of their education had prevented them from seeing, what is surely obvious, that if Bolshevism was an evil thing, and if there was a danger of it in Great Britain, then the way to avoid it was to welcome Labour by ordinary, political, 'constitutional' channels into a position of political stability and responsibility.

The General Election, then, in Labour's view, was won by false statements, and by promises which were never meant to be fulfilled. Having got together the House of Commons on this false basis, Mr Lloyd George was able, by the free operation of the political theory we are discussing, to pass any law he liked, and to continue in office passing such laws as long as he liked; for there is nothing in that political theory to prevent any Parliament from legislating to extend its own life indefinitely.

Parliamentary majorities in this country are always held together by a process of indirect and often unintentional corruption. An enormous number of offices and honours are distributed, and often induce people to vote irrespective of their own convictions or even of their pledges to their constituents. If ever there is a revolt within the House of Commons, and the Government is in danger of losing the support of its own followers, it has only to threaten them with the unpleasantness, uncertainty, and expense of an election, and they almost always come incontinently to heel. They keep the Government in office, and it rewards them with money and little bits of ribbon. The eighteenth century method was more direct for by that method the Government openly, one might almost say 'officially,' took on the task of buying votes at so many pounds each.

Whatever, then, may be the powers or limits of true democracy, there is no democracy in Great Britain

under the present system, and people who tell the working-class it is entirely their own fault if they do not get the sort of Government that they want are accusing the working-class of the very fault of those who mislead it.

The working-class was, according to the view which organised Labour now freely expresses at all its conferences, deceived by Mr Lloyd George at the General Election. It may be said that it ought to have known too much about Mr Lloyd George to allow of that; but consider that there was turned on it the battery of far more than half the Press of the country, assuring it, day by day, evening by evening, Sunday by Sunday, in every variety of tone and accent, that Mr Lloyd George was the sole past and future saviour of his country. To expect any body of people untrained in politics to resist such a battery is to expect something of human nature which even the political theorists can scarcely take for granted. Nor, under the capitalist system, while it remains possible for any combination of rich men to bring that battery to bear upon the public at any moment, is there a possibility that the people should be allowed to vote for what they really want. I do not want to beg the question of whether the British public does or does not desire the nationalisation of the mines; but I do agree with all Robert Smillie implied when he said, at one of last year's Trades Union Congresses, that 'he had not the slightest hope, even if a General Election were to take place next day, that the Government would allow them to fight it on the question of the nationalisation of the mines.' 1

This, in brief, is the argument against the sole and exclusive use of the political vote for all purposes of

1 Times, December 10th, 1919.

reform. It is as certain as death that whatever may be considered permissible in minor ways, any ultimate and fundamental economic and social change, any revolutionary change, any real re-distribution of the power or wealth of the community, will be met by the solid marshalling of all the forces which have power and wealth already. Moreover-as has already been argued-it seems probable that those same forces would continue to resist any fundamental change, even if it had been legislatively and 'constitutionally' enacted. This is perhaps the answer to those who plausibly argue that, if Labour has not yet sufficient education to insist on getting its real wants met in Parliament, it has not sufficient skill to 'run' an economic revolution. It may be that the economic revolution must precede any effective political change.

XIII

THE NATURE OF CAPITAL AND THE GENERAL STRIKE

IF the ballot-box is not all-sufficient, if the present form of democracy does not actually result in that government by the main body of the people which is what 'democracy' means: if the operations of political equality are frustrated by economic inequality; and if, in consequence, the whole class which bears the burden of economic inequality is feeling its way towards the removal of that inequality-then it becomes the urgent duty of everybody to understand the basic cause and nature of the inequality, and to consider whether the demand for its removal is just and practicable, or immoral and dangerous.

What view of private capitalism is implied in the present activities of Labour? Those activities, whether we like it or not, imply the Socialist view of private capitalism. Not every worker who demands nationalisation is, by label, a Socialist. But nationalisation is the practical expression of Socialist theory. It implies the belief that, at present, out of the total product of the national endeavour, a large proportion is wrongly and wastefully diverted, as rent and interest, into the pockets of the owners of private capital; and that the entire product of the national endeavour ought to be available for the common use of the entire community. The Trade Union movement as a whole is committed by definite and repeated resolutions to this theory; 1 See Appendix IV.

1

this theory is the substance of the political claim of the Labour Party; 1 and its full and efficient carrying out means the revolutionary change of the national life. We must, therefore, summarise it here, in spite of the danger of repeating the obvious.

What, then, in the view we have to consider, is capital? The word is loosely used in such phrases as 'driving capital out of the country' or 'destroying capital' (as some say it would be 'destroyed' by the taking of a Capital Levy), without any clear realisation of what is actually meant by it; and Socialists, who want to remove capital from private hands, sometimes fall into the trap, and talk as if abolishing private capitalism were the same thing as abolishing capital. You can no more abolish capital than you can abolish gravitation. Capital is a fact, just as economic rent is a fact.

Suppose there is some land on what is called the margin of cultivation--that is to say, land which can be made to produce only just enough to make it worth cultivating at all-and suppose there is another piece of land more productive: then the difference in the value of the annual product of the two pieces of land is the economic rent of the latter; and, so long as the different pieces of land do differ, so long there will be' rent. But that does not mean that the rent need be appropriated by private landowners.

It is just the same with capital. So long as there exists any form of wealth which expands in the process of being employed, so long there will be capital, but that does not mean that the capital need be owned, or the result of the expansion appropriated, by private individuals, instead of by the whole community.

I once defined capital as material plus expectation, 1 See Appendix III.