INTRODUCTION PUBLIC attention has been absorbed in what has been happening in Russia. Now in Germany. The working class revolutions there have been so much more spectacular as to have quite overshadowed the formidable British labor movement or to have been confused with it. Some writers on the great war have said that the thing which set this war off from any known for a thousand years has been that it was the wrestlings of whole peoples; that here we have been dealing with folk movements unlike any that had occurred since the days when Saxons and Franks, Teutons and Huns and Slavs swept over western Europe. However that may be, there has been another folk movement at work in the midst of war in Europe which is tremendously significant. It asserted itself disruptively in various stages of the Russian revolution. The same forces are at work elsewhere. And in England we have the attempt to harness them in a great constructive working class movement which will make for changes in the economic and political life, in the period following the war, as sweeping as the changes wrought by those middle-class movements which manifested themselves in the ascendancy of nationalism, and in the struggle for liberalism within the nations. In all European history, we have had in England forecasts of fundamental changes that were coming on the continent. The English reformation preceded the continental reformation; the English swing to parliamentary government and democracy preceded the political revolutions on the continent. For the most part Englishmen did not go through anything like the travail and bitterness which the continental peoples traversed in running the same course. They did not come out at the same point; but they showed the trend, and they showed it in advance. Even so, what has been going forward under the stress of war among the wage-earning population of the island commonwealth foreshadows changes which will affect and condition the whole fabric of western civilization. Being a folk movement, it is not possible to compress it into any one channel. It is not like the single tax movement, or the prohibition movement, or the municipal ownership movement as we have known them in this country, because these are propaganda given over to a single issue. The British labor movement is rather the expression at a hundred points of great tidal impulses at work in the common life. This book can best serve American readers by telling of certain of its eager manifestations-international, political, industrial—that will play an organic part in the period of reconstruction. CHAPTER I THE WORKERS' SHOW OF HANDS At the time the Allied premiers met in Paris in January, 1918, a dry remark was credited to Georges Clemenceau, rugged figure in the political life of France since before the days of the Commune. "Napoleon was not so remarkable as we thought,” he said. "After all, he fought only coalitions." His epigram put the case for the efforts then on foot to bring about unity among the Allies, both in military operations and in statesmanship. It was natural that the same forces should be at work among the workers as among the governments. And it is characteristic that, just as the British were the last of the great European states to get their full measure of man-power and industrial capacity into swing in the war and, once in, thereafter took over much of the heavy end of the front; so now, after three years of slow crystallization of opinion, the B:itish labor movement came forward to bear the brunt in an Allied labor offensive. In pursuit of its objectives, this labor drive combined unremitting resistance to Prussian militarism in the field with what Arthur Henderson called the diplomacy of democracy. It drew its dynamic from stirrings deep down in the working life of Great Britain. Whether the war was to end through a military decision or through negotiations, the British workers served notice that they purposed to have a say in the settlement of the struggle in which they had spent and been spent so unstintedly. They were profoundly at odds with the whole scheme of foreign relations which broke down in August, 1914. They felt that they had paid the piper, and they did not mean to leave their security against future wars solely in the hands of the governing classes with whom they identified this war. They were not sanguine as to the ability of those classes to get out of it what they went into it for, much less to lay a new world order that would stand. They looked to the common feeling and brotherhood of the masses the world over as the only factor sufficiently forceful to checkmate competing commercialisms—as a bond to hold the world together, greater than all the international laws and courts and treaties that could be devised. They forecasted a recoil against the old order of things |