Mr Fisher, whose income the House of Commons was invited to raise from £2000 to £5000 a year—he does not ask, and he is quite right not to ask, these gentlemen to live on 60s. or 63s. or even 77s. a week. It would never occur to him to ask it. Why, then, should he ask the railwaymen? This is a simple

problem, but it is the fundamental one.

The railwaymen say, and, indeed, all the members of the working-class are saying, with increasing insistence 'Is there really any reason in the nature of things why some niust have so much, and others so little?' And they are answering that there is no such

reason.

Whatever may be the lot of the poorer middleclasses, and it is certainly a harder one than ever, there is concurrently an enormous aggregation of money in the hands of the capitalist class, and a colossal and frivolous expenditure of it upon luxuries.

It is sometimes urged in defence of capitalism that, without the private capitalist, there will be no saving and re-investment, and, therefore, no development of industry. There is no reason why the community should not save and re-invest for itself. But what immediately concerns us here is not the saving, but the spending, of the monied classes. A speech made by Lord Colwyn, Chairman of the Income Tax Commission, to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, throws a great light on the rearrangement (if we may use so polite a term for it) of the national wealth during the war.

Lord Colwyn said :

'Some shipping concerns have made fabulous sums of money directly through the war. I have had three instances brought to my notice, which I cannot vouch

C.R.

F

for, but they are given me on very high authority. There is the case of a man who was worth a million in 1914, and he has multiplied that six times over by now. There is another case of a man who had three millions, and he also has multiplied that five or six times. A prominent lawyer of Manchester tells me that he was in a case concerning some aliens who came to this country during the war and got hold of some things the Government required. They began in 1914 with £10,000 capital, and their capital to-day is £500,000.' 1

In the New Statesman of July 10th, 1920, occurs the following statement of the way the money goes:-

'Any examination of the aggregate current expenditure on palatial country houses and steam yachts, motor-cars, costly furniture and clothes, even wines and cigars, shows what a huge margin there still is for the Chancellor to absorb, before he comes anywhere near the total that can be taken for public purposes, without lessening by one iota the productive capacity of the nation. British industry, indeed, is suffering from a surfeit of profits. The directors of business would actually produce more if they were not doing so well.'

But, indeed, one scarcely needs quotation to reinforce the evidence of one's own eyes.

Now, is there anybody who will maintain that this collocation of wild spending by the few rich, with the bullying and repressing of the poor for desiring a slight betterment of their conditions, is morally justifiable? Is there anybody who will deny that it is socially dangerous? It summarises the causes of industrial

1 Times, March 10, 1920.

unrest. It is a conspicuous element amid all the elements of unrest that I have quoted. Yet, into all these elements, I will not say of revolution, but, at any rate, of progressive uncertainty, banked up like gunpowder in an arsenal, the Government was ready to throw the lighted match of provocation in such a crisis as the Railway Strike. I would ask here, and insist upon my question to those who deny the possibility of a violent revolution in this country: 'If the Railway Strike had gone on another week and had been supplemented by a strike of all other transport workers, and of the miners, what would have happened?'

VI

MARX, LENIN, AND CARSON

We shall see in the next chapter what the Railway Strike was what caused it, and how it was conducted. We shall see how near it came to the sort of revolutionary upheaval which nobody wants. But we must not be misled by that into mixing up in our minds the sort of revolution which nobody wants with the sort of revolution which a great many people are determined to have. Because chaos would be bad, it does not follow that complete reconstruction would not be good. Indeed, the very badness of chaos is an argument for complete reconstruction-once we are convinced that the choice is between these two alternatives, and not, as some too easily assume, between a continuation of the present system and chaos, or between a continuation of the present system and complete reconstruction.

Do not let us be frightened by words. Disraeli spoke of the mild, political, and strictly 'constitutional' change embodied in the Reform Bill of 1832 as having been a revolution: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, on the other hand, spoke of 'open revolution' as the point at which 'the proletariat establishes its rule by means of the violent overthrow of the capitalist class' and Lenin, in his book on The State and Revolution, which is an analysis of Marxist Teaching on the State and the Task of the Proletariat in the 1 Communist Manifesto, 1847.

Revolution, written between the first and second Russian Revolutions of 1917, praises Marx and Engels for their 'proud and open declaration of the inevitability of a violent revolution.' 1

In view of these quotations, it is interesting for those who appreciate the enormous influence of Marx on the development of human institutions to turn to the concluding passage of the preface written by Frederick Engels to the first English edition of Marx's Capital. The preface is dated November 5th, 1886, and in it Engels says:

'The time is rapidly approaching when a thorough examination of England's economic position will impose itself as an irresistible national necessity. The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to a dead stop. Free Trade has exhausted its resources; even Manchester doubts this its quondam economic gospel. Foreign industry, rapidly developing, stares English production in the face everywhere, not only in protected, but also in neutral markets, and even on this side of the Channel. While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production, and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed-for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air.

1V. L. Ulianov (N. Lenin), The State and Revolution, English edition (George Allen and Unwin), p. 25.