income is produced. It used to think-indeed, to judge from the incessant sectional wages-strikes that go on, most of it still thinks-that you can get a larger share of the national income by striking for higher wages. Not the propagandists, but the hard facts of life, are showing it that you cannot. Wages go up, and the wage-earner remains, roughly speaking, as poor as ever. That is the revolutionary situation. That is where the propagandist comes in. The propaganda illustrates the facts, and the facts illustrate the propaganda.

We shall trace presently, in bare outline, the way in which past schools of Socialist thought have influenced social and industrial development in Britain. If we attempt no estimate of how the new schools will influence development, that is because our purpose is not propagandist, but purely explanatory. The influence, for instance, of the Guild Socialists is great and growing its practical application to the building of much-needed houses is significant; its power is obvious in the draft bill for Nationalisation put forward by the Miners' Federation.1 But the function of the Guild Socialist at the moment is to guide, to suggest, to convert; and he will succeed in doing this precisely to the extent to which his theories are actually illustrated by the facts. The Socialists of the past might have preached for ever to the workers about 'the expropriation of the capitalist,' and the workers would not have taken the slightest notice unless they had found, by bitter experience, that the continuance of the unexpropriated capitalist (that is, the capitalist in control of private wealth) somehow or other prevents them from getting what they definitely mean to have.

1 See Appendix VII.

They read every day about the 'vicious circle' of wages and prices. That would mean nothing to them unless they felt it in their pockets. They know that higher money wages somehow fail to bring a higher standard of life. The Press tells them that it is, for that reason, no use to demand higher wages. They draw, on the other hand, the conclusion that there must be some way of 'breaking the vicious circle' and making real wages higher. Here again comes in the propagandist, and tells them how it is to be done. Go to any Labour conference: you will hear the pure doctrines of extreme Socialism unanimously cheered by delegates, many of whom would not dream of labelling themselves Socialists—many of whom, at any rate, are sent there by men and women without one trace of conscious Socialist doctrine in their minds. They have not consciously been converted by Socialist propaganda to the belief that they ought to take over for the whole community the ownership of the means of wealth-production: they have simply been convinced by their own wages and their own expenditure that, as long as those means are controlled by private capitalists, the private capitalists will be able—in spite of super-tax and income-tax and Excess Profits Duty to remain rich, and the poor will, on the whole, have to remain as poor as before.

Many of the facts and figures in this book, so far as they concern the actual fluctuation of wages and prices, will inevitably be out of date when the book is published, or immediately after: for wages and prices vary from day to day. That will not in the least invalidate the general argument: it will only reinforce it. For, however wages and prices fluctuate within the present system, they will not so fluctuate as to affect the system itself: the rich will (to say the least

of it) remain just about as rich, and the poor will certainly remain just about as poor.

Similarly, there are, and will be, fluctuations in the revolutionary temper of the workers. A little while ago, there was a 'slump' in that temper, not only in this country, but also in France, and, as far as one can judge, over Europe generally. Even had that slump continued, it, again, would not in the least have invalidated the general argument. A few months ago, it seemed as if the 'advanced' section of Labour -the section which believed in direct action for political purposes, for the enforcement of nationalisation or the stopping of the Russian War-was gaining the ascendancy in Labour's national councils; then for a little it looked like the opposite; then the whole movement suddenly and dramatically swung back towards 'direct action' over the question of Poland and the Russian War. But whether the swing back comes in an August or a December-in this year or that-does not vitally matter. The point is that the pressure of economic events and working-class beliefs assured that it would come. It has come; and, even if it is temporarily reversed, it will come again.

In the coming winter, there will be unemployment on a large scale; and the revolutionary temper will re-surge. Moreover, there are signs that the organised master-class is proposing to challenge conflict by a consistent refusal of even nominal wage-advances; and that is asking for trouble.

These are the facts that matter. All the wild talk is idle. A portion of the Press is trying to frighten us with a lurid picture of a world-wide revolutionary conspiracy. The Evil Thing is all around us. It is Bolshevism. It is Sinn Fein. It is Sinn Fein. It is Egyptian and Indian Nationalism. It is Nationalism everywhere.

It is Internationalism everywhere. It is Mohammedanism. It is Judaism. It is Roman Catholicism. It is Freemasonry. I rather think it is Free Trade. There is no end to it. This sort of stuff is served up for minds like that of the old lady in one of Mr E. V. Lucas's novels, who believed that Lord Haldane had been dismissed from the War Office for trying to blow it up with gunpowder in the German interest. It cannot do much harm. All the harm it is even meant to do, one imagines, is to divert attention from the solid economic facts which really do threaten a violent upheaval, and to stampede the excitable and the ignorant into a general vague panic about nothing in particular, in the course of which some 'agitators may get killed or imprisoned and 'sedition' consequently be 'suppressed.' That would contribute, of course, considerably, to a general upheaval: but the cause of any upheaval that happens will be the cost of living.

Direct action for political ends is constantly denounced by its opponents as 'revolutionary.' But never have we been so near to revolution in the crude violent sense as during the Railway Strike of last year and the Railway Strike was a wage-dispute pure and simple. Moreover--and this is the point which it is so dangerous to ignore—a revolution precipitated in that way would have had no merits whatsoever to compensate for its disasters. There was not at that time any machinery by which the Labour Movement could take over the running of a system thus completely thrown out of gear, or improvise a new system in time to avoid chaos and starvation. Those who were responsible for precipitating and attempting to prolong the Railway Strike-that is to say, the more reactionary elements in the Government

--came very near to compassing the literal ruin of their country. We were saved by the courage and statesmanship of Trade Unionists.1

If this book is able to show anything, it will show that the great solid body of Labour is not in any extreme or blood-thirsty sense 'revolutionary'-is, indeed, the very opposite and that the real danger which does actually exist of a violent upheaval, accompanied by all the circumstances of riot, bloodshed, and chaos, proceeds from wanton provocation by the opponents of Labour's natural expectations and requirements. I say the demands are 'natural,' because it seems to me natural that poor people should want to be less poor. I do not beg the question of whether the demands are in any other sense legitimate-still less the question of whether the satisfaction of the demands is economically possible or desirable.

Another thing this book will endeavour to show is that, whatever may be honestly believed to the contrary, there is enough wealth produced for all the wage-earners of the country to have all their present demands for increased wages satisfied, and

more.

The British Trade Union Movement is, after all, far the greatest in the world: the most powerful, the best organised and the most coherent. As Karl Marx himself, the protagonist of revolution, taught, it is the historic example of a working class so organised as to give promise of peaceful revolution—the taking over, that is, of the economic and governmental system by a working class gradually but consciously educated to that end.

Nowhere is it possible to find, in any of the authoritative pronouncements of organised Labour, the 1 See Chapter VII.