years of war have accentuated this. What was originally a movement of the intelligence has been augmented by a movement of the passions and emotions on account of the way that Capitalism unmasked itself during those years of national sacrifice.

Whoever sees in the Unionist threat of rebellion in 1912-13 opposition to the Home Rule Bill only, sees but the centre front of a stage with far larger issues in the background. The political party that stood in pocket, in mind and in instinct, for the existing order of social and economic relationships, had felt the ground slipping from under its feet. Parliament was being captured and the sky was darkened by ominous clouds. The classes were being driven back upon the last resort of men who find their wills no longer in command of power-force, illegality, unconstitutionalism. They were in exactly the same position as the Bolshevists were in Russia a few years later, and were preparing to adopt exactly the same weapons. As the Bolshevists could not trust the Constituent Assembly and so dissolved it in Cromwellian fashion, so the interests represented by the Unionist party were losing confidence in Parliament elected on Limehouse speeches and beginning to raid henroosts, and declared on an apparently favourable issue that they would maintain their ascendancy by unconstitutional means. The impulse to Unionist illegality came from general political conditions, though it was the Home Rule Bill that, like Moses' rod, enabled it to gush out. The Unionist psychology in 1912 was of precisely the same nature as the Bolshevist psychology in 1918. The war first of all turned these currents back upon themselves, then its influence slackened, finally the currents returned to their normal flow with an augmented force.

The history of the Unionist party in these years is the first chapter in how economic and social antagonism divided our country and ended the Parliamentary régime if the events of to-day are to turn out to be incidents in such an unfortunate history, Mr. Lloyd George's later speeches will in time be recognized as the first bugle sounds in our class war.

ATTEMPTS AT INDUSTRIAL PEACE

For labour, in its morning of awakening, to imitate Capitalism is not commendable from a social point of view, though against such a policy Capitalism itself has no just complaint. During a transition period, however, we ought not to be surprised if labour were to make this mistake. That would be the first natural course for men who have just become aware of the injustices and the indignities of the past. It is the kick of resentment, not the thought of betterment; it is the first impulse to imitate, to show you can do something too, not the reasoned policy to use acquired power well. The emancipated Hindu who, a century ago, got drunk to show that he had devoted himself to Western culture, behaved unwisely but humanly. Both capital and labour have to serve communal ends, and the great task before all who understand the true significance of present-day conflicts is to discover how this synthesis of function can be brought about.

Capitalism itself has occasionally essayed the task but with no conspicuous success. It has tried piece work and task work and bonus payments and what not, the idea being to relate wages to production and increase the efforts of labour. All have failed because the workman in one way or other has speedily discovered that small is the gain which he receives

from his extra product, either absolutely in extra wages or relatively to the added profits which the employer has pocketed. No one can say that, when the most successful of these incentives has been tried, the difference between it and the worst has been the difference between satisfactory and unsatisfactory industrial conditions. Moreover, the profits of the capitalist always come in as a blinding screen between the workman, however he may be paid, and the social advantage of high production. The power of the capitalist to reduce wages has always been too great a temptation for him to resist, and a high income as an incentive to the workman to work hard does not last very long. Irregular employment comes round, and time worker and bonus worker stand moodily together amongst the unemployed.

Schemes of profit-sharing which give, in addition to wages, some percentage of the profits earned, and which are sometimes carried as far as to encourage workers to invest in the shares of companies and even to concede to them a limited representation on boards of directors, have also been tried, but have been so insignificant in relation to the whole process of production, and of such small importance in the industrial works where they have been introduced (the average value of all profit-sharing schemes is 5 per cent. on wages), that at best they have been only a drop in a bucket. As a matter of fact, of the seventy-six profit-sharing schemes of all kinds started between 1867 and 1890, the average life was nine years and nine months. In 1912, 130 schemes employed 106,000 workpeople, and of these 28,750 were gas workers. Their ulterior motives of binding labour to one employment and of separating the labour groups effected from their kindred

mass, have been so apparent that labour has never looked favourably upon them. The profit-sharing device of the South Metropolitan Gas Company (started in 1890) was frankly an attempt to keep the employees out of their Trade Union, and until 1902 no member of a Trade Union could participate in it. The legislative provisions by which gas dividends are regulated by the price of gas make profitsharing schemes easy to work by removing temptations to reduce wages, and so we find them now in operation in thirty-three gas companies. When, as by the labour Co-partnership Association, Labour Co-partnership has been regarded as a leaven of a new system of co-operation based not upon Capitalism but upon the self-governing workshop, the inadequacy of the means in relation to the end has been rightly felt by labour, and the experiment has consequently failed to rouse much interest. It may at the best transform this factory or that, but it has nothing to say to the problem of capitalist combination and touches none of the questions of concentration in control or of the transformation of the whole process of production into a social function. It is, moreover, altogether antiquated and out of touch with the newer ideas of labour responsibility in production which are now in the minds of those giving the tune to the march of labour thought.*

Moreover, none of these proposals are safe from the point of view of the consuming public, because, if labour could be induced to accept them, the most natural next step would be for combinations of capital to make terms with labour to exploit the

* In 1916 there were 101 such workshops in this country, two fewer than in 1914, with a membership of 35,000, a share and loan capital of £1,770,000, and a bonus paid on wages of only £38,000.

public. This is a combination which must be avoided at all costs. We have seen it attempted repeatedly and, though it has had but a partial and a temporary success, its repeated failures must not be taken as a proof that it can never be brought about. The movement towards the combination of capital was baffled again and again, but it at last succeeded. To-day there is an active and pernicious propaganda asking labour to consider nothing but its economic interests, representing all history as being only an economic process, and politics as purely an economic conflict. This, for the moment, may be made the basis of what are called advanced and revolutionary movements, but the general effect on the mind of the working-class masses is to set before them selfregarding goals. Its psychological result is to induce them to think first and foremost of their own immediate advantage, and it obscures the spirit of social service and the end of communal well-being which gives the Labour movement a social, as apart from a class, value. No stream can rise higher than its source, and if the Labour movement has no origin other than economic it can have no other end. The combination that Socialism seeks is not one between the economic interests of labour and capital in the Capitalist system, but one between the moral interests of labour and capital in the community.* If

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*This consideration affects the Labour movement in all its aspects, and Mr. Bernstein in his " My Years of Exile," commenting upon some special characteristics of labour in this country as seen by a foreigner, writes these significant sentences: The defeat of Chartism. deprived it (the British Labour movement) of that element of ideology without which any movement is in danger of revolving in a circle and becoming the raw material of other activities. This limitation of intellectual elasticity of the Labour movement in England increased when the International Workers' Association, which seemed for a moment destined to resuscitate