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 Labour 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 that 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 insure 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 brain-not 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 Labour 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.

What, then, do the British workers stand for in building their new house "upon the common foundation of the democratic control of society in all its activities"?

They stand in the first place for some things on which the general American public would back them up without question.

They stand for free public education-and they stand for it for the children of the whole working class for all the children of Great Britain. Secondary and higher schools are not free schools. in England. The elementary schools are inadequate in numbers, teachers, curriculum. The workers are out for an educational system comparable with the best America has to offer from kindergarten to university, free, public, as a basis for fitting the oncoming generation of British workers to run England.

They are out for a ministry of health and a radical reorganization of the whole scheme of building up the physical fitness of their own kind, such as the recruiting experience had shown was all too much needed. They stand out, to use Sidney Webb's phrase, "for the universal enforcement of the national minimum;" for the strengthening of the factory, compensation and insurance acts gov

erning hours, health, unemployment and the like: in other words, to lay a floor of standards beneath which no industrial operations shall be carried on in England. They stand for giving an entirely new embodiment to home life among the workers of Great Britain by far-reaching housing and city building schemes, and they speak in terms of a million new cottages and an outlay of three million sterling for rehousing in mining villages, rural districts and town slums.

They sensed an attempt to reduce wages when the troops come home, to take advantage of the dislocation of demobilization to worsen the conditions of employment and to leave to private charity the handling of unemployment. They call for a revolution of the poor law and for deliberate national organization to meet unemployment in advance, by public works in housing, school building, transport and road building, afforestation and the breaking up of great estates into coöperative small holdings; by raising the schoolleaving age to sixteen, by shortening the hours of labor of young persons and by initiating the universal eight-hour day.

In the political field, the party stands for the complete removal of all the wartime restrictions on "freedom of speech, freedom of publication, freedom of the press, freedom of travel, freedom of choice of place of residence, and freedom of employment the day after peace is declared." To quote a speaker on the floor of the June conference:

A man with his hand crippled has been in prison for two years for refusing military examination, because he is a conscientious objector. He is now doing time in a stone quarry. When the names of our heroes at the front are placed on a monument in some fair square of the city, may the names of the conscientious objectors be there, beside them.

It cannot be said the workers as a whole understood or sympathized with the principles of the conscientious objectors, much less shared their feelings. But they understood and were aroused by the treatment accorded them in prison. That awakened old echoes of the treatment accorded labor leaders in the long struggle for the right to organize, and it provoked the quick recognition that without their organized power, their own strike leaders in wartime would have been handled no differently.

In the debates at the June conference, working-class resistance to any attempt to carry over military methods into the industrial life, or perpetuate them under a peace economy was voiced by W. C. Anderson, member of Parliament from the Independent Labour Party (left):

The new spirit requires new machinery, and labor ought to give a clear lead. The military service acts are being used more and more for industrial conscription. Labor must conquer the government. Labor must be the government. Labor must make the laws, not for a small section, but for the whole community.

He spoke of the new grades of military service for the ages of forty-one years to fifty-one years:

They believe they will be sent to the front. The government says to them, "If you will place yourselves in our power and be sent anywhere we say, you will be exempted from military service." This is industrial compulsion. Either they should be sent into the army or be left free as a civilian.

Labor is of one mind with respect to peace time conscription, military no less than industrial. It took its stand against "any continuation of the military service acts a moment longer than the imperative requirements of the war excuse."

But "individual freedom is of little use without complete political rights." The Labour Party

sees its repeated demands largely conceded in the present representation of the people act, but not yet wholly satisfied. The party stands, as heretofore, for complete adult suffrage... effective provision for absent electors to vote, for absolutely equal rights for both sexes, for the same freedom to exercise civic rights for the common soldier as for the officer, for shorter parliaments, for the complete abolition of the House of Lords, and for a most strenuous opposition to any new second chamber, whether elected or not, having in it any element of heredity or privilege, or of the control of the House of Commons by any party or class.

Labor stands for absolute autonomy of each self-governing part of the Empire, for "home rule all around," and for an imperial council which would express the democratized spirit of "the Britannic Alliance."

We now come to the larger economic proposals on which there is bound to be much friction. "What the nation needs is undoubtedly a great bound onward on its aggregate productivity." But this to labor's mind

cannot be secured merely by pressing the manual workers to more strenuous toil, or even by encouraging the "Captains of Industry" to a less wasteful organization of their several enterprises on a profit-making basis.

What the Labour Party looks to is:

A genuinely scientific reorganization of the nation's industry, no longer deflected by individual profiteering, on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production; the equitable sharing of the proceeds among all who participate in any capacity and only among these, and the adoption, in particular services and occupations, of those systems and methods of administration and control that may be found, in practice, best to promote, not profiteering, but the public interest.

To this end the party stands "not merely for the principle of common ownership of the nation's land, but for a unified national service of communication and transport, to be worked unhampered by capitalist, private, or purely local interests (and with a steadily increasing participation of the organized workers in the management, both central and local) exclusively for the common good"; for the erection of a score of gigantic super-power stations, "which would generate, at incredibly cheap rates, enough electricity for the use of every industrial establishment and every private household in Great Britain"; for "the immediate nationalization of mines, the extraction of coal and iron being worked as a public service (with a steadily increasing participation in the management, both central and local, of the various grades of persons employed)." The workers want household coal of standard quality, at "a fixed and uniform price for the whole kingdom, payable by rich and poor alike, as unalterable as the penny postage stamp." Similarly, they advocate the expropriation of the profit-making industrial insurance companies which "now so tyrannously exploit the people with their wasteful house-to-house industrial life assurance," and they advocate local option and "taking the entire manufacture and retailing of alcoholic drink out of the hands of those who find profit in promoting the utmost possible consumption."

The party takes ground against allowing the government control over the importations of wheat, wool, metals and other commodities to "slip back into the unfettered control of private capitalists, who are, actually at the instance of the government itself, now rapidly combining, trade by trade, into monopolist trusts, which may presently become as ruthless in their extortion as the worst American examples." To quote:

Standing, as it does, for the democratic control of industry, the Labour Party would think twice before it sanctioned any abandonment of the present profitable centralization of purchase of raw material; of the present carefully organized "rationing" by joint committees of the trades concerned, of the several establishments with the materials they require; of the present elaborate system of "costing" and public audit of manufacturers' accounts, so as to stop

the waste heretofore caused by the mechanical inefficiency of the more backward firms; of the present salutary publicity of manufacturing processes and expenses hereby insured; and, on the information thus obtained (in order never again to revert to the old time profiteering), of the present rigid fixing, for standardized products, of maximum prices at the factory, at the warehouse of the wholesale trader and in the retail shop.

Labor holds that it is just as much the function of the government to protect private consumers as to protect, through the factory acts, the wage earning producers.

To provide the revenue to meet the cost of the war and to make the constructive investment for national production outlined, the Labour Party repudiates all proposals for a protective tariff, strenuously opposes any taxation which would increase the price of food, and objects to any taxes interfering with production, commerce, transport or communication. Rather, it turns its eyes on the holdings of what it describes as "that one-tenth of the population which owns nine-tenths of the riches of the United Kingdom." It would extend the Excess Profits Tax, increase the Mineral Rights Duty and bring "the steadily rising unearned increment of urban and mineral land . . . wholly . . . into the public exchequer." It stands for paying off the national debt by the direct taxation of private fortunes both during life and after death. It proposes to rearrange the "whole taxation of inheritance from the standpoint of asking what is the maximum amount that any rich man should be permitted at death to divert by his will from the national exchequer which should normally be the heir of all private riches in excess of a quite moderate amount by way of family provision." It stands for a special capital levy to pay off a very substantial part of the entire national debt.1 It stands, in fine, for taking over the

1 When the issue of conscription of wealth was raised by labor it met with a striking response from the leader of the Unionist party. Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was quoted in the London Times of December 26, 1917, as saying: "I am inclined to take this view that we ought to aim at making this burden (of national debt) one which will rest practically on the wealth that has been created and is in existence at the time the war comes to an end, so that it would not be there as a handicap on the creation of new wealth after the war. The question of whether or not there should be conscription of wealth, then, is entirely a matter of expediency. In my opinion, it is simply a question of whether it will pay them [the wealthy classes] best, and pay the country best, to have a general capital levy, and reduce the national debt as far as you can, or have it continued for 50 years as a constant burden of taxation. My own feeling is that it would be better, both for the wealthy classes and the country, to have this levy of capital, and reduce the burden of the national debt."