it meant that while the miners have the largest labor group at Westminster, they hold in reserve their industrial organization in asserting their demands for social change. By mid-winter, after general strikes in Glasgow and Belfast in which the shop-stewards figured, the Triple Alliance was to make united demands (including nationalization of the mines) and the government was to counter by setting up a new inclusive joint body, representing all the interests in British industry.

The leaders of the "Centre," like John Robert Clynes, of equal strength in the trade union movement as in the political movement, are desirous that the new power of labor shall exert itself through the established channels of government. Clynes said at the close of 1918:

So far as I have any authority or influence with regard to the working people of this country, I want to resent in the strongest terms the declarations now being made to invite the organized working classes of the country to use the industrial weapon, the weapon of the strike, to attain their political ends.

The masses of wage earners form the greater part of the electorate, and there is no economic alteration which organized workers desire, which they cannot obtain from the floor of the House of Commons, if they send their representatives there in large enough numbers. Labor should stand for law and order, because the time may come when labor may have to make the law, when labor will expect and call upon other sections of the community to respect the law.

If labor expects that example to be followed, it must set it now.

Which course-constitutional, political and economic reform or industrial direct action-will prevail in the counsels of labor depends on the capacity of political democracy to assert itself constructively at Westminster.

Such a conservative publicist as J. L. Garvin, editor of The Observer, in a pre-election statement advocating the return of Lloyd George, wrote:

Either we must undertake with clear eyes and firm hands a constructive revolution, not shrinking in the process from a large extension of public control, or the general order here will be menaced. After the Great War and its astounding revelation of how pigmy were our pre-war efforts for the improvement of human life and happiness by comparison with the colossal ability and power since employed in a necessary destruction, the masses everywhere demand a new society. After the most frightful of wars, changing forever the mind and aspirations of the people, we have to transform-from top to bottom and throughout the whole social and industrial organization of Great Britain. Unless we do that a tidal wave of revolutionary feeling will sweep the polls a very few years from now,

Henceforth Labor and Capital face each other as equal in human dignity and status. Labor is done for ever and for ever with the old relationship of 'master and man.' The workers want the profit of large public services on a national basis to go to public uses instead of to private pockets. After the Great War that is what they want. The conservative forces everywhere must willingly give more than they have given or seem yet prepared to give, or it will be much the worse for them. In this country they must face the extension of public control in five or six large spheres of public life.

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CHAPTER XXII

IN FRANKLIN'S FOOTSTEPS

IN the course of his address at the Derby meeting of the British Trades Union Congress (September, 1918), Samuel Gompers swept away part of his notes and announced that he was "shortening his line on the international front." He did just that. Within the month he sat in at a reconvened session in London of the InterAllied Labour and Socialist Conference; and American labor struck hands on war aims with the Allied socialist and labor formation.

"We of this Labor Mission," "Gompers had been quoted as saying at the government luncheon tendered him on his arrival (with Barnes in the chair, supported by three of his colleagues in the War Cabinet, the Prime Minister, Lord Milner and Chamberlain), "have come here for the purpose of endeavoring to unite the workers of Great Britain, of France, and of Italy to stand together as one solid phalanx to make good the declaration of American labor." Now, unity among the workers of Great Britain and France, of Italy and Belgium had been achieved seven months earlier, with American labor "out of it" in the interval. And the new unity, to which American labor became party in the remaining two months of war, was not achieved by swinging them to the American labor position on the one question of procedure upon which it had kept aloof, but by recognizing the common principles which had animated labor's war aims on both sides of the Atlantic and upon which Henderson had pleaded in vain with the earlier American labor delegation to make public cause with them. It was not the one-ply military policy of the president of the American Federation of Labor, but the dual military-political offensive of the American President upon which they found common footing, or, to be specific, his 14 war-aims, which no sooner had been put out in January, 1918, than they were subscribed to as kindred to their own in a joint statement by Henderson for the British Labour Party and Bowerman for the British Trades Union Congress.

We must go back to the days of Benjamin Franklin for a figure comparable to that of Samuel Gompers on his wartime mission to England, France and Italy. To help American readers visualize European labor gatherings, we have set down our impressions of

some of their leaders, men and women. As a matter of comity, the process should be reversed. Not the least graphic and appreciative of the sketches of the president of the A. F. of L. was that published by L'Opinion on the occasion of his visit to Paris:

A stocky little man of whom one forgets the height in seeing only the strong and whimsical face, the big nose, big lips, a complexion colored like a sun brick, a scalp almost bare with some few tufts of gray hair mixed with black threads. All at once this countenance appears illuminated, animated as it is incessantly by his astonishing bright eyes in which sparkling gold and green appear. These changing eyes, which brighten and darken, turn themselves directly to you in inquiry and conquest. The first impression is one of mobility, of force and almost as much of charm. It is one of the faces whose modeling and expression tempt a painter. . . .

Samuel Gompers is not merely an orator with a magic voice. From the first meeting, his personality strikes you and impresses itself on you. Still less can we define it in a formula such as an American proposed to me: "He reminds me absolutely of a Scotch Calvinist preacher."

We see him seated in an armchair with a big cigar in his hand patiently lending an ear to the questions of an interviewer. From politeness he has put a French rose which some one has offered him in his buttonhole. He listens-this orator is a singularly good listener; he makes you repeat, put your question more precisely. He is in no hurry to reply; prudence is his first virtue.

However sure his thought may be, he seeks a form that will express it better. He foresees and obviates any interpretation which will misrepresent it. He proceeds step by step. With a definite character, with an emphasis of the voice he impresses the idea, the fact to which he wishes to draw attention. His hand is nervous, underscored by a sober gesture. For him there is no question of leaving to the many chances which a lack of precision has in store for those who leave to developments the trouble of working out their precise thought. This prudence is a sort of honesty, a feeling of responsibility. If he measures his words it is because he knows that every word is an act.

Samuel Gompers has both the inclination and the gift for action and, what is not always reconcilable, he is a strong man: "I am proud to live in an epoch in which action is everything; in which there is not a thought, a passing impulse but which can and must be translated by an act." And he adds: "I am proud to live in an epoch in which if the young men of 20 have the maturity of those of 30, those of 60 have the energy of those of 40."

Energy and vitality which abound in the man create his convictions. The conception which Gompers has of democracy is that of an extremely mobile society, in which liberty has the first place, in which liberty permits every personality to come to birth, to be formed, to assert itself frankly in complete freedom of movements:

"We wish to be masters of our destinies and that every one in the universe shall have the possibility of living his whole life. We wish to have the right to make mistakes, to commit errors, provided that the opportunity is given us to express ourselves. This is the privilege of democracy.'

A strong personality, he feels no distrust for other individualities; on the contrary, he thinks that the desires of the masses cannot express themselves through persons whose action is embarrassed by shibboleths and traditions of party, and that their interests will be better defended than they are by energetic and independent men capable of listening to reason, but of holding their own against caprice. He believes that the great force operating in the world is that of bodies of free men animated by the same spirit, closely linked together by mutual esteem and sympathtic reciprocity. In accordance with certain essential principles of action, they are always ready to renew their agreement by amicable discussions and to recast every day, if necessary, their action. . . .

Of course, not President Gompers but Colonel House would come to mind in pressing deeper the analogy to America's first diplomat of democracy. The visits of the quiet-spoken Texan to England and the Continent earlier in the war, his unpretentious but potent part in the conferences at Versailles which promoted Allied unity in military command and economic co-operation, in armistice and in peace, afford a closer parallel to the mission of the great Pennsylvanian to England before the American Revolution and to France while it was on. None the less, in more ways than one, Gompers may be said to have followed in Franklin's footsteps: his rise from a cigarmakers' apprentice to a foremost leader of men; his coming from Britain as a lad to make his way in the New World, like the coming of the Boston printer's boy to Philadelphia; and his picturesque claim, in his advanced years, upon the retina of the French capital. But it is his part in inter-Allied labor activity at the London Conference that concerns us here.

Gompers' information had been of the worst from the start. The correspondence published in the American Federationist was peppered with the names of Havelock Wilson, Appleton, Victor Fisher and their like. The hand-picked British labor delegation to the United States in the early months of 1918 was of a sort to amplify their misrepresentations. The much escorted American delegation which visited England in the spring was confident that the future of the British labor movement lay in the hands of that same crowd at the extreme right. With the exception of Clynes (who was listed in a group of officials at a dinner at the House of Commons) the American delegation's report did not name any of the outstanding leaders of the British labor majority. Barnes, Roberts, Hodges,