which in the period of reconstruction would effect changes in the economic life, nation by nation, profound as those in the political life following the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars, when by the 30's the husks of feudalism were thrown aside and the middle classes asserted themselves in terms of political democracy and representative government. With this difference: education, newspaper reading and interchange of ideas now quicken and bind deeper reaches of the social order. These the great war had cut asunder and isolated. But the working classes, nation by nation, had gone through like experience, and out of their common travail might they not find common purpose?

Thus it was that the British labor men, and behind them Allied labor, set going their procedure to find out, if they could, where the German and Austrian working classes (with whom before the war they had much in common) stood close to them on the issues of the struggle in which they were pitted against each other; what differences separated them; which of these differences were due to ignorance and distortion, and so might be swept away by letting in the light, which of these differences were due to obstacles thrown in the way by other interests in the national life, and so might be combated internally; which of these differences, if any, were in truth irreconcilable, and so must be fought through to a finish. And they believed that their statement of war aims brought the issues back to the unimperialistic bedrock on which they (regardless of what motives actuated other groups in their own nation or in other nations) had gone into the war, and on which they intended to fight to the end-the issues of self-determination, which had clustered about Belgium and which were democracy's answer to militarism and conquest. They believed they could strip off those elements of competitive aggrandizement-forcible annexation, punitive indemnities, economic boycotts and the rest—which had come to encrust these first purposes and had given color on every hand to the propaganda that each people was fighting a war of defense. They believed that these issues were so close to the mainsprings of working class feeling that the German socialists would get out of hand if their majority leaders refused to meet them. They believed that they could drive a wedge between the German working classes and their governments which, sooner or later, would rend the central empires if the workers met the issues and the governments refused.

They were not visionaries, these labor leaders; they did not expect to unravel in a night a skein which had been tangled and knotted by years of blood and strain. They did not waste time in debating whether it could be cut with the sword, with those who had foreshadowed a swift military decision with every spring. Rather, without stinting their support to the armies in the field, they set about the slow task of putting as much courage, patience, hard thinking and mass action into their labor offensive as went, say, into preparing for a half mile of artillery fire, barrage and infantry assault. And they held it as reprehensible to ignore and neglect the marshaling of civil pressure in the great struggle as it would have been to ignore the air service or the navy.

They were not defeatists, these labor leaders. They were as determined in their project in the fall of 1917, when the British second army thought it had turned the corner of the war at Paeschendale Ridge, as they were at their meeting the February following, when the whole talk on the western front was of how to meet the anticipated German drive. They did not abandon it in the weeks of strain when the German armies forged toward Amiens and Paris. They held firmly to it in the midst of the tremendous counter-offensives of the summer of 1918, in which British and Colonials, French, Belgians, Italians and Americans jointly drove the invaders back. They simply did not take stock in the cry that you could not wage war and exert statesmanship at the same time. They did not fear that labor negotiations would demoralize the Allied armies; they held that with whole nations at war, civilian morale was as vital as army morale, and that secret treaties, dickers over territory, the mistrust and lack of confidence which come of ill-defined purposes, were forces of disintegration which could be overcome only by bringing the purposes of the war unequivocally out into the open and out at a level upon which the average man would be fully willing to continue to lay down his life and that of his son.

They were not for peace-at-any-price. Their statement of the conditions on which they would continue their support of the war and on which they were prepared to urge peace were affirmative. They were simply through with talking about victory like buying a pig in a poke; about winning the war, without setting forth what ends you hoped to win and without keeping your mind open to any less humanly costly way of achieving those ends.

They were not for a separate peace. Their whole procedure was to organize a common front; and to do it, not, as they believed the governments had done prior to President Wilson's initiative, by arriving at a multiple of their several ambitions, but by cleaving through to what were the great common denominators of democratic purpose.

They were not Bolsheviki. The British labor offensive antedated the advent of the Bolshevik régime. It was the Russian Minimalists who cabled concurrence with the British statement; it was with their leaders that they had old associations. But, in common with the workers of all Europe, the British were greatly stirred by the Russian revolutions, and they ascribed in no small part to the Allies themselves (in failing to meet the Russian provisional government half way in the matter of war aims, and in blocking the Stockholm meetings) the overthrow of Kerensky, the cave-in of the Russian armies, and all that those events came to mean. And they believed an outcome on the eastern front altogether different from the subsequent Brest-Litovsk treaties was possible if the same attitude were not persisted in toward the Soviets.

They were not, in fine, anything that the jingo press described them to be in the earlier stages of the movement, and they were not concerned with what it ascribed to them now, except as this afforded powder to their agitation and further identified the contrary policy with those very forces with which, for twenty years past, the British labor movement had wrestled in forcing through domestic industrial and political reforms. Their positions, here sketched in broad outline, were, of course, not altogether different from those held painfully by individual thinkers and small groups in each of the warring countries, individuals and groups that were currently damned for their pains, and that lacked both the mass and momentum to get their proposals across to the general public. But here, shouldering their way up into the arena not only of discussion but of decision, came a body of men who refused, quite as doggedly as the lonelier prophets, to be dislodged by conventional blasts of denunciation and whom the very winds of controversy served only to reveal as a rapidly mustering host.

That this new leadership in western Europe would spring from the labor movement might have been foreseen.

With hold-over parliaments, more or less out of touch with the changes in public opinion, and with coalition governments, shortcircuiting the development of party sentiment as such, the policies of the older party groups failed to crystallize while the war was on in a way clearly to differentiate them. Thus, the British Labour Party found its opportunity; the elimination of its secretary, Arthur Henderson, from the British War Council by way of mat” on August 11, 1917, being the occasion for its action but not its cause. Within the succeeding twelve months it slowly formulated a coherent program, both of foreign and internal policy, which could be weighed against that of the government in power and which offered an alternative, fresher approach to issues of war and peace; a program which on its international side could be taken over by kindred groups in the Allied nations who had been groping for such leadership, and which had the tremendous reinforcement of being, seemingly, more in line with the free statesmanship of the American president than the course their own governments were able or chose to follow.

That it should be in England that this new labor leadership would emerge might equally well have been forecast. Elsewhere, the groupings had been too fragmentary; the cleavages between extremes. In France and Germany, the socialists had been split by the war. The minority factions had taken a position of opposition to their governments but that had been not only on matters of policy, but on the prosecution of the war itself. In Italy, it had been the majority, but the working classes in the Italian cities had not as yet found common cause with the peasants; the proletariat was immature. In France the syndicalists presented a separate wing of the labor movement, discounting both the parliamentary groups of socialists. Since the fall of 1917, Italy, like France, had been invaded, and the psychology of the situation had been against any organized action which might be construed as counter to the prime duty of getting the invaders out. In undefeated, uninvaded England, the labor movement was freer to assert itself along lines more nearly analogous to those possible in peace times; and it did so.

Moreover, the British Labour Party was made up largely of men who had been “for the war” and who were indispensable to it; who had the disconcerting effrontery to lay down with one hand plans for a great memorial in London to their fellows who had fallen in the conflict, and with the other to set going the nominating machinery for contesting not only the 35 seats they then held in Parliament, but some 300 more.

The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, for example, with four hundred thousand unionists in the British forces, could not lightly be discounted as “slackers." Nor could the Labour Party be set aside as negligible, with its 2,700,000 members, in the overt act of stretching their tent ropes to include all workers "by hand or by brain,”—with testimony of social unrest drawn by government inquiries from every part of the kingdom, -and with fair prospect that the troops when demobilized would strike hands with them.

So it was that after a Russian government had gone down with its plea for a fresh statement of war aims unmet; after the Russian soviet program had for two months gone unanswered;

· The All Russian Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates enumerated 15 points in the form of instructions to its delegate to the Allied War Conference, Paris; the Bolsheviki took over the government and organized a council of National Commissioners on November 7, 1917, in whose name Leon Trotsky, as national commissioner for foreign affairs, sent out the document of 15 points as a "formal offer of an immediate

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after a certain noble peer had been soundly scolded as a pacifist Tory for writing a piece to the papers; after President Wilson's earlier declarations had been met with altogether vague if hearty assents; after the U. D. C. leaders and, at their side, a score of like-minded commoners who had never broken silence before, bad been denounced by spokesmen for the Cabinet for raising afresh the issue of war aims at Westminster; after all these things, a delegate conference of the British Trades Union Congress (the industrial organization of British labor) and the Labour Party (the political organization of British labor) came forward with their joint statement of war aims on December 28, 1917, and smoked the administration out. A carefully prepared statement was given out by the premier at a conference with labor on the man power bill on January 5, 1918. There followed President Wilson's world-encircling message of fourteen points which the English labor leaders hailed as kindred to their own; and which the French parliamentarians, in a remarkable session of the Chamber, claimed as breathing the very spirit of France, marred only by the consciousness that their own government had not given it utterance first. Whatever considerations inside the British War Cabinet, and whatever commitments to the Allies outside, had inhibited Lloyd George from coming forward earlier, no longer held after labor's show of hands. Rightly or wrongly, the labor group felt that they were the only force strong enough to have opened the way for his statement; the only force strong enough in the future to bring the British government into line on those crucial points of President Wilson's statement, and of their own, where the British official statement was silent; where France and Italy had not spoken.

America entered the new year (1918) with its full weight thrown in the inter-Allied war councils for that unified command of the armies on the western front which in Foch's hands, and supported by fresh and ever fresher divisions from over seas, was armistice on all fronts and the immediate opening of peace negotiations ;" followed by an invitation of Dec. 6, to all embassies and legations to participate and by the issuance by the Russian plenipotentiaries of six basic principles” at Brest-Litovsk, Dec. 22. Count Czernin's six clauses of December 25 were in reply to these Russian formulations; and Lloyd George in the course of his statement of January 5 and President Wilson in the course of his message of January 8 made rejoinder to Count Czernin. Clearly the Allied governments felt the obligation of making a counter statement of war aims at a time they were holding aloof from the Brest-Litovsk meetings. The initiative of the Bolsheviki as well as the pressure of British labor was a factor in the new public declarations, This series of documents was published in "A League of Nations” by the World Peace Foundation, Boston, 1918.