9

FOREWORD

An  attempt  is  made  in  this  book  to  present  to  the
Electors  an  account,  as  brief  as  is  consistent  with  a
fair  measure  of  completeness,  of  the  manner  in  which
the  late  Government  have  carried  out  their  promises
to  the  men  who  won  the  war,  and  to  all,  men  and  women
alike,  who,  on  the  strength  of  those  promises,  placed
them  in  office  in  December,  1918.
The  Government,  with  those  who  supported  them,
conscious  of  the  fact  that  they  have  failed  to  carry
out  the  promised  rehousing  of  the  working  classes
and  clearance  of  the  slums,  which  have  so  long  disgraced ­
  our  country  and  produced  a  C3  population,
have  endeavoured  to  throw  the  blame  for  their  own
failures  and  broken  pledges  on  to  all  and  sundry
except  upon  themselves.
More  especially  have  they  sought  occasion  by  every
excuse  which  they  could  invent  to  inflame  public
opinion  against  the  working-classes,  who  contributed
with  their  own  lives  and  suffering  to  the  winning  of
the  war.  It  is  an  old  truth  that  a  man  dislikes  no  one
so  much  as  him  whom  he  has  injured.  No  doubt  it
is  with  some  such  instinct  as  this  that  Mr.  Lloyd
George  has  called  working  men  Bolshevists  (would  he
say  so  to-day  ?),  and  that  Sir  Alfred  Mond  has  condemned ­
  them  as  idlers.
It  will  perhaps  therefore  be  convenient  if  we  enter