at the earliest possible moment a joint statement of their War Aims in harmony with the above;

(c) Approves the arrangements made for the holding of a further conference in London on the 20th February of the Labour and Socialist Parties of the Allied nations on the basis of the War Aims of British Labor with the view of arriving at a general agreement among such Parties; (d) Calls upon the working class organization of the Central Powers to declare their War Aims and to influence their Governments to make statements of their War Aims in order that the world may see how far the declaration of all the Powers provide a basis for a negotiated and lasting Peace, and (e) Assuming that a general agreement can be arrived at by the labor and socialist parties of the Allied nations directs that their several governments should be then at once urged to allow facilities for attendance at an International Congress in some neutral state, preferably Switzerland, at which organized working class opinion of all the countries may be represented, in order that nothing may be left undone to bring into harmony the desires of the working classes of all the belligerents.

That a copy be forwarded to the Prime Minister.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEW ISSUE AND ITS ENGINEERS

ENOUGH has been said to bring out with clearness that the British labor offensive was not to be mistaken for a propaganda movement rallied behind a few watch cries and recruited up from a handful of men to a mass agitation. If we are seeking a comparison in current American history, to what had taken place in the British Labour Party, it would be to imagine that the insurgent movement in the Republican Party had found the national leaders swinging with it in 1912, or had succeeded in shifting control from such stand-patters as Taft, Root and Cannon to Roosevelt, Johnson and the progressives; or to recall the new and progressive tilt to the balance of power in the Democratic organization which came that year with the triumph of the Wilson Democrats at Baltimore. There was something tidal at work in American political life. But these alignments were not at a time of such transcendant national crisis, forcing men inexorably back to the bedrock of their make-up for choices, nor were they concerned so closely with the things which affect the individual in the everyday stuff of life and labor.

The emergence of the new leadership might be disposed of offhand as the recourse of a few disgruntled labor politicians despoiled of office and anxious not to return to the bench. It might be discounted as the stampeding of the sober mass of labor by a group of hotheads, the old leaders going with the crowd lest their places be taken from them. These things might have entered in, but as explanations they were altogether too fine-spun.

The upward thrust of the new labor motivation had been a matter of growth within a great social organism, the membership of which had gone through a searching common experience and come out feeling the same way. In later chapters we shall press our exploration back of the sphere of war relations to that of domestic politics, and again back of the sphere of domestic politics to that of the workaday life-revealing ever deeper reaches of experience, an ever swelling volume of common feeling. The engineers of the new offensive had been party to this experience, had shared in this feeling, and this had come to be as true of the labor "center" as of

the "left." It is on the new majority that we can now fix attention, on the men who for two years have guided developments, if we would get close to the realities.

The swing was toward the left-not to it.

There has been no end of confusion and distortion as to the personnel of the British labor offensive. It has been associated by some with advocacy of a patched up peace that would have meant knuckling in to German militarism. Now, the man who drafted the war aims memorandum was Sidney Webb, who from the beginning had been backing up the war in the New Statesman. Americans will remember a member of the British mission which visited this country in the early months of the war. He was called by a New York banker the largest calibered labor man he had ever met. This was J. H. Thomas. He was to be found at Nottingham, at the head of the delegation of the National Union of Railwaymen. He was chairman of one of the chief committees at the subsequent inter-Allied meeting. In each of the great British labor gatherings of the last two years, as we have seen at London and Birmingham, Blackpool and Derby, he has been in a sense the floor leader of that central group which, with a steadfast following behind them, have held the new majority intact and converted the swing toward the left into a new dynamic, cohering and not disrupting the forces of labor. He has been close to Henderson, who quit the government because, in his words at Blackpool, he had "refused to do what I never will do, namely, desert the people who sent me into the government," and to Clynes, who coolly told the delegates at Nottingham that he would quit the party if they forced a premature issue with the government, which, in the view of these leaders, might embarrass the nation in the active prosecution of the war. The war aims had been put out by the new working majority in which, as we have seen, these three and their kind struck hands with such men as Ramsay MacDonald and Robert Smillie, who had stood out for working class negotiations from the first year of the war. The issue was not pacifism, but imperialism, and the new working majority offered itself as a nucleus around which the democratic forces of England might unite. Reviewing Henderson's new book, "The Aims of Labour," Sidney Webb wrote in The New Statesman:

It is sometimes forgotten how considerable was the effect upon the spiritual course of the war which followed Mr. Henderson's resignation from the Government. The people of this country have always from the first moment of the war had only one object, a people's peace; but there is no doubt that as the exigencies of war gradually caused all control of policy to be surrendered into the hands

of governments, a feeling of helplessness, of inability to affect policy, settled upon labor and the peoples in Western Europe. Mr. Henderson's resignation dissipated in this country that feeling of helplessness and canalized once more the desires and determination of labor to control policy and accept only a people's peace.

As a check and confirmation both of our impressions as visiting journalists and of the ex parte statements of the labor men themselves, it will serve the purposes of this interpretation to quote a keen English observer, interviewed just before the Nottingham convention. A man of large independent means, he could not be charged with class bias; a university man, he was conscious of those larger implications of the English birthright that must not be sacrificed for to-day's pottage; an indefatigable worker in the war service of the nation, he was not of the sort to give aid or comfort to the enemy. As he saw it, British labor opinion was crystallizing about four or five main propositions:

1. For an unimperialistic peace. Their demand that the government commit itself unreservedly to such a policy was back of the recent pronouncements and pressure upon Lloyd George. Labor, he believed, would back up the war unreservedly so long as Germany failed to meet the Allies on this footing.

2. For participation of the people in foreign affairs. They felt that the old scheme of things in which they had no say, and the general muddle of secret diplomacy, had let them in for the present war. This had bred a determination that this should not happen again. They believed that the government had mishandled the Russian situation; they desired to take a hand, to find out about it, and to reach the working class opinion of other countries.

3. For disarmament; to get the burden of militarism off the backs of the workers.

4. For democratization of industry; they wanted a direct say over the conditions and affairs of work; and more, to participate themselves hereafter in the management of industry.

5. For a league of nations.

The insight and precision of these generalizations our further inquiries tended only to substantiate; a better telegraphic summary of the major trends of the British labor movement could scarcely be written than the five propositions as they lay in our informant's mind. The particularity of his information was shown when we asked him to specify why labor felt the government had mishandled the Russian situation in 1917. He grouped points which in their reaction upon working class opinion both in England and in Russia were, he said, now more and more recognized as blunders:

Blunder 1. The statements of Lord Milner when in Russia, in the last days of the old régime, supporting the Czar's government and making the revolutionists feel that England was against them.

Blunder 2. The statement of a member of the ministry in Parliament after the revolution broke out, eulogizing the Czar's government as an Ally.

Blunder 3. The refusal to let English labor participate in the Stockholm conference. A statement was given out which indicated that the Kerensky government was opposed to the meeting, without letting it be known that this expression was from the Russian Embassy in London, and not from Kerensky. When this reached Russia, it not only had a bad effect on Kerensky but undermined his position. Henderson's resignation confirmed the feeling among English labor on this point.

Blunder 4. Acquiescence by the government in the refusal of Havelock Wilson and the Sailors' Union to transport Ramsay MacDonald to Russia. MacDonald had great influence in foreign labor circles. He was whole-heartedly for Kerensky, against a separate peace, etc. He would have unquestionably fortified the provisional government.

Blunder 5. The failure to carry out an inter-Allied government conference and meet the Russians half way in the matter of war aims. The revolution had made any earlier understandings between the Allies, to the mind of the Russian people, a compact with the discredited régime of the Czar. In failing to carry through an official inter-Allied conference restating the purposes of the war, and in failing to let English labor participate in the Stockholm conference, Great Britain was acting in line with positions taken by France and Italy. Lloyd George had been, it was thought, favorably disposed toward such fresh action and England, as labor saw it, should have asserted her position.

Blunder 6. The failure to allay the mistrust by labor of the men surrounding Lloyd George-Milner, the man generally credited with getting England into the Boer War mess; Prussian in temperament and training; Carson, the aggravating delayer of Irish settlement; hated throughout the north of England; Curzon, who, as viceroy, had set India at heads and points; that is, in labor's view, imperialists who had messed up British relations with South Africa, India and Ireland.

It may well be asked how far such delicate questions reached down to the average man in the form of gripping issues: but to see that they were bone and sinew of the protestantism of the British labor leadership, one had only to mark their recurrence in labor press and speeches. Believing that such cabinet members were. the last men to deal in the spirit of English democracy either with revolution abroad (in Germany no less than in Russia), or with democratic strivings at home, the moderate central leaders were