We must, if we can, see good on both sides in every conflict, and keep out of our propaganda—whether it be Socialist or anti-Socialist, revolutionary or antirevolutionary the note of personal bitterness. But that does not mean that we are to avert our eyes from public wickedness, to speak smooth things of cruelty or corruption, or to declare there is no bitterness when we know that there is bitterness, and cause for it.

It will be well for us, however, if we can keep our denunciations free from self-righteousness: if we can see the human race, ourselves in common with all the rest, making some sort of struggle forward against immeasurable difficulties, and stumbling-one of us here, one of us there—in the process. If, as the late John Davidson said, the hardest thing a man can do

'Is to come it brave and meek with thirty bob a week, And feel that that's the proper thing for you,'

none the less, 'It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.' Success is a great danger and those of us who are not called upon to face it should try to think gently of those who are. Many a man has begun life as an honest man and ended up as a Prime Minister. When we contemplate the wreck, we can but say: 'There, but for the grace of God, go we.'

The poor are curiously free from personal resentment of social evils: they have in the past, for the most part, taken inequality for granted. But the danger-point was bound to come when they woke up, as they are now waking-first, to the existence of the inequality secondly, to the fact that the appeal of those at present in financial control is always quite

cynically to force and, thirdly, to the fact that the appeal to force can always in the last resort be successfully made by the largest class—the workers.

Nevertheless, the crash is very far from inevitable. It can, and I believe it will, be averted; but only if the moral indignation at inequality-the indignation which inspires the demand for equality—is understood. The economic basis of the demand for nationalisation is inseparable from its moral basis. Let there be no mistake about it, the question of nationalisation or socialisation of industry has to the workers a moral aspect no less vital than its economic aspect.

The division of the community into those who own capital and therefore can make others work for them, and those who have to sell their own labour power in order to get access to the means of work is, in the view of the propagandists of nationalisation (and remember that the whole Labour movement has been convinced by the facts which these propagandists merely interpret, and is committed to nationalisation),1 a division of the community into parasites and slaves.

Broadly speaking, some possess capital and others, because of that, have to work on terms dictated by the capitalist. That, rightly or wrongly, the workers increasingly resent: to that, rightly or wrongly, they increasingly attribute what they feel to be the moral wrongness of their lot.

But how is the great moral change to be brought about? Obviously, since what is held to be morally wrong is the division into those who have and those who have not, no solution will satisfy Labour if it leaves that division in being.

1 See Appendices III, and IV.

V

THE DANGEROUS POINT OF VIEW

ONE can best illustrate the frame of mind which Labour is 'up against' by a quotation, insignificant in itself, yet highly dangerous as a symptom; a letter published in the Times of May 25, 1920, on the question of railwaymen's wages. I do not give the name of the writer, of whom I know nothing, because I do have no desire to pillory him as an individual. His sole importance is as a symptom; he puts in a rather crude and extreme form the ordinary talk of clubs and colleges his letter, I may mention, is actually dated from an Oxford college.

'TO THE EDITOR OF THE Times.

'SIR,-The Chancellor of the Exchequer has recently stated that the total amount of the subsidies granted out of public funds (a most pernicious form of State expenditure) in the year 1919-20 amounted to £140,320,000. It may perhaps be of some interest to point out that this sum almost exactly equals the whole Imperial revenue of this country so recently as sixteen years ago. Last year the subvention to the railways alone was £50,000,000. This sum is equivalent to the total charge for the British Navy just before the war -a charge which the representatives of Labour considered that the country was economically unable to sustain. The expenditure for the year 1920-1 is estimated to be £1,184,102,000, which is very nearly

twice the dead weight of the whole National Debt in the first year of the present century. Since 1913 (I quote the figures of your Labour correspondent) the annual railway wage bill has risen by £100,000,000, and this is merely the increase in wages paid to about 450,000 people—-one hundredth part of the population of these islands.

'I think it will generally be admitted that, if these figures had been prophesied to financiers ten years ago, they would hotly have denied that such a state of things was even remotely possible, and, if they could have even been convinced of the possibility, they would have declared that nothing less than national bankruptcy was the inevitable result of a financial position so appalling.

'Some of these figures might perhaps be worth the consideration of the National Wages Board, now considering the claim of the railwaymen for an additional £35,000,000 to the £100,000,000 they have already received. Your Labour correspondent on May 18 states that a country porter before the war was earning 18s. a week, together with certain privileges and rights which somewhat increased his nominal wages. To-day he is demanding 77s. The cost of living has about doubled, and it would be desirable as far as possible that all those concerned with the great basic industries should be at least saved the loss caused by increased prices, even though it must be necessarily at the cost of other classes. But the N.U.R. are demanding, for this grade at any rate, in a time of national loss, debt, and embarrassments quite unprecedented, a wage not twice, or three times, or four times, but four and a quarter times, that which they received in a period of peace and prosperity. Is it quite impossible to meet this demand with the

simple yet all-sufficient answer that the country cannot afford it? The whole question is prejudiced by those comparisons which are proverbially odious. Those who conduct the case for the companies labour to show (and in great measure succeed in showing) that the wages of railwaymen do not really compare unfavourably with those of miners, policemen, dockers, and others, but it is lamentable that they have this task thrust upon them. They must often long to say —what is entirely true-that many of these rates, in the present state of our finances, ought never to have been conceded. They were the outcome of the desperate shifts of embarrassed politicians who found it easier and more popular to surrender to a clamorous class than to guard, even at the risk of misrepresentation, the rights of the community. Every rash and profligate step in the past has fatally hampered and jeopardised the future. The warnings of the authors of the Minority Report in the Dockers' Inquiry have been fulfilled with appalling rapidity.

'Mr J. H. Thomas himself lately told the railwaymen that "the workers should clearly understand that every time they made a wage demand it was followed by the inevitable increase in the cost of living, which not only nullified the increase, but had the effect of creating a heavier burden upon a large section of the community." If Mr Thomas is consistent with himself, his only course is to come down on the side of honesty, sanity, and financial probity, and to say to his men : "Your position, even if it is not all that you desire, is infinitely better than before the war, though by all the lessons of history you might expect it to be worse. There is no question here of intercepting large profits, for the profits are admittedly non-existent. The financial position of the country is perilous in the