us is not the government of 
 men so much as the administration of things. 
 
 Noske and Schiedemann wanted to "govern" 
 with the help of the White Guards and the 
 discarded Prussian jack-boot. 
 
 An iron discipline will, of course, be necessary 
 during the revolutionary crises, and later in the 
 transition from Capitalism to Communism. 
 
 The Old Order is visibly breaking up. The 
 unemployment problem becomes more and more 
 acute. Those who have taken toll of three- 
 fourths of the product of our labour in reward 
 for their "directive ability" and "superior 
 brains " cannot avert the disinteg-ration and 
 decay of their own cherished system. During 
 the war they accumulated piles of credit and 
 money values, which to-day they are totally 
 unable to realise. The free circulation of com- 
 modities is the breath of the nostrils of the 
 Capitalist System. 
 
 154
 
 CONCLUSION 155 
 
 They spent £8,000,000,000 destroying life, 
 and now shrink from spending a tithe of this to 
 maintain life. They would have spent another 
 £8,000,000,000 and waded through seas of 
 human blood to destroy the Soviet power in 
 Russia, if Labour had voted the men and 
 materials as willingly as a suborned House of 
 Commons voted the credits. 
 
 The Representativesof theFederation of British 
 Industries, the Financiers, the Landlords, the 
 Brewers, the Distillers and the time-serving 
 office-bearers who constitute the Coalition, are 
 in a mess from which they are unable to extricate 
 their precious selves. They want Germany to 
 pay hundreds of millions of pounds in goods to 
 us and France at a time when they are formu- 
 lating anti-dumping legislation. 
 
 During the war, and in order to lessen our 
 debts to the United States, the British Govern- 
 ment requisitioned millions of pounds' worth of 
 overseas securities which were taken from the 
 previous owners in exchange for war-script. The 
 workers of those countries in which investments 
 were made will now pay tribute, not to the British 
 investors, but to the American bond-holders ; but 
 the British investors will get, or attempt to get, a 
 satisfactory return, and it can come only from the 
 British working-class, who, if they consent, will be 
 doubly exploited to pay interest onthewar-inflated 
 homeinvestments and the war-indebtedness. Well 
 may we say that while young men gave their lives, 
 old men loaned their money !
 
 156 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 The Capitalist System is packed full with its 
 own inherent contradictions. AVise men, wishful 
 to preserve the present order, would have cut 
 the loans from one country to another and stimu- 
 lated international trade to the utmost degree, 
 rather than hampering and embarrassing it to 
 the extent to which the present mismanagers 
 have done. Trade and commerce need peace 
 and trading with Russia, but finance and short- 
 sighted politics promote war, and, when this fails, 
 sabotage trade. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the character of the 
 Government restrains Lloyd George from the 
 course which instinctively he knows to be best 
 for him and his colleagues. He has realised that 
 the costly Russian war will bring its Nemesis, as 
 the Boer War did to all who actively supported it. 
 
 No, do what they now can, these contradic- 
 tions will perplex and ultimately baffle them. 
 Unemployment increases, and while some tem- 
 porary relief may come in the Spring or Summer 
 with increased trade, the crisis generally will 
 become more and more acute. Their suggested 
 remedy for bad trade — lower wages — can only 
 adversely affect the total volume of employment 
 by lessening the effective demand at home. The 
 stalwarts of the Capitalist System in Europe and 
 America may look confidently forward to a general 
 decrease in wages, forced down by the pressure 
 of the unemployed ; but this will stimulate 
 enormously the revolutionary movement. 
 
 If the governing classes are able to weather
 
 CONCLUSION 157 
 
 the present storm, it will only be for a time, 
 when they will be confronted with another even 
 more furious. The Labour Movement is gather- 
 ing strength and momentum for an attack by 
 some form of mass action. This threatened at the 
 time of the Railway Strike in 1919; it became 
 again practicable during the Mining Strike of 
 1920. The Triple Alliance, had it but responded 
 to the pressure of the militants at the time of 
 the most recent mining crisis, would have pre- 
 cipitated a revolutionary situation. 
 
 Those who constantly aver that the British 
 working-class would not participate in a general 
 strike policy do not know the history of their own 
 Trade Union and Labour Movement. Industri- 
 ally, the British Labour Movement is the best 
 and strongest in the world. Did not Marx say 
 we were the prize-fighters of the International 
 Proletariat ? Politically we move slowly, but 
 we move. Direct action for political purposes, 
 as has been shown over and over again, has 
 captured the hearts and minds of the working- 
 class. There were prejudices to be overcome ; 
 there were obstinate individuals to be strenuously 
 fought in our own ranks ; but the outer defences 
 of our opponents have been destroyed. 
 
 Moreover, to learn to strike straight is to learn 
 to vote straight. The recent Bye-Election at 
 Abertillery, where one of the foremost advocates 
 of direct action won so signal a victory, proves 
 the accuracy of the foregoing contention. It 
 will come to be regarded that he who votes for
 
 158 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 a candidate of the master class is as much an 
 enemy of the Working-class as one who " scabs" 
 in an industrial dispute. 
 
 Industrial solidarity is the prelude of political 
 solidarity. Every strike, whether for definite econ- 
 omic advance or for political purpose, is a phase 
 of the class struggle. Clear-thinking workers 
 now recognise that to attempt to improve their 
 economic status by raising nominal or money 
 wages is like twisting ropes of sand. They sup- 
 port wage movements nevertheless, because they 
 increase militancy, stimulate class antagonism, 
 and bring disillusionment of the old-time fallacy 
 of a " Fair day's wage for a fair day's work." 
 
 "Increased Output," as a ready-made panacea, 
 was loudly acclaimed immediately following the 
 Armistice, not only by the Government and the 
 employing class, but was repeated by certain 
 well - known Labour leaders in the infamous 
 " Gate to More " posters which confronted us on 
 the public hoardings. How futile were these 
 "reach-me-down" arguments can be better 
 appreciated to-day, when the unemployed army 
 totals something like two million men and 
 women, and the policy of the self-same Govern- 
 ment and employers appears to be decreased 
 production and universal short-time. 
 
 The growingly intelligent mass may be de- 
 ceived once or twice, but they cannot be deceived 
 for ever. Those Trade Union officials who 
 eagerly supported the appeals made by and on 
 behalf of the master class for increased output,
 
 CONCLUSION 159 
 
 despite the fact that they have tried to eat their 
 own egregious words, have lost any influence 
 they ever had with the discerning section of the 
 workers. " More production " under the Capi- 
 talist System must and can only mean more un- 
 employment. Under Socialism, increased output 
 would automatically add to the available supplies 
 to be equitably distributed among one and all, and 
 would give everyone an improved standard. 
 
 When it comes, the revolutionary situation 
 will be the result of the partial or complete 
 collapse of the present order of society. It may 
 emerge from the acute unemployment crisis ; it 
 may come after the captains of industry attempt 
 successfully or unsuccessfully to take advantage 
 of the mass of unemployed to force down the 
 wages of those who remain in employment. 
 Mass action will produce general strike organi- 
 sation on the lines of Workers' Councils ; this 
 will challenge existing political organisation. 
 The Labour Party may have parliamentary 
 power thrust upon them by such a crisis, but 
 unless and until they have absolute economic and 
 industrial control vested in their hands, this will 
 be of no more avail than the Kerensky regime in 
 Russia or the Noske-Schiedemann Government 
 of Germany. Insistently will come the demand : 
 " All power to the Workers' Councils." This is 
 the underlying idea of the Soviets. 
 
 The British form of trade unionism was the 
 one which ultimately set the standard for trade 
 unionism throughout the whole world Not
 
 160 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK 
 
 because it had any special advantages, or because 
 there was any distinct and inherent wisdom on 
 the part of its founders. Meeting the compelling 
 needs occasioned by the development of British 
 capitalism, it served to represent the workers' 
 opposition to the tyranny or oppression of the 
 employing or capitalist class. 
 
 German social democracy, upon the founda- 
 tion of the teachings of Marx and Engels and 
 under the leadership of August Bebel, was the 
 example upon which Parliamentary Socialism 
 sought in every country to extend. This being 
 the product of a later period was regarded as 
 something to work in and through the Capitalist 
 System, but, gradually, it was held, tended to 
 supersede that system. 
 
 Parliamentary democracy is a myth exploded 
 by the war and the developments arising from 
 the war. The Soviet idea, or that of Workers', 
 Soldiers' and Peasants' Councils, is one which, 
 by factory and workshop representation, goes 
 right down to the roots of the Capitalist System 
 and destroys it at its very foundations. 
 
 Before success is ultimately achieved, mountains 
 of work will have to be accomplished, but that 
 will be done before and during the revolutionary 
 crisis. Finally, the militant proletariat in this, 
 as in every capitalist country, will work stead- 
 fastly for, and dedicate and devote themselves 
 unceasingly to, the Social Revolution; peacefully, 
 if possible, but — the Social Revolution, 
 
 PRINTED BY THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND II YOUNG STREET.
 
 LIST OF NEW & 
 
 FORTHCOMING 
 
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 SPRING 
 
 1921 
 
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 PARSONS, LTD. 
 
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 2 THE ''NEW ERA " SERIES 
 
 Quarter Cloth, Crown 8vo, 4/6 net 
 
 LAND NATIONALISATION, by A. Emil 
 Daviesy L.C.C., and Dorothy Evans (formerly 
 Organizer, Land Nationalisation Society). 
 
 In the past the importance of the land problem has been 
 neglected, but now the changed conditions brought about by the 
 war call for increased production at home. This book shows 
 that the present system of land ownership impedes production 
 on every hand and stands in the way of almost every vital reform. 
 
 The authors contend that no solution of the serious problems 
 that confront the community can be found until the nation 
 itself becomes the ground landlord of the country in which it 
 lives. They put forward a scheme for nationalisation complete 
 in financial and administrative details, providing for the partici- 
 pation of various sections of the community in the management 
 of the land. 
 
 THE NEW LABOUR OUTLOOK, by 
 Robert Williams (Secretary of the Transport 
 Workers' Federation). 
 
 The theme of this book is the new orientation of the aims of 
 international Labour. The author deals with the acute world- 
 need for increased output, and maintains that the workers will 
 consent to produce more only if and when they have assured 
 themselves that by so doing they will immediately improve their 
 economic status and ultimately establish a new social order. 
 
 A separate chapter dealing with the collapse of the Second and 
 the development of the Third or Moscow International indicates 
 the connection between the present political crises in many coun- 
 tries and the economic class-struggle which is now proceeding. 
 
 The author has a wide and varied experience of proletarian 
 conditions, and has drawn largely upon facts within his own 
 personal knowledge for the material of the book. 
 
 LEONARD PARSONS LIMITED
 
 THE ''.NEW ERA " SERIES 3 
 
 SOCIALISM AND PERSONAL 
 LIBERTY, by Robert Dell (author of "My 
 Second Country".) 
 
 "Personal Liberty in the Socialist State" is an old controversy, 
 and the publishers feel that Mr. Dell's new volume will evoke 
 widespread interest and discussion. 
 
 The author shows that Socialism is not necessarily incompatible 
 with personal freedom, or with individualism properly understood, 
 but is rather an essential condition of both. He contends that 
 economic freedom is unattainable under Capitalist conditions by- 
 any but the owners of capital and that individual liberty is being 
 threatened by political democracy, which is becoming a tyranny 
 of the majority. 
 
 OPEN DIPLOMACY, by E. T>. Morel 
 (author of "Red Rubber," "The Black Man's 
 Burden," etc.). 
 
 "Foreign Policy and Secret Diplomacy" continue to be terms 
 invested with some icind of mysterious attributes. In this volume 
 Mr. Morel endeavours to simplify a problem which still remains 
 complicated and obscure to the general public. He shows us 
 "foreign policy" as an influence working in our everyday lives. 
 He brings "diplomacy" into our homes, and serves it up as a dish 
 upon the breakfast table. He depicts us helpless automata moving 
 blindfolded in a world of make-believe untii we secure an effective 
 democratic control over the management of our foreign relations, 
 
 PROLETCULT, by Eden and Cedar "Paul 
 (authors of "Creative Revolution"). 
 
 Education to-day, availing itself of the widest means, employing 
 the press and the cinemas no less effectively than the schools, 
 imposes upon the community the idiology, the cultured outlook, 
 of the ruling class. 
 
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 4 THE ''NEW ERA'' SERIES 
 
 The authors contend that among the working classes there are 
 many who strive for the realisation of a new culture. 
 
 Proletcult (proletarian culture) organises and consolidates the 
 thought-forces which will complete the overthrow of Capitalism. 
 It will then inaugurate and build up the economic and social, the 
 artistic and intellectual life of the "new era". This great and 
 far-reaching contemporary movement is the theme of " Proletcult." 
 
 AN AGRICULTURAL POLICY, by F. 
 
 E. Green (author of " A History of the 
 Agricultural Labourer, 1870- 1920," etc.). 
 
 Whilst this book deals with the country-side, and will be 
 enjoyed by every farm worker, it is of absorbing interest to the 
 man in the street. It is not a dry technical treatise but is a work 
 racy of the soil. It criticises with refreshing frankness those 
 responsible for the present state of agriculture. It discusses 
 whether small holdings or large holdings should be encouraged, 
 and outlines a scheme which would give the whole nation as well 
 as the workers an interest in the success of agriculture. The book 
 should be read in conjunction with "Land Nationalisation" by 
 Emil Davies. 
 
 THE CONTEMPORJRr SERIES— Volume Three 
 
 SOME CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS 
 (Men), by R. Brim ley Johnson. Crown 8vo, 
 
 7/6 
 
 net. 
 
 This book is concerned with Youth : it deals not with the 
 "big guns" booming, but with a few free spirits, alert and vital, 
 quick to see and to speak, fearless and independent. 
 
 Mr. Brimley Johnson reveals the fine art of their craftsmanship 
 and the bright glow of their message in a volume the aim of 
 which is to indicate the tendencies of modern fiction. 
 
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 THE ''SOCIAL STUDIES'' SERIES 5 
 
 RELIGION IN POLITICS, by Art/mr 
 Ponsonby. Crown 8vo, 6/- net. 
 
 One of Mr. Ponsonby's most interesting and attractively- 
 written books. It describes the growth and purpose of political 
 parties, and exhibits the idealism which inspires reformers. At 
 once stimulating and educational. 
 
 SOCIALISM AND CO-OPERATION, by 
 L. S. Woolf. Crown 8vo, 6/- net. 
 
 LIFE AND TEACHING OF KARL 
 MARX, by M. Beer (author of "A History 
 of British SociaHsm"). Crown 8vo, 6/- net. 
 
 This is a translation of a book written by Mr. Beer to celebrate 
 the centenary of Marx's birth. It is a most interesting and 
 reliable biography, and a concise and adequate summary of the 
 Marxian economic and historical doctrines. New light is thrown 
 on the attitude of Marx towards violent revolution, and his 
 responsibility for Bolshevism is discussed. 
 
 This is the only work of its kind in the language, and will 
 rank as the authorised biography and exposition. 
 
 PARLIAMENT AND DEMOCRACY, by 
 
 J . Ramsay Mac'Donald. Crown 8vo, 3/6 net. 
 
 This is an acute study of the problems now agitating the 
 minds of Socialists. The theories and proposals of the Guild 
 Socialists are closely analysed and discussed by the author, who 
 puts forward an alternative policy for social reconstruction. The 
 book may be said to embody a modern conception of the future 
 industrial State, and of the relations of the individual to the 
 community. 
 
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 MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 A LADY DOCTOR IN BAKHTIARI- 
 
 LAND, by Dr. Elizabeth MacBean Ross. 
 Crown 8vo, 7/6 net. 
 
 Dr. Ross was one of the band of Scottish women who helped 
 to clear Serbia of typhus and she herself died there from the disease. 
 
 Before going to Serbia during the war, Dr. Ross worked in 
 Persia among the semi-civilized Bakhtiari tribes, and this book 
 contains the record of her experiences. 
 
 STRAY THOUGHTS AND MEMORIES, 
 by the late James A. Rentoul, K.C., LL.D. 
 Edited by L, Rentoul. Demy 8vo, 18/- net. 
 
 These memories were jotted down by Judge Rentoul during a 
 prolonged illness and have been collected for publication by his 
 sister after his death. 
 
 Miss Rentoul includes reminiscences of her brother's earlier 
 days in Ireland, as well as of his career at the English Bar and as 
 Judge of the City of London and Central Criminal Courts. 
 
 The book also contains Judge Rentoul's views on social and 
 political questions on which he felt very strongly during his whole 
 life, and on which he spoke and wrote frankly and fearlessly. 
 
 RED RUBBER, by E. T>. Morel. New and 
 Revised Edition. Crown 8vo, 6/- net. 
 
 Mr. Morel is one of the few men whose work for the world 
 may truly be described as heroic. Against all the forces of 
 royalty, wealth, indifference, and statecraft, Mr. Morel for ten 
 unresting years waged a conflict as noble as any recorded in our 
 history. No one could desire a more glorious monument of his 
 life than this book forms. 
 
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 MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 THE BLACK MAN'S BURDEN, by E, 
 T>. More/. Crown 8vo, 6/- net. 
 
 The tragic story of one of the greatest crimes in history — the 
 wrongs inflicted by the white races upon the black. A book that 
 is indispensable to every social reformer. 
 
 MY YEARS OF EXILE, by EduarJ 
 ^ernstein^ the well-known German Socialist. 
 Translated by 'Bernard MialL Demy 8vo, 
 I 5/- net . 
 
 This is a translation by Mr. Bernard Miall of Eduard Bern- 
 stein's " Aus den Jahren Meines Exils." In this volume the 
 veteran socialist gives a spirited account of his travels and his 
 years of exile in Italy, Switzerland, Denmark and England. As 
 a prominent socialist and Editor of Die TLukunft he was outlawed 
 by Bismarck's Government. For a great part of his lifetime he 
 made his home in London, where to many Londoners still in 
 their prime he was a familiar friend. 
 
 During his long residence in London he was intimately 
 acquainted with all the leading personalities of the time, and the 
 reader will meet in these pages with many famous and familiar 
 figures : Marx and his ill-fated daughter, Bebel, the elder Lieb- 
 knecht, Engels, Stepniak, William Morris, H. M. Hyndman, 
 "G.B.S.," John Burns, Mr. and Mrs. Hubert Bland, Mr. and 
 Mrs. Sidney Webb, J. R. MacDonald, etc. 
 
 Particularly interesting is his account of Engels' famous Sunday 
 evenings. In addition to presenting an interesting picture of 
 Socialist circles in London, this volume throws many sidelights 
 on the development of the movement in Germany and on the 
 Continent in general. 
 
 No one interested in Socialism or the Fabian Society should 
 miss this unique book. 
 
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 8 MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 WOMEN AND CHILDREN, by Hugh de 
 Selincourt. Crown 8vo, 8/6 net. 
 
 This is a novel which, while primarily a work of art, should be 
 of absorbing interest to all who realise the inestimable importance 
 of sexual psychology, and the value of a proper and enlightened 
 education in sexual matters. The chief characters in " Women 
 and Children " have not had the privilege of such education, and 
 the lack comes near to wrecking their lives. In the heroine, 
 a distinguished feminist and a " welfare " inspector during the 
 war, the lack is overcome by courage, humour, and the maternal 
 instinct. In the Dwarf, her friend, it has meant a solitary life, 
 and for a time threatens to wreck his friendship for her ; but she 
 is able to restore his sanity by a gesture beautiful in its courageous 
 generosity. In her lover, Hubert Bonner, cast up by the war, a 
 " shell-shock " sufferer at a loose end, it means clumsiness in 
 approaching women, diffidence, shame and irritability. The 
 rehabilitated Dwarf, however, brings the lovers together after a 
 misunderstanding that is nearly final, and so leaves the three of 
 them planning a school on new lines. As a foil to these three 
 victims of Victorian prudery we have a family of *' simple lifers." 
 Mr. de Selincourt thinks courageously and writes with distinction 
 and an unusual sensitiveness to obscure but significant moods. The 
 book contains some notable scenes and should not be missed by 
 any amateur of modern fiction. 
 
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