THE AIMS OF LABOUR

CHAPTER I

THE POLITICAL LABOUR MOVEMENT

WITH the coming of peace the world will enter upon an era of revolutionary change to which there is no parallel in history. In this country, as in every other, the war has already profoundly modified the economic system of pre-war days, and has introduced far-reaching innovations into industry. Methods of State control which would once have been regarded as intolerable infringements of the rights and liberties of both employers and workmen have been accepted without effective protest even from those bred in the individualist tradition of the last century. Some of these changes are admittedly only temporary and provisional. They were dictated by national necessity, and were introduced upon the explicit understanding that an unprecedented situation had arisen which called for bold and drastic measures. Those measures which relate to trade union practices and customs in the work

shops, in particular, are governed by strict pledges for the restoration of pre-war conditions when the national crisis is over. Nevertheless, the extent and importance of these changes in methods of production, the control of industry, the management and distribution of labour, and the limitations imposed upon the activities of financiers and the enterprises of individual capitalists, practically involve a revolution, the effects of which will remain when the necessity which gave them their sanction has passed away. Most of them are permanent. In four crowded and eventful years we have gathered the fruits of a century of economic evolution. We have entered upon a new world. With the main features of this new world we are still unfamiliar. We cannot yet begin to measure the material effects of the war upon the commercial and industrial system upon which our civilisation has been based.

Still less can we estimate the results of the inner revolution of thought and feeling which has accompanied these material changes. Yet we are beginning dimly to see that the old order of society has dissolved. A new social order is taking shape even in the midst of the stress and peril of the time. This revolution is fundamental, for it touches the springs of action in the great mass of the common people. Greater changes in the material structure

of society have still to come, but they will be dictated not by the exigencies of war but by the new democratic consciousness and the new social conscience which have come to birth in the long agony of the present struggle. The people have been taught by events, better than by any process of rational argument, that they alone make war possible, though they have no hand in fashioning the policies that lead to war: their energy, devotion, and sacrifice, in trench, field and factory, are qualities which their rulers exploit when they quarrel with one another. In times of peace the people feel that they are nothing; when war comes they are found to be everything. War is possible only because the skill and bravery of the common people, their immense industry, their patient endurance, their direct and simple sense of right and wrong, give the world's rulers a feeling of power which they use, not to ensure the happiness and prosperity of the multitudes of humble folk, but to glorify their own names and to feed their insensate ambitions. The people have discovered this, and in learning it they have discovered their own power. Never again, we may be sure, will the people allow themselves to be driven helplessly into war by these sinister forces. Neither will they be able henceforth to see as enemies the people of other countries who are like themselves the