uncertain, as a nation-indeed, the seven million adult workers organised in Trade Unions do, with their families, make up more than half the British nation. And the individuals who make up 'Labour' are just as much and as little likely as any other individuals to regard it as 'interference' if anybody, whether 'middle-class' or not, talks what seems to them sense. They are certainly not going to waste much time. listening to people who talk what seems to them nonsense. The vast majority of them, like the vast majority of other classes, do not read Karl Marx: but those who do would never think of reproaching Marx for not having been born a proletarian, any more than, to all appearance, the Russians share the indignation of the British Press at the thought that Trotsky was born a Jew.

And as for 'middle-class spokesmen,' Labour has, and can have, no spokesmen but what itself appoints. Some of these may be called middle-class: but what of that? What does it matter, and what does it amount to? Many Labour leaders who are proud to regard themselves as working men are a great deal better educated, a great deal better dressed, and some of them are a great deal better off, than most members of the middle-class.

So far from its being possible to pin down the great body of thought, will, and action, known as 'Labour,' to the intentions of individual 'spokesmen,' it would be easy-though unfair-to maintain that Labour itself did not know its own mind. The casual newspaper reader must often be astonished at the discrepancy between the resolutions passed by organised Labour at its annual or special conferences and congresses, and its subsequent action-between its resolutions to refuse conscription, and its acceptance

of conscription: between its resolution to 'compel' the Government to nationalise the mines, and its failure even to try to compel the Government to do anything of the kind. One simplc explanation, which will occur to every one, is that to pass resolutions is easier than to act. Somewhat more profound is the truth that the vigorous few, sufficiently 'keen' to get put forward as delegates, can pass resolutions, but cannot act without the support of the inarticulate mass. (All the more impressive to those who remember this are those movements which indubitably have great masses of the rank-and-file behind them, such as the insistence of the railwaymen on their great strike, or even the majority vote of the miners in favour of 'direct action' for nationalisation of the mines-or, far the most impressive of all, that overwhelming and unprecedented flood of local resolutions against a Polish War which in August, 1920, actuated and endorsed the setting up of Labour's Council of Action to prevent the war). Thirdly, there has to be remembered the somewhat unfortunate past history of the Trades Union Congress, which, owing to the divorce of its Parliamentary Committee from the day-by-day problems of industry, contracted the habit of passing resolutions on which nobody expected action to be taken at all.

I need not waste much time over a fourth explanation, put forward in most of the newspapers whenever a Labour Conference passes a resolution unpleasing to its critics—the explanation which declares that the whole trouble is due to the undemocratic nature of the block vote. The block vote, which I am not concerned to defend, is the device by which a bare majority of a given union or federation can decide which way, at the subsequent conference with other

unions, the whole weight of that particular union or federation shall be cast. Whatever may be said for or against this method, it is not, and that for two reasons, a considerable factor in the discrepancy between Labour's words and Labour's acts. In the first place, it is criticised as 'undemocratic' only when the decision resulting from it is displeasing to the critic and, in the second place, it is by no means clear that the decisions which depend on the block vote are identical with those which never result in action.

Such are a few of the difficulties and obstacles in the way of arriving at any conclusion about 'what Labour wants' and 'what Labour is going to do.' What can be done, and what is still done so little as to leave one part of the nation in a truly dangerous ignorance of whither the other part is tending, is to look at the facts and see what Labour is actually doing.

III

LABOUR UNREST: ITS MATERIAL AND MORAL CAUSES

BEFORE the war, the phrase on everybody's lips was 'Labour Unrest.'

What Labour was, and why it was unrestful, remained indefinite in the minds of most who used the phrase. But, deep below the casual futility of those phrases which pass from mouth to mouth, swaying elections, conferences, Parliaments, as powerfully as the invisible wind sways the woods, and yet never at any moment touch the thinking portion of the human mind: deep in the sub-consciousness of the middle-class which wondered and protested at the unrest of Labour, there were two profound and dangerous assumptions, one corresponding to each of the undefined words.

'Labour,' it was felt, was something separate a body of men with different capacities and intentions from the 'public' or the 'community.' It was forgotten, as it is still forgotten, or ignored, when people talk of strikes as 'against the community' or of 'public opinion' as 'against Labour,' that the manual workers, with their wives and families, constitute more than three-fifths of the whole population.

And unrest, it was felt, was something at once unreasonable and transient. Some of the 'public' said, sympathetically or unsympathetically, that what the working-man wanted was more wages: some of the 'public' said that the working-man didn't know what he wanted.

Both statements were true, as far as they went; and both were utterly misleading. The working-man wanted more wages; but that want carried with it implications far beyond the merit of any particular set of disputes or any particular period of unrest, and involved the solution of the fundamental revolutionary problem where are the higher wages to come from, and how are they to be rendered permanently and effectively higher? The working-man did not know what he wanted, but who does?

A few propagandists urged, both upon him and upon his critics, that his immediate wants could not be satisfied, except in the emptiest appearance, without the further satisfaction of wants so vast that he had rarely thought of formulating them.

They told him that anything he succeeded in getting by way of increased wages would, in effect, be taken away from him again by increased prices, and that he could not succeed in even his simplest demand so long as he acquiesced in that system of production and exchange known as the capitalist system. They admitted, of course, that this was true only within limits. Obviously, increase in wages-and not merely in money wages, but in real wages, in the actual purchasing power of wages-is possible without a radical change of system but it is possible only up to a point, and that a point not likely (so the propagandists said) to satisfy Labour's just aspirations.

Besides, they added, what did increased wages amount to after all? A man dependent on another man for leave to work, for 'access to the means of production,' for his weekly wage, was-even though the wage itself were a comparatively high one-a 'wageslave' still. What was wanted was a change of status. The whisper of 'control of industry' was in the air :