Full text: Labour and the Nation

revolutionary, it is not disposed to dispute with them as to the use of 
words. The dangerous revolutionaries are not those who seek power 
to initiate reforms which are long overdue, but the reactionaries who 
dam the stream till it bursts its banks in a raging torrent. 
LABOUR PRINCIPLES 
The Labour Party will carry out its policy by peaceful means, but 
it will carry it out. Since it has set the example of working out, in 
practical detail, the social and international reconstruction which it 
proposes, the character of its programme is generally known, and we 
need not here do more than recapitulate briefly the fundamental principles 
upon which it rests. They are the protection against exploitation of the 
worker and the consumer; the increase of national wealth by the 
application to production and distribution of the possibilities revealed by 
the progress of scientific knowledge and of the art of administration; 
the extension of common provision for the common requirements of a 
civilised existence; the utilisation for the public benefit of the surplus 
wealth which to-day too often at once enriches and degrades a small 
minority of the population; and the systematic pursuit of a policy of 
peace and co-operation in international affairs. The roads along which 
the Labour Party will advance to the establishment of the Socialist 
Commonwealth are. therefore, five. It will use its power 
{(i.) To secure to every member of the community the 
standards of life and employment which are necessary to a healthy, 
independent and self-respecting existence. 
(ii.) To convert industry, step by step, and with due regard 
to the special needs and varying circumstances of different 
occupations, from a sordid struggle for private gain into a 
co-operative undertaking, carried on for the service of the 
community and under its control. 
(iii.) To extend rapidly and widely those forms of social 
provision—education, public health, housing, pensions, the care 
of the sick, and maintenance during unemployment—in the absence 
of which the individual is the sport of economic chance and the 
slave of his environment. 
{iv.) To adjust taxation in such a way as to secure that due 
provision is made for the maintenance and improvement of the 
material apparatus of industry, and that surpluses created by social 
effort shall be applied by society for the good of all. 
(v.) To establish peace, freedom and justice by removing 
from among the nations the root causes of international disputes, 
by conciliation and all-in arbitration, by renouncing war as an 
instrument of national policy, by disarmament, by political and 
economic co-operation through the League of Nations, and by 
mutual agreements with States which are not members of the 
Leaope.
	        
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