Industry, with its monstrous burden of social misery and economic
waste, leads them to recommend little more than the gradual
trustification of the industry in private hands, by measures which (in the
improbable event of their being carried out) would confront mine-workers
and consumers alike with the permanent menace of a private monopoly.
The Liberal Party's Masters
The timidity of Liberal policy is not an accident. It is the inevitable
result of the composition and history of the Liberal Party. Nor must
it be forgotten that, though Liberal economists may propose, the
disposing will be done, not by them, but by the propertied interests with
which, to-day as in the past, the Liberal Party is closely identified.
The ostentatious coldness with which its industrial programme,
hesitating though it is, has been received by influential Liberals is a
sufficient proof that the Party as a whole does not share the new-found
enthusiasm of the sponsors of the Report. The workers of the country
will be wise to reflect that, as long as the influences at present in control
of Liberal policy continue to inspire it, Britain's Industrial Future will
bear a somewhat unattractively close resemblance to Britain's
Industrial Past.
A PEACEFUL REVOLUTION
An acute student of British politics has supplied in a sentence a
diagnosis of her difficulties. They are due, he writes, to the inability
of her rulers to realise that the nineteenth century has come to an end,
and to their consequent incapacity to introduce the changes which are
required by the twentieth. It is that transition to a new era which
Conservatives and Liberals alike have been too timid, too trammelled
by meaningless social prejudices and obsolete class traditions, too
enslaved to old ideas and too hostile to the new conceptions which the
changed conditions of the world impose, to be willing to undertake or
to be capable of undertaking. It is that transition which it is the
mission of the Labour Party to initiate and control. In the bankruptcy
of Capitalism—a bankruptcy revealed, not only by its failure to offet
a tolerable livelihood to the mass of the population, but by its inability
to harness for the service of man the new resources which the progress
of science has revealed, or even to administer existing resources with the
efficiency which was once its special boast—Labour alone can lead the
nation to a prosperity established on the secure foundations of know-
ledge, good will, and the comradeship of all in the service of all.
The Labour Party is well aware that, thanks largely to the policy
of the present Government, it will succeed to an estate which is heavily
encumbered. It is all the more determined, therefore, that the task of
reconstruction shall be begun without delay. Confident of itself, and
strong in the support of the workers of the nation, Labour has no need
for the violence which is the weapon of the weak. It will carry its
programme into completion by peaceful means, without disorder or
confusion, with the consent of the majority of the electors and by the
use of the ordinary machinery of democratic government. If, in such
circumstances, it suits its opponents to describe its policy as
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