promulgate a programme of national and industrial reconstruction based on what it conceives to be a reasonable compromise between the individualistic laissez faire economics of the bourgeois State and the revolutionary socialist principles nowadays promulgated by the Labour caucus. This new party, not forgetful of the blessings conferred by the Liberal vindication of individual rights, strives to take what is good from socialist thought, and, finding its basic principles in the great ideas initiated in America by Alexander Hamilton and in Germany by Friedrich List in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, seeks to elaborate a polity founded on national economics in contradistinction to the cosmopolitan economics of mid-Victorian Britain. Unlike the Labour Party, it upholds the economic and political unity of the Britannic Commonwealths, but, unlike the imperialists of an earlier period, it seeks to establish such an empire unity on the basis of democratic institutions. Both politically and industrially it already numbers many thousands of supporters in its ranks throughout the kingdom, is well organized, and will challenge the opinion of at least half a hundred constituencies at the coming general election.

When, therefore, we come to enquire as to the issues that will be raised at the coming election, it is essential that we should bear in mind the history of the growth and development of Labour in this country as summarized in the foregoing pages. Labour will only enter the electoral lists nominally as a united party. From the extreme right wing represented by the rather stodgy and unimaginative trade unionist of Radical Party tendencies, to the extreme left wing, as expressed in the syndicalist-communist movement, there is a considerable number of gradations. These various factions have been more or less driven together under the pressure of the war; it is, however, in the last degree unlikely that they will remain a cohesive force when peace comes. The trade unionist who pins his faith to a craft unionist organization, including those who before the war were Tories by conviction or Liberals by conviction; the trade unionist who is labouring unceasingly to merge the craft union into the industrial union; the State socialist of the classical Fabian type; the pre-war 'soft' socialist of the I.L.P. model; the Marxian socialist of the disciplined and more or less centralized socialism

as visualized by the social democrat; the 'rebel' of the George Lansbury type-all these will have a tendency to break away from each other. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that there is a counter-influence to these disintegrating influences which tends to draw minorities towards a compromise of their principles with the solid majority. It is dimly and unconsciously recognized by all the factions that in Labour affairs the maxim that unity is strength' is particularly apposite. Moreover, the insistent and revolutionary minorities are not entirely unhappy in their trade union environment inasmuch as they supply-and feel that they supply-the driving force.

In addition to these considerations the woman electorate is a new factor. Prophecy is notoriously an unsafe guide, but in regard to the women's vote it is probable that, so far as the manual wage-earning class is concerned, in the large majority of cases the wife will vote on the same side as her husband. The exceptions, of course, will be numerous. The experience of the female vote for instance in our Dominions overseas goes to show that the women's vote has on the whole been cast in favour of such measures as prohibition of the liquor traffic, greater protection of mother and child, a drastic revision of the divorce laws, and draconic police measures against the spread of venereal disease applied equally to men and women. The women's vote may also be counted on as being cast in favour of greater educational opportunities in all directions, measures which come under the generic description of the endowment of motherhood, and such applications of socialist ideas as the nationalization of the milk trade.

Moreover, the whole of our political issues will be fought out on a different plane than before the war. Conservative politics, in the pre-war sense of the term, are as dead as the dodo. The battle of democracy versus class-government has already been fought out, and won and lost. Parties will only survive in the future in so far as they express most forcefully and most clearly the political and social ideals of democracy, that is, of industrial democracy as well as of political democracy.

The profound weakness of the Labour movement as a political force lies in the present incoherence of its political ideas. The movement seeks to co-relate the most rigid indivi

dualism in economics and politics with the most sweepingly socialistic theories. Industrially it has given a tepid welcome to the aims and objects expressed in the Whitley Report, while simultaneously the spirit of the class-war and the ceaseless fight against the capitalist order as a class is everywhere prevalent and prominent. The recent Trade Union Congress, for example, has called for the full restoration of the civil and industrial liberties of the workers, has re-affirmed its conviction that the institution of any system of tariffs would be contrary to the national interest, and at the same time has demanded the most sweeping forms of nationalization in regard to canals, mines, railways, milk, agriculture, housing, and air-craft has called for a great extension of State-aid for education, State control of industrial conditions, andin the closer federation of trade unions on an industrial basis -aims at stamping out entirely individual freedom' of employment.

There is still another factor to be taken into consideration in estimating the influence of Labour in the coming general election. Under the new constitution the Labour Party as a political entity will function not only through the trade unions affiliated thereto, but largely, if not mainly, through the local Labour parties whose individual members need not necessarily be trade unionists or members of affiliated socialist societies. The trade unionist masses are not yet alive to the pitfalls and perils to trade unionism which the extended membership thus introduced will add to an already heterogeneous body.

The case of Mr. Charles Roden Buxton affords a piquant example of these perils. Mr. Buxton has recently been adopted as Labour candidate for so considerable an industrial constituency as Accrington, mainly, if not exclusively, through the influence of the Independent Labour Party. As prospective parliamentary candidate before the local Labour caucus he defeated so sound a trade unionist as Mr. John McGurk, chairman of the Labour Party. Now, Mr. Buxton, as is well known, is neither a trade unionist nor a socialist. He is a disgruntled Radical who has deserted the Liberal camp because the Liberal Party did not afford adequate expression to his ultra-pacifist opinions. Mr. Buxton is not only not a trade unionist nor a socialist, he is not a manual

wage-earner, but one of the abhorred intellectuals-the son of a baronet and a distinguished graduate of Cambridge. Apart from his pacifism, chasms yawn between him and his socialist and syndicalist colleagues on the most essential political and economic ideas and principles.

There is a further consideration. At the general election of 1906, which witnessed the Parliamentary birth of the Labour Party, not more than two or three Labour candidates were elected independently of Liberal votes. There was a complete understanding between the Labour Party machine and the Liberal caucus in regard to a certain number of seats at that election, and the defeat of the Unionists in a majority of those constituencies was due to the political unity of the Liberal and Labour forces. This was a highly convenient arrangement for the party, then led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. It came about mainly through the pledge given by the former Liberal leader to the trade unionists to reverse the Osborne judgment by statute, and force was given to the campaign by the attack made on the employment of Chinese labour in the South African mines.

It has now, however, become fairly obvious that the Labour Party can only grow at the expense of the Liberal and Radical Party. Under these conditions Mr. Henderson's arrangement for running three or four hundred Labour candidates is not being regarded with any degree of enthusiasm by the distinguished officials whose head-quarters are in Abingdon Street. Liberalism had no objection to the lordly patronage of a more or less docile and infinitesimal minority of trade unionists, whether they accepted the Liberal whips, as in an earlier stage of Labour representation, or whether they were nominally 'independent.' But when it comes to the very junior partner seeking to 'jump' the claim of the old hands in practically every seat which the Radical wirepullers at the apex of their party's fortunes could hope to control, then they regard it as too much of a good thing.' Hence it may be inferred thatwilly-nilly-Liberalism will fight Labour at the next General Election. The Old Liberalism will be between the hammer and the anvil of Lloyd-Georgism and Hendersonism, and it will certainly have to fight for its life.

Had parliament accepted the principle of the second ballot or of the alternative vote the situation would have been at

once simpler and clearer. As it is, the contest at the coming general election will tend to assume, more and more, the character of the electoral battles in France, where victory in the lists is frequently disputed by candidates styling themselves respectively Legitimists, Orleanists, Republicans, Progressives, Radicals, Radical-Socialists, Independent Socialists, Unified Socialists, and others besides.

If the industrial delegations which meet at the Trade Union Congress or at the Labour Party Conference actually represented the political and industrial sentiments and opinions of the rank and file of the organized workers, and those of their women-folk who can claim and will exercise the vote, the result of this coming general election would be a foregone conclusion. Neither the middle class, nor the unorganized wage-earning class, could stand up politically with any hope of success against organized Labour. How far, then, is the individual trade unionist elector likely to support the Labour Party candidate for parliament? This is the crux of the whole matter, and this is where, I think, the Labour Party will fail, and fail heavily.

In my earlier student days in France we used an expression current in Parisian argot which signified the doleful afterdinner bill-'la douloureuse.' There was a big moral behind this. One gets nothing in this life without paying for it in some form or another, and the Labour Party will have to pay for its gigantic industrial organization at the price of homogeneous political power. The manual wage-earning classes. of the country could never have been organized in anything approximating the proportions in which they have been organized except on a craft basis. Wage-earners were brought together, and then federated in their craft organizations in defence of their craft interests, and for the improvement of their economic and industrial status. Had they been appealed to on any other grounds their organization could never have been realized. Hence Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Agnostics, Tories, Liberals, Radicals, Socialists, and men who had no ideas, either theological or political, were brought together-either as cotton operatives, or as miners, or as railway workers, and so on. Later on small socialist organizations were linked up in political partnership with this mass of craft workers, with the result that, with their greater driving