be one of the landmarks and shining examples of all human history. Comparison may be made between the entry of the United States into the war and that of the British people. There is some resemblance, but there is a difference. The outrageous invasion of Belgium, involving special and separate treaty obligations, left Great Britain at the outset no alternative; her decision had to be sudden; the whole people felt at once that there was no honorable way of avoiding war. Articles have been written since to show that the interest of Great Britain was directly involved, that though Belgium and France were attacked, she, too, was threatened, and all that is true. Numerous public utterances in Germany since the War began have disclosed that the German purpose was to subject not only Belgium and France, but also Great Britain, to German predominance. But the British people had not time at the outset to consider where their interest lay; had it not been so they would have taken time to consider and to argue, but as things were, honor was so clearly and peremptorily challenged, and sympathy so deeply outraged by the initial action of Germany that there was no time for consideration and no place for argument. This it was that made the decision of the British people so practically unanimous, so quick, and so thorough. The decision of the United States was slow and deliberate; it is apparently not less unanimous and thorough, and each decision will have its own impressiveness in history.

On our first entry into the War we were, as the United States now is, free to decide our own part and our own terms of peace. When Japan entered the War the obligations of the Anglo-Japanese alliance to make war and peace in common came into effect; then the agreement of September, 1914, made mutual and binding agreements between ourselves and France and Russia, and our position now is that of the other nations who are parties to the agreement of September, 1914. The United States are independent of that agreement; this is a difference, important and definite, though, I believe, it will be small in practical effect compared with the deep underlying identity of view, principle, and feeling.

President Wilson said the other day that this is a conflict for "human liberty." That is what the Allies have been made by German action in the War to feel more and more deeply, and this feeling is a greater

bond of union than anything else. There is one more thing to be added. I was talking the other day to a man who had been some two years at the front and was home for a ten days' leave. Of all feelings, those that have the most right to be considered with attention and deference are the feelings of the men who are risking their lives and undergoing the awful trial and suffering of trench warfare. In this man's feeling there was no hatred and no passion; there was great weariness and great longing for the end of the War, but an intense desire to see the War end in such a way that, if he survived, the rest of his life-he is a young man-should be free from war and the threats of war. That, too, as I understand, is President Wilson's policy and purposehuman liberty and secure peace. . .

There is but one other point on which I would touch; it is the prospective relations between Great Britain and the United States. Mr. Balfour's mission has, we hope, done something to make it felt in the United States that there is real community of ideas, sentiments, and sympathy. This country was fortunate in having Mr. Balfour to represent it on such a mission at such a time, and he very likely did more to promote understanding of us in America than any one else could have done in the time. And the more closely the two peoples come into contact, the better they get to know each other, the more I believe it will be apparent to each not only that they speak the same language, but that they use it to mean the same things, that they both have the same idea of freedom and liberty, and desire the same sort of world in which to live.

There is no reason in the forms of a constitutional Monarchy why the British people should not be as free, as truly and thoroughly a democracy, as any republic can be. The American colonies of the eighteenth century by the War of Independence established not only independence but democracy. The states of Europe, whose internal conditions were then different from those in America, were not yet ready for the same measure of democracy. Russia is only just beginning to establish it, but the change there promises to be thorough. All the other great States of Europe, except Germany (I omit Austria-Hungary because it is more impossible than ever to define the internal conditions of that mixed Empire), are now in form and in spirit and in fact democratic. Great Britain has attained it not less surely

and thoroughly than others by the process of political evolution.

In all dealings I have had with Americans, official and unofficial, I have felt that the outlook upon national and individual life was the same. No written agreement is necessary to draw the two nations together or to keep them in friendship; what is needed is that each should continually see in the utterances of representative men, and in the writings of the press, not the eccentricities and the fringe, not the froth and eddies, but the main deep current of public opinion in both countries.

That is what we feel about President Wilson's recent announcements. They satisfy, they carry conviction, that make us feel that we really know what he thinks and why he thinks it and how firmly he grasps it; and we hope that the response from public men and from the press on this side is making the President and the people of the United

States feel that we really do respond earnestly and truly; that the sentiments and principles expressed by him are ours also, and that in what he has said of this war and of his hopes for the future he has spoken what is also in our minds and hearts.

If the millions of dear lives that have been given in this war are to have been given not in vain, if there is to be any lasting compensation for the appalling suffering of the last three years, the defeat of the Prussian will to power, however it is brought about, will not by itself be enough.

Out of this defeat must come something constructive, some moral change in international relations; and the entry of the United States of America into the War, in the spirit and with the principles that have inspired their action, is an invaluable and, I trust, a sure and unconquerable guarantee that in the peace and after the peace these hopes will be realized.

A NEW FORCE IN POLITICS

CARLETON HAYES

[From British Social Politics, 1913]

Two historical factors have conspired to bring about in our own day a fundamental change in the convictions of many thoughtful persons as to the proper scope and functions of government. In the first place the French Revolution not only abolished legal class privilege and defined civil "rights" uniform for all citizens, but it sounded the death knell of absolutism; and its great dreams of individual liberty and social equality and political brotherhood provided a powerful stimulus, throughout the nineteenth century, to ever-recurring and increasingly successful movements throughout Europe for the extension of the suffrage and the removal of legal disabilities in society. In France, political democracy was gradually evolved through kaleidoscopic changes of Legitimate Monarchy, July Monarchy, Republic, Empire, and Republic. In England, a like process was painfully in evidence during Peterloo Massacres, and Chartist riots, and Reform agitations. In

both countries, before the close of the century, the electorate had supposedly attained a democratic mastery over one great institution-the government.

Of greater importance to us than the more or less theoretical principles proclaimed and exemplified by the French Revolution are the very practical problems created by that series of marvelous mechanical inventions and adaptations which has passed under the name of the Industrial Revolution. Within the last hundred years the whole social fabric has undergone a complete transformation, until it has brought forth present day capitalism and the factory system and a wage earning proletariat huddled in great towns; and novel facts have presented themselves which could not be faced in the manner of the eighteenth century nor run away from as the laissezfaire economists of the last century would have done. So long as highly developed industrial states-countries directly affected by the Industrial Revolution-pursued a frank policy of non-intervention, the capitalist class seemed to grow wealthier and more powerful, while the mass of wage earners seemed to grow relatively poorer and

more degraded. Under such conditions, written constitutional guarantees of religious toleration and political equality did not suffice to render democracy real and vital. Soon after the French Revolution, Babœuf had declared:

"When I see the poor without the clothing and shoes which they themselves are engaged in making, and contemplate the small minority who do not work and yet want for nothing, I am convinced that government is still the old conspiracy of the few against the many, only it has taken a new form."

Gradually the working classes, whom the Industrial Revolution called into being, came to share Babœuf's opinion and to claim that they suffered from class privileges infinitely more oppressive than any of those against which the French Revolution contended. They began to believe that political rights and written constitutions, of themselves, might be quite sterile, and to demand the employment of political agencies in order to secure equality of opportunity for all classes and the well-being of each and every citizen, worker as well as capitalist. It followed quite naturally from the interesting union of two revolutionary currentsthe political and the industrial—that the people of each affected state thought of using their democratic representative mastery over government, in proportion to the extent to which they had achieved it, as a means through which to undertake industrial regulation and general social control. That has meant the socialization of politics -government, in its widest significance, of the people and for the people.

"Social politics" thus becomes a convenient phrase to indicate, loosely perhaps, the present day development of political democracy and its utilization for social purposes. Social equality is its goal. Mr. Percy Alden, one of its distinguished advocates in the British Parliament, writes in a recently published volume:

"Without claiming too much for the new program which the Liberal party has put forward, this, at least, may be asserted with confidence, that it implies a desertion of the old individualist standard and the adoption of a new principle-a principle which the Unionists call socialistic. If it be true that a positive policy of social reconstruction savors of socialism, then, of course, this contention can be justified. The main point is that the function of the state in the mind of the Liberal and Radical of today is much

wider in scope than seemed possible to our predecessors. The state avowedly claims the right to interfere with industrial liberty and to modify the old economic view of the disposal of private property. Liberalism recognizes that it is no longer possible to accept the view that all men have an equal chance, and that there is nothing more to be done than to hold evenly the scales of government. As a matter of fact, the anomalies and injustices of our present social system have compelled even our opponents to introduce ameliorative legislation. But the Liberal of today goes further. He asks that such economic changes shall be introduced as will make it possible for every man to possess a minimum of security and comfort. Property is no longer to have an undue claim; great wealth must be prepared to bear burdens in the interests of the whole community. Our social system must have an ethical basis."

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF BRITISH LABOR [From the Report of the Sub-Committee of the British Labor Party, 1918]

It behooves the Labor party, in formulating its own program for reconstruction after the war, and in criticizing the various preparations and plans that are being made by the present government, to look at the problem as a whole. We have to make clear what it is that we wish to construct. It is important to emphasize the fact that, whatever may be the case with regard to other political parties, our detailed practical proposals proceed from definitely held principles.

We need to beware of patchwork. The view of the Labor party is that what has to be reconstructed after the war is not this or that government department, or this or that piece of social machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself. The individual worker, or for that matter the individual statesman, immersed in daily routine-like the individual soldier in a battleeasily fails to understand the magnitude and far-reaching importance of what is taking place around him. How does it fit together as a whole? How does it look from a distance? Count Okuma, one of the oldest, most experienced, and ablest of the statesmen of Japan, watching the present conflict from the other side of the globe, declares it to be nothing less than the death of European civilization. Just as in the past the

civilization of Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, and the great Roman empire have been successively destroyed, so, in the judgment of this detached observer, the civilization of all Europe is even now receiving its death blow. We of the Labor party can so far agree in this estimate as to recognize, in the present world catastrophe, if not the death, in Europe, of civilization itself, at any rate the culmination and collapse of a distinctive industrial civilization, which the workers will not seek to reconstruct. At such times of crisis it is easier to slip into ruin than to progress into higher forms of organization. That is the problem as it presents itself to the Labor party.

What this war is consuming is not merely the security, the homes, the livelihood, and the lives of millions of innocent families, and an enormous proportion of all the accumulated wealth of the world, but also the very basis of the peculiar social order in which it has arisen. The individualist system of capitalist production, based on the private ownership and competitive administration of land and capital, with its reckless "profiteering" and wage slavery; with its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and its hypocritical pretense of the "survival of the fittest"; with the monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the degradation and brutalization, both moral and spiritual, resulting therefrom, may, we hope, indeed have received a death blow. With it must go the political system and ideas in which it naturally found expression. We of the Labor party, whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an administration, will certainly lend no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to see thať it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death. If we in Britain are to escape from the decay of civilization itself, which the Japanese statesman foresees, we must ensure that what is presently to be built up is a new social order, based not on fighting but on fraternity-not on the competitive struggle for the means of bare life, but on a deliberately planned coöperation in production and distribution for the benefit of all who participate by hand or by brainnot on the utmost possible inequality of riches, but on a systematic approach towards a healthy equality of material circumstances for every person born into the world-not on an enforced dominion over subject nations, subject races, subject colonies, subject

classes, or a subject sex, but, in industry as well as in government, on that equal freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and that widest possible participation in power, both economic and political, which is characteristic of democracy. We do not, of course, pretend that it is possible, even after the drastic clearing away that is now going on, to build society anew in a year or two of feverish "reconstruction." What the Labor party intends to satisfy itself about is that each brick that it helps to lay shall go to erect the structure that it intends, and no other.

We need not here recapitulate, one by one, the different items in the Labor party's program, which successive party conferences have adopted. These proposals, some of them in various publications worked out in practical detail, are often carelessly derided as impracticable, even by the politicians who steal them piecemeal from us! The members of the Labor party, themselves actually working by hand or by brain, in close contact with the facts, have perhaps at all times a more accurate appreciation of what is practicable, in industry as in polities, than those who depend solely on academic instruction or are biased by great possessions. But today no man dares to say that anything is impracticable. The war which has scared the old political parties right out of their dogmas, has taught every statesman and every government official, to his enduring surprise, how very much more can be done along the lines that we have laid down than he had ever before thought possible. What we now promulgate as our policy, whether for opposition or for office, is not merely this or that specific reform, but a deliberately thought out, systematic, and comprehensive plan for that immediate social rebuilding which any ministry, whether or not it desires to grapple with the problem, will be driven to undertake. The four pillars of the house that we propose to erect, resting upon the common foundation of the democratic control of society in all its activities, may be termed:

(a) The Universal Enforcement of the National Minimum;

(b) The Democratic Control of Industry; (c) The Revolution in National Finance;

and

(d) The Surplus Wealth for the Common Good.

[There follows an explanation of the

meaning of these "Four Pillars," of which only the last part is here given.]

In the disposal of the surplus above the standard of life society has hitherto gone as far wrong as in its neglect to secure the necessary basis of any genuine industrial efficiency or decent social order. We have allowed the riches of our mines, the rental value of the lands superior to the margin of cultivation, the extra profits of the fortunate capitalists, even the material outcome of scientific discoveries-which ought by now to have made this Britain of ours immune from class poverty or from any widespread destitution-to be absorbed by individual proprietors; and then devoted very largely to the senseless luxury of an idle rich class. Against this misappropriation of the wealth of the community, the Labor party-speaking in the interests not of the wage earners alone, but of every grade and section of producers by hand or by brain, not to mention also those of the generations that are to succeed us, and of the permanent welfare of the community-emphatically protests. One main pillar of the house that the Labor party intends to build is the future appropriation of the surplus, not to the enlargement of any individual fortune, but to the common good. It is from this constantly arising surplus (to be secured, on the one hand, by nationalization and municipalization and, on the other, by the steeply graduated taxation of private income and riches) that will have to be found the new capital which the community day by day needs for the perpetual improvement and increase of its various enterprises, for which we shall decline to be dependent on the usury-exacting financiers. It is from the same source that has to be defrayed the public provision for the sick and infirm of all kinds (including that for maternity and infancy) which is still so scandalously insufficient; for the aged and those prematurely incapacitated by accident or disease, now in many ways so imperfectly cared for; for the education alike of children, of adolescents, and of adults, in which the Labor party demands a genuine equality of opportunity, overcoming all differences of material circumstances; and for the organization of public improvements of all kinds, including the brightening of the lives of those now condemned to almost ceaseless toil, and a great development of the means of recreation. From the same source must come the greatly increased public provision that the Labor party will insist

on being made for scientific investigation and original research, in every branch of knowledge, not to say also for the promotion of music, literature, and fine art, which have been under capitalism so greatly neglected, and upon which, so the Labor party holds, any real development of civilization fundamentally depends. Society, like the individual, does not live by bread alonedoes not exist only for perpetual wealth production. It is in the proposal for this appropriation of every surplus for the common good-in the vision of its resolute use for the building up of the community as a whole instead of for the magnification of individual fortunes-that the Labor party, as the party of the producers by hand or by brain, most distinctively marks itself off from the older political parties, standing, as these do, essentially for the maintenance, unimpaired, of the perpetual private mortgage upon the annual product of the nation that is involved in the individual ownership of land and capital.

The house which the Labor party intends to build does not stand alone in the world. Where will it be in the street of tomorrow? If we repudiate, on the one hand, the imperialism that seeks to dominate other races, or to impose our own will on other parts of the British empire, so we disclaim equally any conception of a selfish and insular "noninterventionism," unregarding of our special obligation to our fellow-citizens overseas; of the corporate duties of one nation to another; of the moral claims upon us of the non-adult races, and of our own indebtedness to the world of which we are part. We look for an ever-increasing intercourse, a constantly developing exchange of commodities, a continually expanding friendly coöperation among all the peoples of the world. With regard to that great commonwealth of all races, all colors, all religions, and all degrees of civilization, that we call the British empire, the Labor party stands for its maintenance and its progressive development on the lines of local autonomy and "Home Rule All Round"; the fullest respect for the rights of each people, whatever its color, to all the democratic self-government of which it is capable, and to the proceeds of its own toil upon the resources of its own territorial home; and the closest possible coöperation among all the various members of what has become essentially not an empire in the old sense, but a Britannic alliance.

We desire to maintain the most intimate