'C'était a vous, Crainquebille, d'être le plus

fort.'

ANATOLE FRANCE.

'Honour and admiration must push themselves out towards some quarter: otherwise the moral man is killed.'

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

'Labour puts forward a claim with regard to the whole future of society, property, capital, the organisation of industry, and Parliamentary government.'

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE.

I

WHAT THE REVOLUTION IS TO BE ABOUT

THERE is going to be a revolution in Great Britain. Why and when? 'Let us know precisely what the revolution is to be about,' said the Times leaderwriter, somewhat plaintively, on August 2nd of this year. This book is written in the hope of making it plain 'precisely what the revolution is to be about.'

The issue has been so much confused by wild talk that no one is to be blamed for not knowing what the revolution is to be about. It is, in fact, to be about the simplest and most homely of all subjects-the cost of living. It is to be about the division of the community into those who have more than they need, and those who have less than they need, to furnish a tolerable life.

The civilisation and social structure of our country, rightly or wrongly, take for granted that a few people shall have a lot of money and a lot of power, and a great many people very little money and very little power. But the individuals, and particularly the labouring individuals, who create and compose our civilisation and society, are beginning to cease to take this state of things for granted. Public institutions still assume what the public assumes no longer : and whenever that happens, there is the probability of somewhat violent readjustment. Institutions, after all, are only the body of a public soul, the form of a 1 Written in September, 1920.

C.R.

I

B

public idea. When the idea can no longer be accommodated in the form, the form must be altered; and if it does not yield fluidly and easily to alteration, it breaks. The new cloth tears away from the old: the new wine bursts the old bottles and there is revolution.

If human life were regulated by pure reason and the pursuit of self-interest, the few in any era who have controlled the wealth and the power would have kept the rest of the community in complete ignorance and slavery. I say 'complete' because, once a change begins, no one knows where it is going to stop. That is why, in such matters as the government of subject races, the only logical theorists are those on the one side who say: 'Give these people complete freedom,' and those on the other side who say: 'Shoot all these people down the moment they begin to agitate for freedom.' There is, in logic, no middle course; for once people have begun to agitate for freedom, they are certain to get it; and, if you have allowed them to begin agitation, or even to begin the process of thought, you can only prolong the agony by shooting a few of them at a time.

Education, representation, sops,' and palliatives generally, are as useless as repression. You simply cannot do anything at all with a man except free him or shoot him, once he has begun to demand freedom. If you educate him, however little, he learns enough to want more education. If you give him partial representation on governing bodies, he clamours more than ever for complete representation. If you merely shoot and flog his innocent friends and relatives, he becomes embittered against you, and may even degenerate into a 'sedition-monger,' capable of the detestable wickedness of attempting to shoot or flog you.

All our rulers learn at school the lesson of the Caudine Forks: and they have all forgotten it. You can make friends with your enemy in the gate, or you can kill him while you have the chance; but if you merely kick him through the gate, he will not be grateful to you for having left the gate open, he will come back to do some kicking and killing for himself. That is the abstract logic of history and of government. In the concrete, history and government have no logic. Motives, some good, some bad, but all quite distinct from pure rational calculation of consequences, surge up from somewhere obscure in the hearts of men; and each civilisation, each form of society, provides the means and the necessity of its own destruction-to make way, one trusts, for something better.

It may or may not be practicable for any great military power to 'stamp out sedition' in its subject races. It would involve the killing of almost the whole population, women as well as men. But, theoretically, it could be done. The workers of a great industrial country such as Britain could not, however, -let me point out to those who talk of Labour's demands in terms of dread and hostility-be treated like that, even if anybody could be found to advocate such treatment in theory. The workers produce the wealth on which we all live, and we want them to go on producing it. Nor can they be kept in complete ignorance and slavery. The development of modern wealth-production demands an element of education and skill in the workers; and a little education goes a long way. The trouble in modern society is that the majority of the community are living in bonds which they have outgrown. Everybody familiar with the industrial history of the first half of the

nineteenth century knows that the mass of the proletariat were at that period, in actual conditions, scarcely better off than slaves-that many of them, indeed, were worse off than many slaves. To-day the conditions are modified, but the social structure remains the same. There are still the few rich and the many poor the difference is that the many poor-perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly, but in any case inevitably— are beginning to inquire why this should be so for

ever.

The question I began by quoting from the Times appeared in a leader on the new Communist Party of Great Britain, formally inaugurated at the end of July. But this book will not presume to concern itself with an exposition of the Communist Party, or with any attempt to estimate the extent of the influence possessed by any revolutionary propagandists of the day. That the definitely Communist movement in this country is small means nothing. The original membership of the Party was some five thousand. You could divide that number by a thousand, and still have enough left-if they were the right people -to inaugurate a powerful movement. No one with any knowledge of history will decry a movement because it is small. But the main object of a small movement is to grow big. And my concern in this book is with the movements that have grown big already. Organised Labour is but lightly touched at present by explicitly revolutionary doctrine. It still takes but little interest in 'revolutionary mass action' and 'the dictatorship of the proletariat.' But it wants something; and it is beginning to see what that something is. It wants a larger share of the national income; and it is beginning to believe that, to get it, it must get control of the means whereby that