massed behind the new tactics. Picture the line-up in American football. The backs shifted their tactics from the right end to between tackle and guard on the left. Thus by the close of 1917, the radicals gave fire and urgency to the new formation. The more conservative leaders still stood to the positions taken for three years, but many of them put their weight into the international program which the rank and file had laid hold of with a fervor which can only be compared with the feel of a labor group in the midst of a great strike. CHAPTER VI THE NOTTINGHAM MEETING QUICKENED by these developments, the British Labour Party went into annual session at Nottingham on January 23, 1918. In a way, the Nottingham meeting originated nothing, brought nothing to a head. It merely affirmed the war aims which the two great British labor formations had agreed to in December, and which were to receive the sanction of Allied labor and socialist groups at the London conference in February [page 67]. Its plans for party reorganization, which had engrossed much of the time of the executive in recent months in anticipation of a general election, were held over until a special convention, also in February [page 105]. The tentative draft of its political platform, Labour and the New Social Order,1 in a sense recapitulated the resolutions on internal policy adopted at the preceding annual session at Manchester. This was presented at Nottingham, not for adoption, but for reference to the constituent organizations in advance of a party conference in June [page 125]. Nevertheless, the Nottingham meeting gathered up all these strands into the cordage of its organized purpose and easily may come to be looked back upon as the outstanding labor gathering of the war in England. Some of its characteristics may well be set down here, as a cross section, if you will, of the British labor movement as a whole, master type of the uncounted, lesser meetings which led up to it, meetings of local and national unions, meetings of city and district federations. The delegates responded to spirited idealism from the speakers' platform. Again and again, some fiery radical from a back row would stir them into cheers. They responded less exuberantly, perhaps, but none the less just as spontaneously to homely challenges to fair play and to common sense. They threw open their doors to the representative of the Russian Bolsheviki and acclaimed the revolution; heard him rail at the "moderates," and, "moderates" themselves, nine-tenths of them, the delegates went on about their solid business in a solid way. As a political convention, the thing which most impressed the American observer was the pains taken to provide for the deliberate 1Appendix IV. consideration of policy. Under the rules every constituent organization had been obliged to forward to headquarters the resolutions it had to offer. All these had been sent out from headquarters to all the constituent organizations, so that both the resolutions thus offered and amendments thereto by other labor bodies were in hand in advance of the convention itself. The whole batch was classified, published in a forty-four page agenda and distributed at the first session. Representatives of such constituent organizations as had offered resolutions or amendments on any one subject, on the Ministry of Health, for example, or on the Soldiers' Charter, were asked to meet together in committee and endeavor to reach a joint draft. This in turn was printed forthwith and distributed to the delegates on the day for discussion of the subject. As already noted, the proposal for party reorganization was put over for a full month to give the constituent organizations time to debate it; the draft of the party program, for six months. In the current temper of the public toward queues outside the bakers' shops and meat markets, there was naturally bitter attack upon the government's handling of the food question, both in resolutions sent in and on the floor. But when J. R. Clynes, M.P., the labor member of the food administration, turned the tables, charged the unions with failing to coöperate in the local councils and put it up to them to work out a better scheme, he carried his audience with him. Thus, all through the conference, sympathy for the oppressed of all nations and "grousing" against abuses at home were somehow or other, in true British psychology, consistent parts of a matter-of-fact grappling with practical things. The old watch-cries against capitalistic excesses had their customary echoes, yet the impression abided that here was developing something different both from rigid continental socialism and from the old trade unionism-something organic, national, British. Indeed, the pre-war preachers of class hatred were conspicuous by their absence. The old-line Socialists in England had, in truth, been split by the great war into two groups, both of them comparatively small in numbers. One group, the British Socialist Party, was fairly analogous in its direct opposition to the war to the stand taken by the American Socialist Party at St. Louis, just prior to our entry into the war. Its offices were raided by the government in January, and literature was confiscated that it had planned to distribute at the Nottingham meeting of the Labour Party. The other group, including some of the most extreme antagonists of the social order, merely crossed off "class" and wrote in "race" in the matter of their feel ings and anathemas and became readily enough a race-hatred, jingo section-the National Socialist Party-which, unlike the Labour Party, made no distinction between the German government and the German people. Its resolution declaring against any international conference "so long as the Germans occupy the territories they have seized and carry on their campaign of murder, outrage and piracy," was heavily defeated at an inter-Allied conference in London on August 21, 1917. Its position was fairly analogous to that assumed by the American Federation of Labor once the United States itself became a belligerent. In contrast, there was a very evident resurgence of feeling of working class brotherhood at Nottingham, and the fraternal delegates from Allied countries were made to feel by the applause which followed their speeches that the things in common were bigger than the things in difference. More, the delegates began with singing Connell's familiar "Red Flag," which was distributed by The Herald. They did not balk nor turn a hair at the second stanza, which runs: Look round-the Frenchman loves its blaze; In Moscow's vaults its hymns are sung; They sang it with the unction of a Progressive Party rally singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," but with this difference: they knew the words, and with one accord they gave the full-throated chorus for a seventh and last time at its close, singing it standing, heads up, in a great rolling bass: Then raise the scarlet standard high! From the gallery, before they had sat down, the call came for three cheers for the Russian revolution. They were given. Three cheers for the Austrian working class strike (then on). They were given. Three cheers for peace. Given with three times the volume of the others. A further call from the gallery for three "boos" for the labor "comb-out" raised more of a laugh than a cheer from the assembly. As they sat down, the observer endeavored to size up these people who had been singing socialist songs and cheering peace in wartime. This was not what New Yorkers call a "Cooper Union crowd." A day or so later at the headquarter's hotel, one member of the government labor delegation that was later sent to America pointed with a flip of his thumb at a party of long-haired, thincheeked agitators at a nearby table; there was a girl with them with bobbed hair and a socialist minister in black. "And they talk of that kind being the government, eh?" he scoffed. But this hallfull of labor delegates were predominantly of another sort, with wrists as thick as his own, and with sons, like his, in the trenches. It was made up largely of men forty years old or older. There were a dozen bald heads in the first five rows, for example, and as many polls of gray hair-perhaps a third of the fifty men who sat in them. And speaker after speaker who got up in the course of the three days' proceedings came to mind a few days later when one of the leading English economists said in a matter-of-fact way that there were in the Labour Party more men of capacity and experience, fitting them for responsibility and leadership in seeing England through the reconstruction period, than in either the coalition government or the Liberal Party. At the Nottingham meeting, for the first time, the labor movement clearly demarked itself from the coalition government, as a party of opposition if events so developed, but rather, for the present and for the future, as a party of affirmative proposal. Its Labour and the New Social Order 1 was its charter for the reconstruction period; its Labour War Aims 2 its international program. Eight labor leaders were members of the Lloyd George ministry; Barnes a member of the War Cabinet. But while the vote of the conference was against demanding their withdrawal on questions of policy (Henderson in person leading the opposition to the demand, on the ground that it might embarrass the government in the prosecution of the war), there was no hiding the satisfaction in the corridors over trouble two of them were having in their constituencies, and there was general approval of Henderson's statement that never again would he be a member of a government in which labor was not in a majority. At the Nottingham meeting, also, the swing of the labor movement toward the "left" in the matter of foreign policy, as the outcome of the three war years, stood out as an accomplished fact. The underlying situation was the subject of various interpretations. Nottingham, in January, 1918, the week of the meeting, presented the customary look of an old industrial town, a textile center superimposed upon a mining district. There were few young men abroad. Working girls streamed to the mills in the mornings, 1 Appendix IV. 2 * Appendix II. |