cubic feet. By the end of this year, our cold storage places will show an increase of 25 per cent upon their pre-war capacity.

We have now 535 national food kitchens, and are negotiating with local authorities for the establishment of an additional 500.

We have never believed that we could do much that would be popular; but we do desire to avoid doing anything that would be harmful or unnecessary. We want to let the flow of trade go its usual course if that flow is consistent with the needs of the community. If it is not, there must be checks and there must be interference and immediate action by the Ministry of Food.

It is with Clynes that Hoover dealt in reckoning with England in striking a war time equilibrium in the world's food supply. And it is with Clynes that British labor dealt, in the last analysis, in striking its balance in supporting the war and at the same time projecting its alternative working class policies, domestic and foreign.

To one who saw him in action at this June conference, he carried conviction that he never would leave the trade union movement and the Labour Party. He would never join a "split," never lend himself to a Morning Post trade union party. He would always test his own position by an appeal to a working class constituency. He would abide by their decision. If any one thought he could be used to break the labor movement, that person did not know Clynes. The marks of the sufferings of his early life are on him. He is of the working class. He will die in their ditch. If organized labor pulled him out of the government, he would come. But he would put up a stiff ingenious fight before he came, and would possibly convert it to his ideas. For he believes in both propaganda and administrative work. He believes in labor when it is declamatory, and dissident, and he believes in it when it enters on executive responsibility. He understands Smillie and Walter Appleton, Snowden and Havelock Wilson. He is the greatest success of the labor movement in government work. One left the conference feeling that honest, saddened George Barnes might drop out in the next shuffle, for he had lost the knack of popular appeal. But Clynes would continue in power, until the parting of the ways, for the government of Britain had need for him. He is mentally agile but sincere. He is pure proletarian. If labor should come to power in the next years, as the Tories forebode, Clynes no less than Thomas and Henderson, and with greater experience in public administration than either, would be timber for the premiership. Any man that could hold his popularity after rationing food could harmonize a cabinet. To these names, if the central leaders should be frustrated in their moderate course in a period of dragging peace or of sharp cleavages in the period of reconstruction, were to be added Smillie and Mac

Donald. And at risk of restating from a different angle, some of the developments already covered and some also to be taken up in later chapters, it is important in our interpretation of the crystallizations of British labor thought, to quote an interview which this government labor leader, yet active member of the new majority, gave the writer at the close of this London meeting in June. Clynes said:

The Reform Bill has been carried, thus preparing the way for the General Election. The Bill tends to strengthen labor. All the parties are preparing for the test of strength. It is only natural for labor to secure freedom in order to test its strength. The breaking of the truce does not register the slightest tendency to lessen the support by labor of the government in its war-making.

On the international situation, the attitude of labor is scarcely to be distinguished from that of President Wilson in interpreting the aims of America. Labor has held special conferences on the international situation. And also the labor and socialist forces of the allied nations have held conferences. Although America was not represented, we have had the benefit of conversations with American delegates of labor, and the results of our previous conferences were quite in keeping with the speeches of the American delegates, and completely in line with the expressions of President Wilson.

Our inter-Allied program declared that a German victory would be a disaster and defeat for democracy, and that such an aggression as Germany was guilty of upon Belgium cannot be tolerated by a democracy. Germany has shown by her policy in Russia (at BrestLitovsk and after) that moral appeals are of no avail, and that force is the only doctrine which Germany recognizes. The interAllied memorandum held that settlements, properly made, would settle internal affairs and international relations. Having laid down such a program, it has been proclaimed to the peoples of Germany and Austria. It is for them to reply whether they follow democratic principles and laws of consent, instead of the joint power of kaisers and armaments. Working-class opinion will not tolerate any international talks about not waging the war to the end, unless the peoples of Germany and Austria signify their willingness and agreement to these pronouncements of Allied opinion which date back as far as February, 1915.

For several reasons, of working and wage conditions, discontent has arisen, and enmity to the government, among certain groups. And that hostility to the government has been set up as hostility to the organized resistance of the government against Germany. It is essential to distinguish here between enmity to the government | and the continuing unity of working class opinion on war policy.

The action of certain local labor and socialist bodies, undermining the labor members of the Government, has provoked the retaliation of the threat to start a purely trade union political party. Our

own desire is to regard these differences as temporary and subordinate. The unity of the nation cannot be maintained without_unity of the parties-certainly not without the unity of the Labour Party. It is therefore unlikely that there will be very much response to the suggestion of starting a trade union political party. But the protests may do good in showing a resentment against the action taken by certain local labor and socialist bodies in their attacks on labor men in the government.

Recently an editor had attacked Clynes. Controversy is one of the things he does best. He said:

Dear Sir,

In your last issue you indicate that I "even went so far as to say that labor could not produce enough able men to form a government." I send you this note chiefly to deny this statement. Even if I thought it was so, no labor man need go out of his way to say such a thing, as I hope that enough able men will in due course be found in the ranks of labor fit for any national duty to which labor might be called.

And further:

You state that "the government has mocked at every suggestion of discussing peace on the great basic principles laid down by President Wilson, and has rejected with contempt eight or nine peace offers." Such statements as these are doing great mischief. They are wholly untrue. If they were correct, I can assure you that important as administrative work may be I could accept no responsibility in a government which would mock at suggestions of Peace on the principles of the American President. Immediately after reading your article, I read the speech of the Prime Minister in France last Friday and if you refer to the speech you will find that 'Mr. Lloyd George said, "If the kaiser and his advisers will accept the conditions voiced by the president they can have peace with America, peace with France and peace with Great Britain to-morrow."

I trouble you with this note, because the nearer labor approaches an era of responsibility, the nearer labor should keep to absolute facts in discussing issues of such tremendous import to all of us.

Parenthetically it may well be noted here that it was not until the war was won, with the general election still to come, that the Labour Party called its members out of the government. This, with the armistice signed and the general election set for December it did on November 14, 1918. Barnes, defeated for the Labour

Party nomination in his own constituency, threw in his lot with the new Lloyd George coalition; Clynes argued in the November party conference against the resolution, but responded to it, withdrew from the coalition and campaigned for labor. [Page 269.]

So long as Prussian militarism kept the field, as foe to the nation, labor kept the faith and held to the all-England alignment. Then it made its clean cut break with the war-time coalition in order, for better or worse, to enter the peace on its own footing and with its worker's program for national and international reconstruction.

CHAPTER XIII

LABOR AND THE NEW SOCIAL ORDER

"THERE are bushels of them piled up on the floor. We have never had such a mail," said James Middleton at the Labour Party headquarters, I Victoria Street, London, the Monday following the Nottingham meeting. Middleton is assistant secretary; which is official language for Henderson's right hand. The public will, perchance, never know what the labor leaders know-how much in actual execution of their political and international offensives has hung on the deft ministration of this indefatigable, unobtrusive man with the details at his finger tips. Under various titles and in quaint disguises, you can find him and his kind if you dig deep enough into any organized social movement that, against all the prophets, seems to run on some innate momentum of its own. The bushels of mail were requests for copies of the report on reconstruction issued the week before, under the title Labour and the New Social Order.1 Few committee reports have ever so struck fire in the public imagination at home and abroad.

Its reprint as a supplement by the New Republic in March, 1918, led to the circulation of thousands of copies in the United States. It was hailed by radicals everywhere, and stimulated such progressive thinkers as Winston Churchill to explore the possibilities of an American contribution2 which would reflect our less stratified social composition, and would approach the future from the standpoint of the community as a whole. Some of the more progressive labor bodies-from state federations in the far northwest to independent unions in New York-set out to spread the British program. The American Socialist Party-at the extreme left on the war issues and the Social Democratic League-its pro-war offshoot to the extreme right-brought out domestic platforms in advance of the fall elections (1918), which were clearly attempts to parallel its success in attracting public attention. The American Federation of Labor, at its annual convention in June, was bare of any "glorious reconstruction ideal . . . painted by any word brush," to use Gompers' phrases, and seemed strangely inhibited from ad1 Appendix IV.

2

"A Traveller in War Time" (1918).