of the world—reservations which are incompatible with the Covenant of 
the League of Nations. 
While spending large sums on armaments, it demanded, through 
the British Delegation to Geneva, a reduction in the budget of the 
League of Nations, though the League is the principal bulwark which 
stands between the world and the horrors of another war. 
The Betrayal of International Labour 
In the teeth of the wishes, not only of the Trade Union Movement, 
but of the more far-sighted employers, the Conservative Govern- 
ment has declined to ratify the international convention for a 
18-hour week, adopted as long ago as 1919 by the International 
Labour Conference at Washington. Not only so, but, ignoring 
the agreement reached in 1924, when a Labour Government 
was in office, between the Labour Ministers of Great Britain, 
France, Germany and Belgium, it has actually initiated a 
movement for the revision of the convention, which, if successful, 
would make the international establishment of the 48-hour week 
incapable of attainment. It has done so in spite of the fact that the 
agreement was signed by the British representatives, that the 
international Labour Office has pressed for its adoption, and that Great 
Britain, with her world-wide economic interests, has most te gain by 
the establishment, through international action, of equitable standards 
of life and work, and most to lose by the continuance of unregulated 
international competition. The inevitable result of the Government's 
action is that other industrial nations have declined to enforce 
ternational standards of hours, and that goods manufactured abroad 
ander sweated conditions continue to invade British markets. 
[s it any wonder that the Conservative Government should be re- 
garded as the principal bulwark of reaction in Europe, and that foreign 
observers should remark that, though Great Britain won the war, she is 
losing the peace? 
LIBERAL PRACTICE AND LIBERAL PROGRAMMES 
The Conservative Government does not stand alone as the architect 
Wf confusion. 
It was a Coalition of Liberals and Conservatives, with a Liberal 
Prime Minister at its head, which made the disastrous Treaties of 
Peace and which must bear the blame for the economic ruin created 
by them. 
It was a Coalition of Liberals and Conservatives which betrayed 
the Miners in 1919, and two years later plunged the Coal Industry in 
chaos by a hasty and ill-considered measure of decontrol; which first 
summoned the National Industrial Conference, and then, at a whisper 
of capitalist disapproval, rejected its findings; which, under the 
premiership of Mr. Lloyd George, destroyed the machinery of Land 
Valuation—the boasted achievement of his own Budget of 1909; which 
advertised a programme of social reconstruction till returned to power.