Full text: Labour and the Nation

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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