currents running in the other direction. I hope amongst that majority there are many who will see they must come over to fight for a just peace. The resurrection of the International is certain. To Camille Huysmans, M. Branting said: I have the impression of the American labor delegation that they do not well understand for what reason we are more concerned about time than they are. We must avoid the material ruin of Europe, and for this reason we fight; but we have also a peace policy. Summing up the speeches of the fraternal delegates, and the sense of the conference: They looked to an international conference, but not till (a) The German democracy showed convincing signs of responding to the inter-Allied memorandum and accepting its principles. (b) The collapse of the German offensive. Because the western offensive was at its height and because the labor movement of Germany had not met the proposals of Allied labor, the British Labour Party in this June conference took no further steps in international diplomacy. The conditions were not ripe for an international meeting. The time was not now. But British labor was, none the less, slowly moving towards a consultative conference. Its belief was confirmed that there was no way but to destroy the military power of Germany, the power which betrayed Russia at Brest-Litovsk. But it believed that the way to destroy it was by vigorous prosecution of the war and by the creation of a democratic movement in Germany. J. H. Thomas, secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen (400,000 members), stood, with Ben Tillett, Will Thorne and Will Crooks, for the vigorous prosecution of the war. But he and his railwaymen were committed to the inter-allied memorandum, looking towards an international consultative conference. On June 16 he said to the railwaymen: Our cause is what it was four years ago. It was not territory, not conquest, but the destruction of militarism. For that reason I approved the Stockholm conference. Labor must fight and must insist upon meeting the workers of the word face to face. This is the only way of insuring an open peace. In Part I, we traced the origins of the British labor offensive (in the last six months of 1917); in Part II its juncture with Allied labor and socialist groups (in the first six months of 1918) in a common western front; we can now turn to a consideration of political and industrial developments in Great Britain which paralleled these movements in international affairs. CHAPTER XII THE WORKERS AT WESTMINSTER THE British Labour Party transformed itself during the first half of 1918. A federation of trade unions, trade councils and socialist societies it became a national party of workers "by hand or by brain." Its many streams gathered into a watercourse. The passage of the Representation of the People Act, adding eight or more million voters to the electorate, made it necessary for the political labor movement to widen its course to take in these new affluents, or be swamped by the very suffrage reform it had helped bring into flood. Moreover, labor was forewarned by its leaders that the approach of reconstruction called for far-reaching engineering by the people themselves, if the post-bellum watersheds of existence were not to be controlled by the propertied interests through their hold on the old parties. The political movement gathered head from the same freshets of social unrest that we have seen mounting higher and higher behind the conviction that with respect to the conduct of the war itself, not in national resistance to Prussian aggression (in that labor was at one with the government), but in a working-class diplomacy, in the appeal to democratic elements in Central Europe and in the establishment of an unimperialistic peace, the workers needed a free channel for expression distinct from the Foreign Office or the War Cabinet. So, in six months' time came the reorganization of the British Labour Party, the breaking of the truce with the government and the formulation of its radical domestic platform. The first and second of these developments will be taken up in this chapter; the third in the chapter succeeding. By the new constitution adopted at a special conference in late February,1 provision was made for the first time for individual membership in the party, and special facilities were given to women electors to join. A local labor party was called for in each Parliamentary constituency, with separate sections for men and women. Hitherto, there had been less than 100 such locals. The National Executive was enlarged from 16 members to 22, 13 to be chosen 'Appendix III. |