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 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH 
 ISLES 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH 
 ISLES 
 
 BY 
 ARTHUR GLEASON 
 
 Author oj "Golden Lads," etc. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1917 
 
.A^|1, 
 
 Copyright, 1917, by 
 The Century Co. 
 
 Published, May, 1917 
 
 / 
 
 lY 31 1917 
 
 >C1,A462766 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I Democracy on the March 3 
 
 II Labor 14* 
 
 The Social Revolution in England . . l-l 
 
 The Discovery 41 
 
 Democratic Control 53 
 
 The Pioneers 58 
 
 Reasonable Satisfaction 89 
 
 III Women 95 
 
 Emancipation 95 
 
 The Feminists of the War Office and Ad- 
 miralty 118 
 
 Bowing Them Out 1^7 
 
 Disorganization 144 
 
 England's Policewomen 154 
 
 IV Ireland 173 
 
 The Irish Question 173 
 
 Young England Speaks . . . • . .186 
 
 The Siamese Twin 192 
 
 Poverty: The Real Irish Question . . 206 
 
 V Social Studies 228 
 
 What of England? . . . . . .228 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEE PAGE 
 
 Why They Will Win . . . . . .231 
 
 Dragons' Teeth 242 
 
 Change 250 
 
 A Batch of Papers ...... 260 
 
 Free Speech . 274 
 
 The Right of Asylum 281 
 
 Public Opinion 295 
 
 Where the Lane Turns 307 
 
 The New Way 315 
 
 The New Americanism 320 
 
 Nationahty 330 
 
 VI LliOYD-GEORGE 341 
 
 VII Vale 350 
 
 Appendix 357 
 
 Index 423 
 
INSIDE 
 THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
INSIDE 
 THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH 
 
 England has acted on the world as a principle 
 of release for freedom, sometimes by irritating it 
 into activity, as with the American colonies, 
 sometimes by cooperating with it, as in Canada 
 and Australia. The balance of power has de- 
 parted from England to a wider area. But the 
 principle of government which creates and directs 
 that power continues to be an English principle. 
 It is the principle of democratic control. One 
 hundred years ago England was in a war in which 
 her three leaders were Pitt, Wellington, and Nel- 
 son, three Englishmen. To-day Great Britain is 
 in a war in which her three leaders are Lloyd- 
 George, Haig, and Beatty, a Welshman, a 
 Scotchman, and an Irishman. That is of course 
 3 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 only a chance illustration, but it serves to show 
 the fact that the field of opportunity has broad- 
 ened, and that England is no longer the over- 
 shadowing power in a union, but is the equal 
 among equals. 
 
 If that extension of power among her mem- 
 bers is true of England on her island, it is also 
 true of her among her colonies. Already the new 
 cabinet has called the dominions to a special war 
 conference. This is the first step in a momentous 
 change in the constitution of the empire. The 
 peoples of the dominions are not contented with 
 their status, and they refuse to go on indefinitely 
 under the present arrangement, which focuses all 
 imperial responsibility in the hands of statesmen 
 of the British Isles. They determined to have a 
 voice in foreign policy, and in the creation of an 
 interlocking imperial domestic policy, which will 
 organize the resources of Canada, Australia, 
 New Zealand, South Africa, and India. The 
 constitutional reconstruction calls for an imperial 
 cabinet, answerable in authority to an imperial 
 parliament of all the democracies of the empire. 
 
 The result of this will be the most populous, 
 largest, most powerful state in the world, and that 
 4 
 
DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH 
 
 state will not be an autocracy. It will be a com- 
 monwealth, an agreement of equals. It will act 
 from one will, with one purpose. The operations 
 of that will inside so vast an organism will seem 
 almost like a process of nature. Its influence 
 will be decisive on the immediate future of the 
 human race. Under the perfected internal or- 
 ganization, which is the very purpose of the union, 
 the food-supply of a quarter of mankind will be 
 guaranteed. The land question will be solved. 
 The balance of agricultm'e to industry will be 
 determined and established. The problems of 
 labor will be dealt with in a freedom of opportu- 
 nity and an increase of productive power which 
 would have seemed Utopian to an earlier genera- 
 tion. That imperial parliament will be a league 
 of peace which will give the fh'st stable basis for a 
 world peace. 
 
 This will be the greatest extension of demo- 
 cratic control ever appUed to the map of the 
 world. The dimensions of it are so large that the 
 imagination even of its projectors has not wak- 
 ened to what it implies. A great organism of 
 democracies, excepting only India, will exist in 
 a world still half in political bondage. It will 
 5 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 carry its community far along in the twofold pur- 
 pose of all government — the control of environ- 
 ment and the betterment of human relationships. 
 Suppose the bundle of states in Europe were sud- 
 denly to be thrown together in a vast repubhcan 
 state of common purpose, determined on a uni- 
 fied domestic and foreign policy, then we should 
 have no more amazing entity than in this plan of 
 the new British commonwealth. Impossible, of 
 course, for Europe, because there is no central 
 principle, overriding differences of tradition, 
 race, and language ; but possible and about to be 
 consummated in the empire, because the central 
 principle of democratic control is accepted, and 
 because the kinship of blood and language exists. 
 And it is all so obvious. The synthesis, once 
 stated, demands its own realization. It is like 
 the enlightenment which the faithful believe we 
 shall receive after death, when we shall say, 
 "Why, of course." 
 
 Such is the dream which British statesmen will 
 proceed to put into execution at the close of the 
 war. It is the war whose pressure has coalesced 
 these five democracies, each busy with its own self- 
 contained and isolated life. A common danger 
 6 
 
DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH 
 
 and a common experience of suffering forced the 
 realization of ^vhat a thoroughgoing partnership 
 would bring in organization for industry and in 
 the attainment of a good life. The war created a 
 highly desirable friction between Great Britain 
 and her colonial democracies, which revealed the 
 present unsatisfactory status and the need of a 
 new order. Out of that friction has come the 
 vision of the new commonwealth. 
 
 In the light of this far-flung scheme, the cab- 
 inet changes at Westminster seem petty. But 
 they are actually in part a response to it. In 
 England's reach toward this new synthesis she has 
 instinctively turned to the men who have shown, 
 either recently or in long years of service, an mi- 
 derstanding that England is not the British Em- 
 pire, but that the British Empire is in process of 
 becoming itself a single state, the greatest in the 
 world. The changes in the ministry are not alone 
 expressions of the desire to win the war, but they 
 indicate a di'ift of thought, only half-conscious 
 as yet, toward the future commonw^ealth, toward 
 the unification of the little unrelated democracies 
 which England has sown around the world. 
 
 The British democracy believes it has found its 
 7 
 
EN'SLDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 groogp id kados ifx tbe ^esent cdsis in the neir 
 rahagt lis w3k is to wm tiie to, and it begns, 
 ttnq^ dEnilr, to soise tiie Deed (rf impeiial reoon- 
 stradifB. When tlie need swings ba^ aculdy 
 to Ike mtexnal pviUenis €)f ]ab«- ad juslnKnt, this 
 calanet ^v^ be 5«ifthr displaced if it faik to fbne- 
 n.c in r ifmand, cr ceitam of its men^beis 
 %^_1 f new iD^exial nmustry and 
 
 r ij _ "^-2 poUic has to think in 
 
 ijir-— .-T ;_:i:r >t nnrdated pnnioees. 
 
 It zn Li iTrr J UIL2 .r ". . - . :. IS sHDuttaneoosIr, so 
 
 : r^sscstiBT illrr 
 
 It t^ t: -iizi 
 
 i-g of '"politics" 
 
 Canon.; doi, wiien 
 at gnps wiih a cnsir 
 and f <ara^n ^oEey. 
 JuTJiwl that tiaiffihDc 
 
DEMOCRACY OX THE AIARCH 
 
 swer the innneiiiate neei The ckiin c: c-rrtain 
 observers timt the present gr^-'Up of imper:^ ex- 
 ecatives, agncoltaral and educatioDal experts, 
 and business captains, are a reactknary force, 
 revealing the breakdown of democracy in time of 
 strain- is a failure to see ooe of tbe central prin- 
 ciples of democratic govermnoit. Democratic 
 goremment is a government by expots, inter- 
 preting tbe collective will of tiie people. We 
 shall probably see a s-eries of calMnet sfaifts in tbe 
 next five years, as each of tbe tbree great prob- 
 lems of British policy is taken up. Tbe lime- 
 light win flit from Alancbester and Sootb Waks 
 to Ireland, and thai to Australia, and then to 
 Russia, and public opinioQ wiQ demand a Teiy 
 distinct set of faculties, and therefore of leaders, 
 in dealing with each of these various qoestioDS. 
 
 Since the war began many persons have a^ed. 
 Can a democracy produce leaders of the same 
 merit as an autocracy? And tbe answer bas 
 often been Xo. But the question fails to state 
 the problem. War leaders are ooe requirement, 
 imperial leaders are another, and tbe creators of 
 domestic policy are a third. Let us state tbe need 
 in these terms: 
 
 9 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 1. Can a democracy produce leaders in peace 
 times who can shape legislation and give guidance 
 to the democratic movement? The mass of the 
 people have developed a collective will, which de- 
 mands a reconstruction of the state, expressed in 
 terms of parliamentary control (manhood suf- 
 frage, the predominance of the House of Com- 
 mons over the House of Lords) ; and a recon- 
 struction of industry and the institution of prop- 
 erty, expressed in terms of social legislation, af- 
 fecting land reform, minimum wage, and control 
 of collective enterprise, such as mines and rail- 
 ways, and further expressed in free experiment 
 outside legal enactment, though later to be in- 
 corporated in legislative acts, such as workshop 
 councils. Those leaders of peace Great Britain 
 produced. Her swift adjustments to the de- 
 mands of modern self-conscious democracy have 
 proved that she is the fertile mother of democratic 
 initiative. 
 
 2. Can a democracy produce leaders under the 
 strain of international crisis who can carry 
 through a determined policy demanding organi- 
 zation, efficiency, applied science, and a spiritual 
 unity? This requirement is distinct from the re- 
 
 10 
 
DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH 
 
 quirements of a wise domestic policy. The rea- 
 son is plain. The dealings of a nation with its 
 citizens have reached a level of sanity, intelligence, 
 and ethical decency which the dealings of nation 
 with nation have not reached. Internationally, 
 we are ki the jungle. To handle these interna- 
 tional relationships of greed and hate, the nation 
 has to employ brute force. It has to turn its 
 farmers into killers. It has to make shells in 
 place of workers' cottages. But even while this 
 need is most acute, and because it is acute, there 
 arose in Great Britain the demand for a policy 
 which would draw the sprawled-out empire into 
 one state. The present cabinet is the answer to 
 that demand. 
 
 To the question, Can a democracy produce 
 leaders? the British people reply that they are 
 selecting their leaders according to their need, and 
 that, in doing so, they are proving a democratic 
 principle. It is not an abrogation of the demo- 
 cratic principle when a people turns to its ex- 
 perts. It is one expression of the democratic 
 principle. For democracy brought in two things 
 when it entered life with the organization of the 
 industrial revolution. It brought in a mass 
 11 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 movement and it brought in specialization. The 
 collective will must alwaj^s turn to experts to or- 
 ganize its desires into action. It will control 
 those experts, but it will never supersede them. 
 It exercises its control in the choice of them, not 
 in itself attempting tasks of which it is ignorant. 
 A democracy in itself can liberate only an im- 
 pulse. It cannot frame emergency measures by 
 initiative and referendum. It will always be 
 called on from time to time to pass over its power 
 to a handful of specialists and trust them to use 
 its mass momentum in the right direction toward 
 the desired end. 
 
 The democratic movement began consciously 
 with the purpose of freeing the human race from 
 poverty. But it has steadily undergone a broad- 
 ening of purpose under the pressure of its own 
 requirements. It has found that for self-preser- 
 vation it must include the release of talent and the 
 creation of spiritual values in its program. To 
 produce leaders and to enhance the meaning of 
 life are as much within its province as a proper 
 standard of living in terms of hours and wages. 
 It recognizes its need of an aristocracy of talent. 
 The leaders of the democratic movement state 
 12 
 
DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH 
 
 this: such men as A. E., Wells, Zimmern, and 
 Sidney Webb. This aristocracy will include so- 
 cial experts, artists, ethical leaders, teachers, im- 
 perial executives, organizers, and specialists in 
 foreign policy. War is only one of the many 
 situations where the democracy, with its dis- 
 tributed responsibilit}% does not possess in itself 
 the necessary intelligence and unity of policy to 
 master the sudden crisis. The democracy is only 
 fulfilling its own nature in recognizing a diversity 
 of gifts. 
 
 But through all the adjustments of the coming 
 years, calling for expert treatment, the principle 
 of democratic control will prevail. In time the 
 democracy will develop its own tradition of pol- 
 icy and service and generate its own leaders. 
 The common people of Great Britain have never 
 spoken. It was therefore believed they were 
 dumb. But they were not dumb ; they were only 
 inarticulate. The common people of Great Brit- 
 ain have never acted with common purpose to one 
 end. It was therefore believed that they were 
 impotent. But they were not impotent; they 
 were only unawakened. Now they are learning 
 to speak and to act. 
 
 13 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 LABOR 
 
 THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND 
 
 The opinion has been wide-spread among so- 
 cial workers in America that the war has crushed 
 liberahsm in England. They have formed this 
 opinion because social work has been postponed, 
 trade-union rules have been abrogated, dissenters 
 like Bertrand A. W. Russell silenced, Russian 
 revolutionary centers in London suppressed. 
 But it is a characteristic of experts working in 
 details to miss the main currents of tendency. 
 No friend of radical democracy need be worried 
 by the results of the last two years. The blood 
 spilled by the working-classes at the front has 
 been justified by the profound modifications 
 wrought in English consciousness. A nation 
 mobilized and under arms is a rich field for radi- 
 cal ideas. Blood fertilizes the soil for change. 
 Those of the school of Curzon and Gwjmne, who 
 14 
 
LABOR 
 
 believed that the good old days of special privilege 
 would be restored by conscription, are doomed to 
 an awakening more thorough than befell the 
 French reactionaries of 1790. For this is not an 
 affair of a few noble heads. It is the remaking of 
 a nation. 
 
 England is taking strides toward cooperative 
 socialism. For the first time in their history, the 
 English are thinking in terms of a state — "a 
 modern state, in all its complexity, with scientific 
 laws and regulations." This is a view "utterly 
 strange to English thought, steeped as it always 
 had been in empiricism, and only inclined to such 
 piecemeal legislation as a particular grievance 
 or a particular occasion might demand." I am 
 quoting a government investigator. These tend- 
 encies were already in operation before the war; 
 but what might have required twenty-five years 
 to bring to a head, the war has accelerated, inten- 
 sified, and even altered. 
 
 It is a misreading of English character to think 
 that anything remotely resembling the state so- 
 cialism of Germany, the card-indexing of the 
 community for vocational training, the regiment- 
 ing of the intellectual life into a body of state- 
 15 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 controlled professors, will result from the present 
 English revolution. The social change in Eng- 
 land is not coming with any such over-emphasized 
 nationalism. The Enghshman wants to be let 
 alone for all his personal choices. He wants to 
 disagree with official statements. He will not be 
 coerced even for "his good," as that good is seen 
 by another. Xor will the change come as an in- 
 determinate, spreading internationalism, such as 
 has infected radical thought for half a century. 
 It will be English, inside an Enghsh environ- 
 ment. 
 
 There are two truths so plain that we wonder 
 it required a hundred years to find them out. It 
 is the war that has finally revealed them to our 
 blind eyes. The first truth is that high wages 
 give high productiveness. A well-fed, self-re- 
 specting, healthy workman can do more work 
 than an mider-nourished, servile workman. If 
 the employer wants a good product and plenty of 
 it, he must pay a living wage. The second truth 
 is that workmen must work efficiently if they 
 wish high wages. If they cut down productive- 
 ness there is no money to pay them. The war has 
 smoked the workers out. Their sacred secret 
 16 
 
LABOR 
 
 processes which required hours to work have 
 turned out as simple as building-blocks. It is 
 public knowledge now, the time it takes to do a 
 piece of factory work. For years the worker has 
 been limiting his output. A manufacturer of 
 marine engines states that where thirteen rivets 
 were turned out before the war, seventy are now' 
 being made by the same number of workers. 
 The worker is making the same fight here that he 
 made when he broke the first machines. The ma- 
 chines were robbing him of his living, he thought. 
 Instead of that, they have given more men a bet- 
 ter living. Of late years the worker has been 
 fighting his own productivity. How is shrinking 
 wealth to give him an expanding wage ? Where 
 is the money to come from? As a method in a 
 given emergency, sabotage and limitation of out- 
 put are effective ; but as a nation-wide policy they 
 are instruments that cut the hands of the user. 
 The trade-unions surrender their hard-won regu- 
 lations, and suddenly production leaps up as if 
 it had been released from a dead-weight. They 
 are still insisting on government guarantees that 
 the old restrictions will be handed back to them 
 after the war. It would be flattering to write 
 17 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 that it is by labor that the constructive thinking 
 is being done, but it would be untrue. There is 
 absence of patient thought, lack of a constructive 
 program, the muddle of a helpless creature caught 
 unawares in a tidal wave. 
 
 It was the making of shells that taught Eng- 
 land the new synthesis of capital and labor. Sud- 
 denlj^ she was forced to turn out huge quantities 
 of a product in order to save the lives of her peo- 
 ple. Under that tragic pressure she had to learn 
 overnight how to get a large product. She be- 
 gan in the manner dear to ruling classes: she 
 started an old-time "personal-morality" cam- 
 paign of the evangelistic sort, and her most gifted 
 exhorter, Lloyd-George, went out to down drink. 
 She then preached thrift to the factory-worker. 
 But she soon dropped that way of getting at it ; 
 she stopped lecturing the laboring-man for his bad 
 habits. 
 
 And swiftly she found the solution. It is this : 
 State ownership of some factories ; state control 
 of many factories ; state oversight of an ever-in- 
 creasing number of factories; a conscription of 
 abnormal profits for the community; a living 
 wage; decent working conditions; limited hours 
 18 
 
LABOR 
 
 of labor; no restriction of output; no sabotage; 
 no discrimination by workers against workers, 
 but all to be employed, union and non-union, 
 male and female ; efficiency ; the use of machinery 
 up to its capacity instead of dribbling a process 
 through a day where a half -day of proper han- 
 dling would have completed the product. 
 
 There are broken planks all along the length 
 of this platform. But every sag has meant de- 
 creased output, a longer war, more young men 
 killed in battle. And once England had settled 
 the main question with a measure of honesty, she 
 found that some other things were added unto 
 her. When she paid a living wage to people who 
 had never had it before, and put before them a 
 national ideal instead of a benefit for another 
 class, she found that two million persons joined 
 her national savings fund, thereby breaking an 
 immemorial British habit. She found that her 
 prisons had fewer inmates, that the personal 
 morahty of her inhabitants was in the main im- 
 proved. She found that her school children in 
 factory commmiities were better nourished than 
 they had been in the memory of the examining 
 physicians. She found that her woman question 
 19 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 solved itself. The veiy suffragette leaders, such 
 as Mrs. Drummond and Mrs. Pankhurst, who 
 had put gray hairs on Lloyd-George's head and 
 lines of worry into his face, recruited soldiers, ex- 
 plained the national need to the nien miners of the 
 north counties, assisted in organizing masses of 
 "unemployable" women into industrial workers, 
 and were welcomed by Lloyd-George and the 
 Government as efficient helpers in unifying the 
 nation. And, far more important than the co- 
 operation of a handful of leaders, the unrest and 
 discontent of large numbers of women became 
 transformed into energy. 
 
 While it is ti-ue that only half a million women 
 have entered industry, that figure is only a frac- 
 tion of the number of women who have trans- 
 ferred their activity from domestic service and the 
 parasitic trades into the main channels of in- 
 dustry. In munitions alone five himdred thou- 
 sand women have stepped over from unregulated 
 hours and low wages to sharply defined hours and 
 comparatively high wages. These women, and 
 several hundred thousand others in factory pro- 
 cesses, in railway, tram-car, and omnibus work, 
 and in business superintendence, have "tasted 
 20 
 
LABOR 
 
 blood." By that I mean they have won an in- 
 creased freedom and independence, however im- 
 perfect even yet, and a higher wage. To send 
 them " home" will prove a task larger than the 
 paper resolutions of any men's trade-union, that 
 women workers must give up their jobs. 
 
 It is one more of time's ironic revenges that it 
 is the entrance of women upon the scene which has 
 precipitated social questions to solution, where be- 
 fore they were seething in separate, repellent ele- 
 ments. Woman's long campaign for the vote 
 supplied the needed intellectual criticism of plural 
 voting and of suffrage restricted to a prop- 
 erty qualification. "Manhood" suffrage will be 
 granted. It is not possible for a nation to deny 
 a vote to men who have been ready to die for that 
 nation. This manhood suffrage will include 
 votes for women, for the women have mobilized 
 with an equal loyalty. 
 
 Woman's irritating presence in industry has 
 emphasized the demand for proper working con- 
 ditions. It has sharpened the wage controversy, 
 and it has revealed the need of far-reaching meas- 
 ures to deal with the unemployment situation that 
 the nation will face on the day of peace. Women 
 21 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 are not going to enter industry. They have al- 
 ready entered it, and half a million fresh workers 
 have been added. It is clear that increasing the 
 number of workers does not lessen the problem 
 of a living wage. There is only one answer to 
 the violently acute situation which has been 
 forced by these women, and which will come to 
 a crisis when five million men hang their khaki in 
 the closet. The areas of production must be 
 widened not tenderly and with the imperceptible 
 gradualness of a natural process, but swiftly. 
 
 (1) The land must be broken up into small 
 holdings. Cooperation in produce and market- 
 ing must be practised among the peasant tenants. 
 Ireland has blazed the way here. 
 
 (2) The state must institute fields of activity 
 at home, helping to establish new industries, such 
 as dye-works. It must make use of an immense 
 amount of new automatic machinery, installed to 
 make shells, and adapted to an expansion of gen- 
 eral engineering work and to the creation of new 
 industries. The head of a motor-car company 
 told me that two thirds of his present machinery 
 has been created since the war. The report of 
 the British Association states, "For the first time 
 
 22 
 
LABOR 
 
 in the history of the west of Scotland engineering 
 shops had been filled with modern machine tools." 
 This enormous investment cannot be scrapped. 
 
 (3) The state must greatly extend its sphere 
 of activities throughout the empire in cattle-rais- 
 ing, in developing raw lands, in producing com- 
 modities from the land. 
 
 These methods will be used to meet the unem- 
 ployment situation bj^ furnishing new jobs, and to 
 meet the burden of increased taxation by giving 
 an increased income. The larger progi'am will of 
 course be postponed till its advocates are more 
 numerous and better organized. Such a pro- 
 gram will include : 
 
 (1) An extension of transportation facilities, 
 a greatly enlarged use of waterways, the building 
 of new and better roads. 
 
 (2) Improved housing. The foul slums of 
 great cities and towns, the vile homes of agri- 
 cultural laborers, will have to be razed by as dras- 
 tic a plan as that by which Haussmann drew his 
 blue pencil down through the jungle of Paris. 
 New dwellings in the place of the "lung blocks" 
 must be built. 
 
 (3) Afforestation. If it proves true that 
 
 2S 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 there are several million acres in the British Isles 
 that are unfit for intensive agriculture, this area 
 affords an opportunity for forest development, 
 which in eighty years would offer rich returns to 
 the state. 
 
 Under such an extension of enterprise there 
 would be plenty of work after the war, and there- 
 fore plenty of jobs. The problem is how to ob- 
 tain the money with which to finance the work. 
 The war has shown how to get the money. The 
 conscription of profits, death duties, and the taxa- 
 tion of incomes have availed, with new areas of 
 production, to give a more wide-spread, better- 
 distributed prosperity to England than she en- 
 joyed before the war. It is the line of solution 
 that will be enforced after the war. The exact 
 pressure that will enforce it is the demand for a 
 continuation of the present high wages. 
 
 This program is being postponed as long as 
 possible. Its items will be applied unevenly, and 
 parts will go neglected. Committees of Parlia- 
 ment are sure to bring in ingenious little outlines 
 for legislation, which will affect a few thousand 
 workers, while the anny will demobilize at the 
 rate of five thousand a day. But for every fail- 
 M 
 
LABOR 
 
 ure in boldness and energy, for every lag in ex- 
 ecution, the nation will pay in decreased exports, 
 falling wages, the pressure of taxation, and a 
 wrangle between masters and men. The new 
 order of life is still badly delayed at many points. 
 The lot of the agricultural laborer is miserable. 
 The "East Ends" of the industrial cities remain 
 sodden. An immense number of workers are be- 
 ing underpaid, for the rise in wages has reached 
 only a fraction. A ministry of commerce and a 
 ministry of labor are needed at once, and in the 
 ministry of labor there should be a department 
 for women's work, conducted by women under- 
 secretaries. 
 
 Wages and hours remain the heart of the social 
 movement. The emphasis will not shift from 
 wages and hours. But a new demand has been 
 added to these "old timers." It is the demand by 
 labor for a voice in the control of its working 
 conditions. Mr. Lloyd-George responded to this 
 demand by greatly increasing the scope of wel- 
 fare work in factories. Through the famous 
 manufacturer and social worker, Seebohm 
 Rowntree, he has put protective agencies at work 
 in munition factories which affect the lives of half 
 25 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 a million persons who were not safeguarded to 
 the same extent formerly. This safeguarding is 
 done by welfare secretaries, whose duty it is to 
 study the health, home conditions, and sanitary 
 appliances of women. Grievances of workers 
 are laid before these secretaries. Welfare secre- 
 taries are not a new arrival in British industry, 
 but there were few of them in relation to the im- 
 mense numbers of factories and workers. This 
 movement toward conducting industry in its so- 
 cial relationship from the point of view of the 
 worker is in its beginning. Labor will press on 
 for an increasing recognition of its right to be 
 heard in management in workshop adjustments, 
 the speed of machinery, rest-times, hours of work, 
 details of discipline, and the grading of labor. 
 
 As this tide of reform rises higher, there is a 
 back wash. Class education, land monopoly, a 
 state church, persist down to our own day. Eng- 
 land has continued in a modified, far less harsh 
 form those special privileges of a ruling class that 
 in France led to the overthrow of the nobility and 
 the clergy. The industrial revolution of a cen- 
 tury ago suddenly altered the texture of feudal 
 English life, just as it would have altered France 
 
LABOR 
 
 without the French Revolution. It added a new 
 upper layer to the pressure from overhead on the 
 manual worker in agriculture and industry, at the 
 same time that it gave an ever-increasing popula- 
 tion a share in the means of production. But the 
 coming of machinery, creating a new world, was 
 powerless in England to disturb the big land 
 holdings, the church, and restricted education. 
 They have continued to govern the conditions of 
 life. The best defense of the class system which 
 I have recently seen is that given in lectures to 
 the University of Pennsylvania by Geoffrey But- 
 ler under the title of "The Tory Tradition." 
 He clearly shows the contribution which has been 
 made by the Tory rejection of a utilitarian stand- 
 ard, their distrust of sectional control, their in- 
 sistence on the organic conception of the state, 
 their behef in the power of tradition and the an- 
 cient processes of government, their emphasis on 
 national duties, and therefore on a far-sighted 
 foreign policy. He says, "Our system of classes 
 represents the effect of selection by the capacity 
 to govern." And again, "Heredity is no Tory 
 invention, but a scientific fact." 
 
 In any analysis of unseemly class prepon- 
 27 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 derance the honest student of Engh'sh conditions 
 has to qualif}^ the downright statement. Thus 
 the landed gentry have often exercised a personal 
 care for their tenants and the village community 
 that the modern liberal captain of industry has 
 sometimes neglected to exercise toward his em- 
 ployees. But the land monopoly has prevented 
 England from being self-supporting and from 
 relieving the pressure on industry of an over- 
 crowded labor supply. It has robbed her of a 
 sturdy land-owning peasantry like the French, 
 and has given her in their place a city-bred, under- 
 sized, intellectually feeble, morally infirm lower 
 class. 
 
 The intellectuals of the public schools and of 
 Oxford and Cambridge have supphed a poise 
 and dignity to modern life that a mediocre democ- 
 racy^ lacks. Their graduates have given honest 
 leadership in the Government. Recently their 
 young men have gone gallantly to a service from 
 which there is no returning. But much of the 
 defense for the rigid, medieval class system, in so 
 far as it possesses an intellectual basis, has been 
 supplied by public school and university men. 
 They are living in the home of lost causes. 
 28 
 
LABOR 
 
 The belated Tory Church of England clergy 
 have continued to be an ameliorating influence in 
 their communities. Their sane manner of living, 
 their personal kindliness, their patient absorption 
 in the humble lives about them — all these make a 
 contribution we overlook in our easy generaliza- 
 tions on the decayed church. And there are 
 abounding elements inside the established church 
 itself that are as liberal as any elements in modern 
 life. That church still has wise leaders, like Dean 
 Welldon of Manchester and a dozen others. The 
 sacramental view of life has profound and per- 
 manent values for certain persons. But when 
 all has been said, it remains true that the church, 
 with its compromised theology, its indifference 
 to social injustice, its ignorance of where the 
 modern fight for righteousness is being waged, 
 its land-holding, its taxation, its absence of intel- 
 lectual force in seeking truth, has acted as a deter- 
 rent in the emancipation of the masses. A state 
 rehgion has been a soporific, drugging the laborer 
 to believe that his lot in life was a paii; of the 
 scheme of things. As an institution the church, 
 and as a body the clergy, have not sought equality 
 for their communities. The present National 
 29 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Mission of Repentance and Hope, the most 
 ambitious crusade the church has launched in 
 many years, has been swung over into an evan- 
 gehstic campaign against the personal vices of 
 drink and sexual indulgence, and into an old- 
 fashioned appeal for personal righteousness and 
 the deepening of the religious life. The ma j ority 
 of the bishops remain blind to the demand of the 
 workers for an economic underpinning to their 
 lives. The workers believe that the way to a 
 proper life is by taking a hand in the control of 
 industry, by a living wage, and by fewer hours of 
 work. They are frankly uninterested in the 
 restriction of public houses and a more diligent 
 attendance in places of worship till they see that 
 their larder and their leisure are guaranteed. 
 
 These, then, are the forces of reaction tighten- 
 ing themselves for the struggle. These great 
 estates of the landed gentry, the clerg}% and the 
 public school and university men will die hard in 
 defense of the class system. They will be power- 
 fully supported by the individualistic capitalist, 
 avid for his profits, and by the timid, unintelligent 
 middle class, fearful of its narrow income from 
 rents, stock-holding, and small investment. 
 30 
 
LABOR 
 
 But the same quick action that turned out shells 
 by the acre will be enforced by the return of a 
 nation in arms. It is not that they will use the 
 rifle to shoot. It is that their strength has been 
 compacted where their eye can see it, their oigani- 
 zation ready-made for them, their sei-vice to the 
 nation acknowledged. Soldiers and workers are 
 the same men, inside the small area of an island. 
 At one stroke war won those things for which in 
 peace a portion of the English people seek in 
 vain: proper food, correct conditions for effi- 
 ciency, a pension for dependents, high honor for 
 service, a common sacrifice, and, embracing all 
 like a chmate, a favoring public opinion, a great 
 universal equality. They will demand that the 
 same himianity be let loose into their daily life 
 of the factories. Is the basic work of peace less 
 worthy than trench routine? 
 
 There has been a certain vital force in new 
 countries that England has lacked in recent years, 
 Some of that living element went out to America 
 and the colonies. It founded free institutions, 
 established a wider equality, liberated a play for 
 individual initiative. It left England grayer 
 and heavier than in its great epochs. Next to the 
 31 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 sleeping strength of the Russian peasantry, the 
 English mass is the slowest-moving force in the 
 modern European world. 
 
 Observers of England have written down this 
 slackening of effort as laziness. But "laziness" 
 and "drink" and "thriftlessness" are the inva- 
 riable resort of an imperfect analysis. What 
 was the cause of that laziness? I believe that we 
 have the answer in the weakness that sets in when 
 an organism gets out of touch with its environ- 
 ment. All the conditions of modern life were 
 changing rapidly, and England revealed little 
 adaptability in fitting herself to the change. 
 What the war has made clear is that England 
 was losing her stride in the modern world. She 
 was lagging in agriculture, industiy, and applied 
 science. To put the matter clearly and frankly, 
 an anemia had spread over English life in recent 
 generations. Through lack of vocational train- 
 ing, the working-man had lost ambition, and his 
 power of production had lost pace with German 
 and American workers. The huddled, sheltered, 
 unproductive lives of middle-class people were 
 often without direction and purpose because they 
 were untrained. The upper class had lost power 
 32 
 
LABOR 
 
 of constructive leadership in the traditions of an 
 education unrelated to the realities of modern 
 hfe. 
 
 This war has wakened England. It has made 
 the working-man work at full-tilt for the first 
 time in his hfe. He has been wiUing to do it, 
 because the product served a national purpose 
 instead of the profit of another person. He has 
 been physically able to do it, because an increased 
 wage gave him better food. He has discovered 
 how to do it, because the pressure of necessity has 
 unlocked brain cells which in ordinary times 
 would have required a term of education to 
 coordinate. The war has turned the middle-class 
 home inside out, and freed the respectable unem- 
 ployed into usefulness. It has given new and 
 more active forms of employment to women 
 caught in domestic sei-vice and the parasitic trades 
 of "refined" di-essmaking, millinery, and candy 
 manufacture. Finally, the war has given a 
 career to upper-class Enghshmen. For the first 
 time in their lives they feel they have found some- 
 thing active to do through noble sacrifice. The 
 sigh of relief that went up at the discoveiy that 
 life was at last worth living, if only because of its 
 33 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 brevity, was echoed in the poetry of officers as it 
 drifted back from the trenches. 
 
 The key to the present situation is the sudden 
 enormous release of energy. Male labor has felt 
 it, and has responded with increased production. 
 Women have felt it, and have transferred their 
 activities from low-pressure drudgery and par- 
 asitic employments to the main channels of 
 industry. The directors and capitalists have felt 
 it, and have sanctioned new areas of production, 
 new automatic machinery, and more liberal terms 
 for their workers. The state has felt it, and has 
 taken a direct hand in the encouragement and 
 control of industry. An incredible amount of 
 energy has been let loose in England which before 
 was lying latent in underpaid, undernourished 
 working-men, in individualistic businessmen, in 
 unimaginative government officials, in extra 
 daughters in the household, and in unattached 
 women of a moderate income and no profession. 
 
 A spiritual transformation would come to pass 
 if atoms were dissociated and the latent energy in 
 matter released into a torpid world. What coal 
 and electricity and radiimi accomplish in burning 
 through obstruction and speeding up life would 
 34 
 
LABOR 
 
 be transcended by that new amazing release of 
 force. But that very thing took place in the 
 social organism. Industrial labor and the home 
 were each an "indestiiictible atom," the final unit 
 that could not be pried open, or separated into 
 parts. And suddenly it was broken up, and an 
 immense energy set going in the community. 
 
 To maintain this increased activity after the 
 war will require an enlarged system of state edu- 
 cation. Vocational training must be given to 
 the young in place of the present laissez-faire 
 policy, which lets children slip out from control, 
 at the age of fourteen and even younger, into 
 "blind-alley" pursuits. England will have to be 
 remodeled or else lose her place among the 
 nations. 
 
 If she fails to take action in accelerating indus- 
 trial democracy, she will see her surviving young 
 men saihng in droves for Canada and Australia. 
 The colonies are far-sighted, and their prop- 
 aganda in England is continuous, and has gi-eatly 
 increased since the beginning of the war. Show- 
 windows on the Strand and King's Road, and like 
 strategic points of great cities, are filled with the 
 genial products of the soil and the mines, — ears 
 35 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 of grain and slags of metal, — and the background 
 a gay painting of an overseas city, with its hos- 
 pitable harbor. Pleasant-voiced and energetic 
 gentlemen inside the roomy, prosperous offices 
 tell you what you can make of your life if you pull 
 up stakes and come with them to the new lands. 
 If England fails, she will be stripped of men, and 
 will become a feminist nation. But she will not 
 fail. The penalty is too severe. 
 
 It would be easy to play the role of a prophet 
 here, and ride a radical gallop through the coming 
 England. But I have consistently limited this 
 outline to the tendencies already under way, to 
 the currents already running. I have struck out 
 the minimum of social remodeling, as recognized 
 by middle-of-the-way publicists. I can quote 
 "The Saturday Review" on a minimum wage for 
 agricultural labor, "The Times" on the idea of 
 national syndication, the Government on the 
 "pigsty" in which the farm-laborer has been 
 forced to live, and Mr. Asquith on woman's claim 
 to a vote on the basis of her war work. 
 
 To suppose that these changes are going 
 through gracefully is to dream in the dayhght. 
 They are coming jerkily, unevenly. Nothing 
 
LABOR 
 
 will be granted except as it is forced. I have 
 heard talk by persons in well-to-do homes about 
 the new brotherhood of the trenches. One of the 
 most distinguished English writers said to me : 
 
 "Do you think working-men will ever feel 
 bitterly again, now that they have seen their 
 officers leading them and dying for them?" 
 
 It did not occur to her to inquire how gallantly 
 in an infantrj^ charge would prove a substitute 
 for a living wage. There will be brotherhood 
 after the war if the privileged classes pay a hving 
 wage; but from what some of their represent- 
 atives have said to me I gather that brotherhood is 
 to be practised by the workers in ceasing to 
 agitate for the basic conditions of a decent life. 
 
 Not much of this emancipation is being made 
 in love. It has largely come by the clever use of 
 force, and what it brings will be like the gains of 
 war for territory — areas soaked with human 
 tears, breeding-places of fresh dissension. The 
 eternal questions will beat in again after the new 
 order is established. Is a living wage the final 
 answer to the homesickness of the human spirit? 
 Does a materialistic conception of life satisfy the 
 longing of the heart? Are the claims of beauty 
 37 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 met by uniform rows of neat little dwellings and 
 by sanitary factories? Have we really crossed 
 the great divide and arrived finally in the smi- 
 shine? One doubts it. The life of the spirit is 
 not so easily satisfied. But as in the present war 
 of arms political differences are buried, art and 
 poetry forgotten, and all the national will focused 
 on this one thing to do, so in this gi'eater struggle 
 the vast complexities of hfe are overlooked for 
 the sake of a working program of action and 
 a sharp summary. Happiness and morality, 
 beauty and religion, are left to take care of them- 
 selves. 
 
 It is not from brotherly love that an increased 
 cooperation between the directors and the workers 
 is being established, but because without cooper- 
 ation the production of wealth is lessened, capital 
 is diminished, and wages are decreased. That 
 cooperation is not secured by telling the laborer 
 to "be good," to remember the nation, and to for- 
 get his wage. The capitalist of the past has been 
 indifferent to the welfare of his workers. He 
 has had his mind on individual profit, not on 
 national wealth. If he acts in the future as he 
 has in the past, extracting an immediate high 
 38 
 
LABOR 
 
 profit at the expense of the worker, and therefore 
 of the national wealth, the control will be taken 
 from him, and will pass over automatically into 
 the hands of the democracy. It rests with the 
 capitalists themselves whether they and their sys- 
 tem will survive or whether their function will be 
 taken over by the industrial group and the state. 
 Capital and labor are a permanent institution; 
 but the capitalist, unhke the laborer, is by no 
 means an indispensable unit in the institution. 
 If the capitahst will handle himself in relation to 
 his employees as the French officer does in rela- 
 tion to his men, he can postpone his extinction 
 indefinitely. If he develops a democracy of spirit 
 and attitude, taking less profits and paying 
 higher wages, exercising leadership by intelli- 
 gence and sympathy, and permitting labor a voice 
 in working conditions, he will remain in partial 
 control of a diminished realm for the immediate 
 future at least. As fast as he fails he will be 
 ousted. 
 
 Discipline and responsibility are the essentials 
 for the new life just beginning, and they rest with 
 equal weight on employer and employee. They 
 are two words which had become unpopular in 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 our recent philosophy of life, because the qual- 
 ities themselves were out of favor. But the war 
 has revealed their ancient worth under the cake of 
 modernism. 
 
 The faults of the English, as I see them, are an 
 almost incorrigible mental torpidness, which is 
 slow to see a new situation and obstinate to move 
 even when seeing it; a deep-rooted belief in the 
 class system; an unconscious arrogance; and a 
 suppression of the emotional life. As the result 
 of these limitations in insight and sympathy, the 
 English race has been backward in the betterment 
 of its own people. It has overvv^orked and under- 
 paid its own sons and daughters till a portion of 
 its population rots in foul slums. 
 
 A silent, slow-moving, but determined will, a 
 constancy of purpose, a standard of conduct, 
 often fallen short of, but rather consistently 
 aimed at, are, I think, the saving characteristics 
 of English character. By reason of these virtues, 
 — and they are supreme virtues, — when the Eng- 
 lish race starts to right a wrong, it goes through 
 with the work to the end. It has now set itself 
 to give justice to its workers. The social move- 
 40 
 
LABOR 
 
 ment is more surely on its way in England than 
 in any other country of Europe. 
 
 Human history has moved in cycles, and war 
 has often marked the cesura. The French 
 Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the inven- 
 tion of machinery altered the face of the world 
 and refashioned its inner life. We are to-day 
 in the presence of an industrial revolution as vast 
 as that of a century ago. We in America shall be 
 wise if we, like England, practise preparedness 
 not only in the obvious surface requirements of 
 dreadnoughts and citizen armies, but in the pro- 
 found modifications of the social structure and 
 consciousness. 
 
 THE DISCOVERY 
 
 Any one who looks forward to a peace on earth 
 following the war of the trenches is going to be 
 present at a surprise-j)arty. The workers are 
 gathering themselves for a mighty effort which 
 will make the French railway ^rike and the Eng- 
 lish mine and transport strikes look like an after- 
 noon tea. The issue will be precipitated when 
 the Government and the employers fail to restore 
 41 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 the old trade-union rules and regulations. They 
 cannot restore them because the conditions have 
 changed in the last two years. New automatic 
 machinery and the entrance of male and female 
 semi-skilled workers have made it impossible to 
 restore the old system, which was adapted to the 
 old conditions. Let me quote from a careful 
 investigation made by experts: 
 
 Many of the men who return from the trenches to 
 the great munition and shipbuilding centers are, within 
 a few weeks of their return, among those who exhibit 
 most actively their discontent with present conditions. 
 Among those who have fought in Flanders or who 
 have been employed in making shells at home, there are 
 many who look forward to a great social upheaval 
 following the war. It is the testimony of responsible 
 observers on the spot that some of our greatest in- 
 dustrial centers are even now in a state of incipient 
 revolt. To a very large number of the men now in 
 the ranks, the fight against Germany is a fight against 
 *'Prussianism," and the spirit of Prussianism represents 
 to them only an extreme example of that to which 
 they object in the industrial and social institutions of 
 their own country. They regard the present struggle 
 as closely connected with the campaign against capital- 
 ist and class-domination at home. 
 
 Unfortunately some of the results of the war itself, 
 42 
 
LABOR 
 
 such as the Munitions Acts and the Compulsion Acts, 
 have intensified this identification of external and in- 
 ternal "enemies." We are not discussing the necessity 
 of these measures. The point is that the working of 
 these acts and the tribunals created under them has 
 given rise to an amount of deep and widespread re- 
 sentment which is the more dangerous because it is 
 largely inarticulate. It is particularly dangerous be- 
 cause it tends to discredit in general working class 
 opinion that section of labor which looks to the im- 
 provement of industrial conditions by negotiation or by 
 legislative action, and to strengthen the hands of the 
 party which preaches doctrines of wrecking and ap- 
 propriation. 
 
 The war has not put an end to industrial unrest. 
 Every one of the old causes of dispute remains, and 
 others of a more serious nature have been added in 
 the course of the war. The very moderation and un- 
 selfishness shown by the responsible leaders of organ- 
 ized labor are looked upon by important sections of 
 their following as a betrayal of the cause and by some 
 employers as a tactical opportunity. 
 
 What is the answer? No half-way solution, 
 no artificial "faked" restoration, no "brotherhood 
 of the trenches," no turning of the attention of 
 labor to "higher things" by a national mission, 
 will suffice to meet the imperious demands of five 
 43 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 million men who have felt the rhythm and 
 momentum of victorious organization. There is 
 only one answer which will avail. That answer 
 is democratic control. It can come in either of 
 two ways. It can come by the graceful conces- 
 sion of the employing class. If it does not come 
 in that way, it will come by the overwhelming 
 force exerted by general limitation of output and 
 by wide-spread strikes. And if these prove slow, 
 then there is the possibility of what a Scotch 
 employer recently declared. He said, "As I look 
 into the future, I see nothing but bloodshed." 
 
 There is no need of bloodshed, which is a crude 
 and unsatisfactory way of determining questions 
 as complex as the division of profits, the limits of 
 fatigue, the conditions of production. 
 
 Let us consider the principle of democratic 
 control in detail. It is sensible, and industrial 
 warfare is senseless, as senseless as international 
 warfare. What is it exactly that the worker 
 wishes? Shorter hours and higher wages? Yes. 
 Better conditions of working and living? Yes. 
 But all these are servants of a better thing yet — 
 status. Status is standing. It is that position 
 which a person or a class holds in society. The 
 44 
 
LABOR 
 
 desire for status is the desire for a good life — a 
 life raised above slavery and injustice, and free 
 to develop its creative impulses. No one of intel- 
 ligence wishes labor to thrust in and muddle 
 matters which it has n't the executive equipment 
 for handling. At its present stage of devel- 
 opment labor cannot organize the market and sell 
 the product. It cannot equip the factory and 
 conduct the operating and selling conditions. 
 Management in that sense is beyond its powers. 
 Education, discipline, experience, the creation of 
 a specialized kind of brain power — all are neces- 
 sary to organize industry and conduct its multiple 
 processes. 
 
 But what labor can manage and possesses the 
 right to manage, but has not received the permis- 
 sion to manage, are the conditions of its own Mfe 
 — its working life and its leisure life. The instal- 
 lation of new processes, the introduction of new 
 machiner}% the injection of new workers — all 
 these alterations of working conditions have been 
 imposed upon the workers, as one puts a new 
 harness on a horse, or shifts him from the plow 
 to the tread-mill. The workers have built up 
 their own system of protective devices to meet 
 45 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 these impositions of the ohgarchy in control of 
 them. They have hmited the output by "going 
 gently" with the work. They have limited the 
 number of apprentices. They have practised 
 sabotage and called strikes. They had no other 
 weapons. The result of these protective devices 
 has been to lessen the volume of production, to 
 give capital a smaller return on its investment, 
 and to cut down wages. The policy has been 
 bad for employer and employee. 
 
 It is not altogether the control which capital 
 and management exercise over the mechanism of 
 production which creates industrial um-est. It 
 is in part the control over labor. Absence of 
 knowledge is the cause of some of the misunder- 
 standing. The workers understand nothing of 
 overhead charges, depreciation of plant, the risks 
 of capital. They know nothing of the policy 
 connected with buying and selling. The em- 
 ployers know nothing of the effect of a new 
 process on the nervous system of the worker. 
 They know nothing of the fatigue from overwork 
 or monotony. They make no study of a standard 
 of living. They go blindly ahead, as if men and 
 machinery alike were tools to be manipulated. 
 46 
 
LABOR 
 
 That an aim of industry should be a good life for 
 the worker is an idea which would sound strangely 
 in their ears. 
 
 What is needed between employer and worker 
 is a pooling of knowledge, a frank exchange of 
 the point of view, and a compromise in manage- 
 ment. The way out is through democratic con- 
 trol over the conditions of work. The worker 
 must be consulted when new machinery is 
 installed. The effect of it must be studied in 
 relation to monotony, fatigue, and danger. The 
 profits from its introduction must be equitably 
 divided between the employer and the worker. 
 The consultation must not be a form of words. 
 It must be a consultation where the voice of the 
 worker is of equal authority with that of the exec- 
 utive management. The worker must be in a 
 position to control the conditions of his putting 
 forth of labor power. The new conditions, 
 created by the new machine with its special proc- 
 esses, must be such that the balance of justice, 
 established under the old conditions, is not dis- 
 turbed by the alteration. The belief that every 
 change, such as "scientific management," in- 
 stituted by the employer, has enabled him to pick 
 47 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 up slack and take a tighter cinch-grip on labor, 
 has led labor to resist labor-saving devices and 
 modern methods of speeding-up. The emploj^er 
 has been partly defeated whenever he has played 
 a "lone hand." And labor, in defeating him, has 
 lessened the volume of production from which 
 higher wages are derived.^ 
 
 1 Consider tlie analysis Sir Hugh Bell has recently made of his 
 own costs, as given in "The Round Table" for September, 1916. 
 
 "His firm makes steel, the raw materials for which are produced 
 from his own coal and iron mines and limestone quarries. In every 
 ton of steel made, 70 to 75 per cent, of the cost goes as the wages 
 of labor. There remains 25 to 30 per cent, for all other outgoings, 
 including profit. The turnover on a steel business in this country 
 about equals the capital invested. If his profit amounts to 10 per 
 cent., of which 3 per cent, at least must go back into the business 
 to maintain the works, he thinks himself lucky, and the 7 per cent, 
 left must cover interest on his capital as well as the profits for his 
 enterprise and risk. The remaining 15 to 20 per cent, goes to 
 cover rates and taxes, railway freights and so forth, part of which 
 again goes to labor. 
 
 "Out of what fund," as Sir Hugh Bell asks, "is he to pay a 10 
 per cent, increase in wages?" If he paid 10 per cent, more, he 
 would have no profit at all and could not continue the business. 
 The increase in wages, then, can only come from within, by greater 
 efficiency in management or greater production per man. There 
 are, no doubt, many businesses which have some monopoly value, 
 where capital secures a greater return; there are others where the 
 return is less and the business is decaying. But except when ab- 
 normal conditions arise, as with shipping now, or when a monopoly 
 or a patent exists, the picture given by Sir Hugh Bell is more or 
 less applicable to indiistry in general. 
 
 No paper resolution, no legislation, and no economic theory can 
 alter tlie facts of the industrial situation, but an adjustment and a 
 gain can be made by a new release of productive energy on the 
 
 48 
 
LABOR 
 
 What is the way out? Surely it is this: in- 
 stall the new machinery, establish scientific man- 
 agement, but explain the process, adjust the 
 wage-scale, debate the problems of fatigue, 
 monotony, and danger, safeguard the standard 
 of living, study the new conditions, and work out 
 an agreement between employer and workers. 
 
 Already there is a rapprochement between the 
 larger groups. In the crisis of 1915, Mr. Ten- 
 nant summoned the labor leaders to organize the 
 forces of labor. The employers and the Govern- 
 ment were helpless unless aided by the workers 
 themselves. On that day, February 8, 1915, the 
 principle of democratic control in industry was 
 established in the modern state, never to be 
 receded from. This system of joint committees 
 had indeed long existed in the leading trades, 
 where employers and union leaders met to settle 
 disputes. But the white flag of truce was over 
 the conference, while, outside, the battle raged. 
 But Mr. Tennant by his bold measure raised the 
 joint committee to the level of continuous medi- 
 ation and consultation. These joint boards will 
 
 part of the management and the men, by consultation between 
 labor and capital, and by hard intellectual eflFort put on each detail 
 of both the industrial process and the industrial relationship. 
 
 49 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 be the method by which the Government, the 
 employer, and the worker will discuss the break- 
 down during war-time of the trade-union rules, 
 and the substitute to be given in place of an 
 impossible restoration. The joint board is part 
 of the machinerj^ for reconstruction. The accept- 
 ance of it is an acceptance of the principle of 
 democratic control. 
 
 That is the centralized and "parliamentary" 
 side of the matter. But it deals with only half 
 the problem. The other half is local government 
 in the individual factory. No system of cen- 
 tralization can ever so extend itself as to deal 
 adequately with the dehcate various human mate- 
 rial in the single factory. And for this a solution 
 has been struck out. It is that of workshop 
 councils, where the men sit in equal power with 
 the management. It has been tried in a few 
 places. It has worked excellently. There is one 
 factoiy where no decision in several years has 
 been appealed from. Disputes have died away. 
 We shall hear much of "workshop councils" in 
 the next five years. The experiment offers the 
 one sane, peaceable way out of a struggle that, 
 "unnegotiated," will throw industry into chaos. 
 50 
 
LABOR 
 
 Let us consider in detail what the workshop 
 council will do. It will deal with the admission 
 of unskilled workers into the factory, with piece- 
 work prices, shop discipline, suspension and dis- 
 missal, welfare, organization, and production, 
 "time" rules, consideration of complaints, meth- 
 ods of increasing efficiency, discussion of hours of 
 work, and the necessity of periods of overtime, 
 supervision of eating-halls, organization of rec- 
 reation. The council will represent a depart- 
 ment, and will send one representative for every 
 fifty workers, for instance. Thus a department 
 with 250 workmen will send five representatives. 
 Sitting with the council in equal numbers will be 
 the manager of the department and his assistants. 
 For a large factory the departmental councils 
 will meet and elect a "works council" — twenty- 
 five workers and twenty-five managers and assist- 
 ants, — who will consider matters touching the 
 works as a whole. On questions such as fixing 
 day wages and the level that governs piece wages, 
 the employer will continue to deal direct with the 
 trade-unions, but the piece rates themselves will 
 be arranged by the workshop councils. 
 
 This is all experimental and tentative. It may 
 51 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 break down under bitterness or trickery. It may 
 be manipulated by clever men. Chesterton, who 
 is a hearty medievalist, desiring general peasant 
 proprietorship, calls the scheme of "a certain 
 proletarian representation in the employer's 
 council" "the man-trap of the management." 
 He says that "the first few labor representatives 
 filtered cautiously into the 'management' will be 
 beaten at the game. That is why they will be 
 allowed to play at it." 
 
 Perhaps, but the idea is in line with democratic 
 principle. It is being worked at by the best 
 minds in England, and it offers the one peaceable 
 way out of a strife that grows more intense every 
 month. 
 
 The situation is this: labor is going to 
 demand higher wages. To obtain them, labor 
 must produce more goods, and the employer must 
 improve his methods, install new machinery, and 
 consult the worker. Some employers will meet 
 the situation with superlatively good management 
 — a management that will welcome the worker 
 to a share in control, and will increase production 
 and wages without financial loss. Some em- 
 ployers will make decreased profits, some will go 
 62 
 
LABOR 
 
 to the wall, and some will fight the new condi- 
 tions. If wisdom prevails on both sides, a new 
 constitution of industry will be achieved. 
 
 DEMOCEATIC CONTROL 
 
 In this age, when psychology is taking over 
 new reahns of fact every year, it is increasingly 
 difficult to use a phrase about society which is 
 accurate in describing the instinctive life of forty- 
 five million persons. Yet one must have a vocab- 
 ulary in order to tallv. The phrase "democratic 
 control" appears throughout this book. By the 
 principle of democratic control I mean the appli- 
 cation to the institutions of property and the 
 state of the sum of the desires and impulses of the 
 persons composing the modern nation-state. 
 Those desires and impulses are often thought 
 about and definitely expressed in a reasoned pro- 
 gram of action, as in the gradually developing 
 "will to war" of the British people. Often they 
 are held only in the subconscious mind, exploding 
 through from time to time in blind action. But 
 the desires and impulses of the mass people have 
 to-day a power in shaping legislation, controlling 
 administration, adapting environment, and estab- 
 53 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 lishing new social relationships, which, through 
 lack of organization, they did not possess in 
 earlier periods. Suppression, thwarting, sub- 
 mission are not acceptable to the people of a 
 modern nation, and they have determined to live 
 a more creative life. 
 
 "Democratic control" is a convenient phrase 
 for describing what is taking place in society, 
 which we express concretely by using the terms 
 "labor movement," "woman movement," "wel- 
 fare work," "British commonwealth," "rights of 
 little nations." An increasing number of people 
 are seeing what they want and are getting it. 
 An increasing number of women are desiring a 
 living wage and the vote, and they are organizing 
 their thought and will to obtain them. An 
 increasing number of manual workers are wishing 
 to control the conditions of their working life, and 
 they are acting together in order to win that 
 status. The dominions are growing restive under 
 an imperial policy conducted by England alone, 
 and they are preparing to take a hand in the 
 shaping of that policy. These are instances of 
 democratic control — the apphcation to govern- 
 54 
 
LABOR 
 
 merit and contract of the sum of the desires and 
 impulses of milhons of persons. 
 
 Our modern social movement, which is seeking 
 to achieve the organized state under democratic 
 control, operates through private ownership and 
 individuahsm (property), cooperation, state con- 
 trol (socialism), and occupational association 
 (syndicalism). The socialistic state has greatly 
 extended its function in the present war. Non- 
 local association, or syndicalism, is increasing its 
 strength through workshop councils, joint boards, 
 and the various organizations of common occupa- 
 tion, trade-unions, "industi-ial workers," gilds. 
 Cooperation for production is powerful in Ire- 
 land, and cooperation for distribution has had a 
 long and successful history in England. Prop- 
 erty — the idea of the "small owner," the "peasant 
 proprietor," one's right to one's "very own," is 
 still intrenched. Any dogmatism on the claims 
 of one of these against the others must to-day be 
 rejected as not fitting the facts. Any prophecy 
 as to which will contribute most decisively to 
 the future organization of society is gratuitous. 
 Each overlaps upon the others, but all are 
 55 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 expressions of the impulse toward freedom, and 
 the social movement is the resultant. 
 
 Particular tendencies in the social movement 
 cannot be exclusively identified with particular 
 psychological dispositions. Dr. Graham Wallas 
 writes to me: 
 
 The extension of democratic control is of course 
 dependent on knowledge, or imagination, as well as im- 
 pulse. More exactly, impulse in the modern world has 
 to be stimulated rather by our ideas of what we can- 
 not see or hear than by our direct sensations. The 
 Railway Men's Union is growing stronger because in- 
 dividual railwaymen are getting a more definite con- 
 ception of the capital- and state-machine instead of a 
 vague acquiescence in a social order felt to be irresisti- 
 ble (or, rather, not felt to be resistible) ; because they 
 have a conception of improving their position neither 
 by individual industry nor by state action, but by syn- 
 dical action; because they have learnt by experience 
 that improvement can be brought about by syndical 
 action. 
 
 There is not half enough concentrated thinking 
 being done. The Labor party in its latest con- 
 ference displayed as much hot feeling over in- 
 finitesimal details as the protagonists in an Irish 
 election, and it dissolved without any large 
 56 
 
LABOR 
 
 program. The speaker's Conference on Elec- 
 toral Reform "approved" of the principle of 
 woman suffrage, but failed to include a measure 
 to obtain it in the resolutions. No synthetic plan 
 of reconstruction is anywhere in sight. What 
 will happen is that the pressure of necessity will 
 force reforms, bill by bill, detail by detail. This 
 is a costly way. It is the way in which shells were 
 substituted for shrapnel. It means that each 
 gi'oup in the community will fight like a lone wolf 
 for its bone. It is possible that the engineering 
 trades, for instance, which will come out on top 
 during the first years of peace, will leave women 
 and unskilled men to fight their own battles, fail- 
 ing to see that a standard of hving and high 
 production are principles established only by 
 combined effort. 
 
 Each class division in the community is sulking 
 in its corner and hugging half a dozen pet 
 fallacies. The employer still believes that the 
 aim of industry is a product rather than human 
 welfare. He still beheves in laissez-faire, "im- 
 mutable laws of supply and demand," a servile 
 wage class. The worker still regards "economic 
 determinism" as governing the multitudinous 
 57 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 currents of human history. He still believes that 
 there is only a certain fixed amount of work and 
 money to be ladled out, a pool unfed by expand- 
 ing production. He still believes in limiting the 
 number of workers and circumscribing the areas 
 and methods of production. He still distrusts 
 the intellect as an instrmnent for estabhshing 
 justice. 
 
 But the principle of democratic control forces 
 its own way irresistibly through the storm of 
 words and conflicting purposes. If only one man 
 in England apprehended it, it would have to 
 prevail, for it leads out of chaos. It abohshes 
 ignorance and poverty. It releases the good-will 
 which lies hidden and obstructed in our nature. 
 It promises equahty, and perhaps some day will 
 bring in beauty to a troubled and unlovely world. 
 
 THE PIONEERS 
 
 England is becoming an industrial democracy, 
 but the talk is all of speeding up production and 
 making a better machine of the worker. The 
 solutions of reconstruction necessitate a consider- 
 ation of new automatic machines and subdivisions 
 of repetitive processes. There is talk of a still 
 58 
 
LABOR 
 
 hotter war of competition than in the old dreary- 
 factory days. All these discussions of the British 
 Association and "The Round Table" and the 
 Fabians and the government reports lean in the 
 du'ection of Americanizing and Germanizing 
 England. When you have made a good work- 
 man in that sense, you have n't made a good man 
 at all. You have made a sharpened tool of pro- 
 duction or a narrow, concentrated huckster. I 
 feel in all this program something alien to the 
 English nature. Half the fine virtues of a 
 liberal life lie outside such competitive industrial 
 requirements. 
 
 Once the question of "wages and hours" is 
 settled, and that is only a detail of management 
 which will be settled, we reach the heart of the 
 problem. Can the curse be removed from 
 machinery? Can joy be put into work? What 
 of the jobs that are monotonous? Will they 
 lessen in number? 
 
 The instant that joy enters into work the 
 problems of overtime and fatigue disappear. 
 Elasticity of spirit gives a swift recovery. Free- 
 dom to choose one's work, the right to arrange 
 one's working conditions, skill in doing the task, 
 59 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 pride in the product — these are the elements that 
 result in "joy in work," are thej^ not? What 
 promise does the futm-e give us that this quality 
 of joy will enter into the work of the masses ? An 
 eight-hour day and a minimmn wage of forty 
 shilUngs a week do not help us here at all. Will 
 the increasing control of working conditions by 
 the workers themselves remove this curse of 
 monotony, the grind of the machines on the 
 hmiian spu'it ? Will the fact of control alter the 
 effect of the work, so that automatically it will 
 pass from a condition of slavery to a condition of 
 freedom? W^ill the worker, in exercising his will 
 on the terms and conditions of his employment, 
 find a full release for his powers, with the result- 
 ing sense of self-expression and its accompani- 
 ment of joy? 
 
 Or will the increasing control of working condi- 
 tions by the workers result in a fundamental 
 remodehng of the nature of the work itself? If 
 so, in what forms will that change show itself? 
 For instance, the happiest communities of the 
 past were surely settled agricultural communities. 
 Will the workers in part return to the land, 
 rendered more fertile by modern methods of 
 60 
 
LABOR 
 
 intensive agriculture? Will there be an era of 
 noble building like that of the twelfth century? 
 Will the modern democracy find it worth while 
 to create beauty? 
 
 Then there remains the use of leisure. Are we 
 to learn an art of living? Will creative activities 
 be honored? Nothing is more striking in the 
 last hundred years than the fact that the poet and 
 the saint "do not count." They have lost control 
 over the channels of power. The artist in any 
 of the great forms has little influence to-day. 
 is easy to reply, "Let the great artist come, and 
 we will listen"; but to produce great persons, the 
 heart of the people must be turned that way. 
 We are not quiet enough or responsive enough to 
 form and nourish such gi'o^vths. Not only are 
 the masters of modern industry materialistic, but 
 the workers are materialistic. The trade-union 
 program, the socialist platform, the reforms of 
 the social experts — all these center about matters 
 of physical well-being and industrial efficiency. 
 What has all this to do with outlook on life, the 
 knowledge of true values, an understanding of the 
 meaning and end of existence? Outlook on life 
 is determined by the use of leisure — by the 
 61 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 pictures one sees, the music one hears, the books 
 one reads, the talk one shares, the games one 
 plays. The only education an adult receives, 
 apart from that of the working-day, with its 
 repetitive processes for most employees, is in the 
 recreation of his leisure hours. School ends for 
 most of the human race at fourteen years of age. 
 The lives of modern workers are dark with drudg- 
 ery for the working shift and spattered with 
 cheap surface sensation in the hours of release. 
 Fatigue and excitement march together through 
 our city streets. 
 
 These are the two great questions of our time : 
 Can the nature of work be ennobled? Can spir- 
 itual values be restored to modern life? For 
 fifteen years these questions of what use shall be 
 made of Hfe under a true industrial democracy 
 have seemed to me the most important, the least 
 discussed questions of our day. Now that in- 
 dustrial democracy is arriving in England, I have 
 put these questions to the leaders of public opin- 
 ion. I have talked with Lloyd-George, experts 
 of the Home Office, of the work councils, with 
 John Burns, Seebohm Rowntree, Snowden, But- 
 ton, MacDonald, Mallon, every type of mind in 
 
LABOR 
 
 the industrial struggle. No one person is respon- 
 sible for the conclusions which I give, but they 
 seem to me a just smnmary of the best English 
 opinion. 
 
 Will industry slide over into an old-fashioned 
 balance between agriculture and factory labor? 
 Can the curse be removed from machinery, so that 
 the worker will find in his day's work some of the 
 same lift and satisfaction which Gilbert K. 
 Chesterton finds in writing books, who told me, 
 "I have fun in writing my books"? These ques- 
 tions have been wrestled with since machinery 
 came in. Hate of the machine was voiced by 
 Ruskin and Morris. The hope of a new and 
 simpler civilization has been stated by Edward 
 Carpenter. 
 
 The answer is clear. The present tendencies 
 of all the leading nations are altogether in this 
 one direction of more productive power through 
 machinery driven by skilled, semi-skilled, and 
 unskilled workers. Whether there is not a 
 wholly different sort of life possible, with a 
 simpler organization and richer values; whether 
 the old England of hardy seamen and quiet farm- 
 ers and yeomen was not a more admirable place 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 than the modern city, is to pose an academic ques- 
 tion in the face of an obvious overwhekning tend- 
 ency. All the nations are becoming x\merican- 
 ized and Germanized. The result is that a cheap, 
 hasty product in unlimited quantity, a race for 
 new markets, hustling and advertising are in com- 
 mand of modern life. All that is fragrant and 
 choice and spacious in the older England is be- 
 ing caught into the whirl of these wheels. This 
 tendency is summed up by two words : some call 
 it progress, and some call it civilization. It is 
 the judgment of experienced men that the mass of 
 the people will never flock back to agriculture in 
 an industrial country. England will not become 
 more like Russia. On the contrary, Russia will 
 become more Uke England. The machine is in 
 permanent control of industrial life. New au- 
 tomatic appliances will be created; new subdivi- 
 sions of process will be devised. 
 
 To offset this dead uniformity, there is the con- 
 stant demand for new goods. No sooner has the 
 manufacture of one article become standardized 
 than the demand for something quite new arises. 
 It is only after this has been manufactured for a 
 considerable time on a large scale that its manu- 
 64 
 
LABOR 
 
 facture becomes standardized. Meanwhile there 
 is much skilled work in connection with it. But 
 the percentage of highly skilled men who make 
 the tools, install them, and direct this new process 
 is small. There remains the vast and ever- 
 increasing mass of semi-skilled workers who per- 
 form the endlessly repeated processes. The 
 highly skilled man finds a measure of satisfaction 
 in the exercise of his craft. A certain few ma- 
 chines have a delicacy of touch, and turn out a 
 beautiful product, so that those who tend them 
 receive a pleasure in superintending the opera- 
 tion. Seebohm Rowntree told me of a machine 
 in his York factory which lays down three colors 
 at one time on shiny paper, and does it with a 
 finger manipulation which seems semi-human. 
 The men in charge of this process thoroughly en- 
 joy their silent partner. Work for them is not 
 monotonous. But these workers of skill or happy 
 processes are few in number compared with the 
 milhons in industry. For the great majority of 
 workers there is little joy in their tasks or small 
 pride in the products. The worker does not look 
 on the Mauretania and say to himself, "I built 
 her," because he tooled the rivets which went into 
 65 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 the engines, though that is exactly the thing 
 which the workman did say eight centuries ago 
 when he chiseled his masonic mark on the gray 
 stone of the cathedral. To-day he seeks for an 
 escape from the monotony of a weary process in 
 other things than in the work itself. He regards 
 machine labor as a drudgery. The series of mo- 
 tions is beginning to become standardized. Ex- 
 perts go through factories distributing cards that 
 analyze the motions required to convert raw ma- 
 terial into commodities. The worker is shown 
 how to economize effort, how to make fewer 
 strokes, and how to shorten the stroke, how to 
 lessen the time of production from four hours to 
 two hours and thirty-three minutes. This drift 
 toward organization and mechanical efficiency 
 will never be checked. It will gather momentum. 
 The worker himself is often in favor of the auto- 
 matic labor-saving machine if his standard of liv- 
 ing is maintained and raised, as against the ma- 
 chine that calls for an exercise of skill. He pre- 
 fers to save his vitality, his mental reserve forces, 
 for his life outside the factory, for the creation 
 of social values in his neighborhood and the fur- 
 therance of the causes that interest him. 
 66 
 
LABOR 
 
 There is a clever and aggressive school of in- 
 dustriahsts in England who will try to speed up 
 industry without winning the cooperation of the 
 worker. They will seek to install a scientific 
 piece rate based on time study of factory opera- 
 tions, standardization of equipment, motion 
 study of the actions of the worker in performing 
 a piece of work, instruction-cards governing every 
 bodily movement of every worker, and a set of 
 "speeders-up" — speed boss, repair boss, shop dis- 
 ciplinarian. This Americanizing of industry 
 does not look genial to the British workman. 
 He will not accept it if it precedes the installa- 
 tion of work councils; that is, boards of control, 
 in which he is represented. He will insist on his 
 share in workshop control. He will obtain it. 
 Then industrial organization will proceed along 
 the inevl^ble lines of efficiency and scientific 
 management. The further this tendency goes, 
 the wider becomes the separation between the 
 handful of skilled workers who shape the tools 
 and set them up and the mass of unskilled work- 
 ers directed by cards, routing, and scheduling. 
 
 There will be no return to a peaceful peasant 
 folk. The dreams of Ruskin and Wilham Mor- 
 67 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ris must be laid aside. The mechanical processes 
 of industry cannot be humanized; they can only 
 be mitigated. The relations between employer 
 and employed can be humanized; the Welfare 
 Department of the Government is humanizing 
 them. Individual employers have long strug- 
 gled to humanize them ; but this cooperation, this 
 kindlier atmosphere, is itself only a mitigation of 
 the conditions of work, and cannot alter the na- 
 ture of the work. Not in the work itself, but in 
 the creation of values outside the working shift, 
 must the mass of people find their escape from 
 monotony. As the worker receives his higher 
 wage and his margin of leisure, he must by in- 
 dividual and collective enterprise lift himself 
 from the machine-made mediocrity of our mod- 
 ern world. The worker will not become a man 
 till after hours. A blessing can be wrung from 
 the machine only on its own terms. It is a com- 
 fort, although a stern comfort, to know the direc- 
 tion in which we are going. Knowing that, we 
 can govern the pace and better the road. Such 
 is the answer on removing the curse from machin- 
 ery. 
 
 What of the worker's conditions after hours? 
 68 
 
LABOR 
 
 The solutions of almost all our social problems 
 are already in operation locally in patches in parts 
 of Europe. Denmark has solved one problem, 
 Sweden another, and Belgium a third. It needs 
 now experts to pool these solutions into a pro- 
 gram and apply it wholesale. Transportation 
 and housing lie at the heart of the problem of en- 
 vironment. Where the worker lives, and in what 
 sort of home he lives, determine the conditions 
 that surround him outside his working hours. 
 State action here is necessar}^ and state action 
 will be taken. 
 
 For two years prior to the outbreak of war a 
 committee had been sitting to consider land and 
 housing reform, and had brought in definite and 
 far-reaching proposals. These proposals were 
 being very seriously considered by the Govern- 
 ment. It is probable that a bill covering many 
 of the reforms suggested would have been intro- 
 duced but for the war. There is every reason to 
 believe that these reforms will come to the front 
 as soon as the war is over. One of these meas- 
 ures deals with compulsory town-planning. In- 
 stead of building from thirty to forty houses to 
 the acre, only thirteen will be allowed. This 
 69 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 means that every workman's house will have its 
 decent privacy, its bit of garden. Another pro- 
 posal is for a system of general transportation by 
 means of light railways. Belgium has had about 
 one hundred miles of light railways for every 
 three and a half miles in England. This gives a 
 network of cheap transportation covering the en- 
 tire area around the great industrial centers. I 
 used to ride into Ghent from Zele, from Melle, 
 from every one of the smaller towns outside the 
 city. Wherever I have stayed in Belgium, 
 whether at Furnes, Dixmude, La Panne, Nieu- 
 port, or Ostend, the whole country-side was 
 woven with tiny steam railways, carrying pas- 
 sengers for a few sous. This system gives easy 
 transportation for the worker from his home in 
 the suburb to his lathe in the factory. It means 
 that he can live on a little land and, with his fam- 
 ily, carry on light gardening, reducing his cost 
 of living, with an occasional sale in the market. 
 The combination of the two measures, — town- 
 planning and cheap transportation, — applied to 
 England, will end the slum by draining it dry, 
 and by substituting a village community in pleas- 
 ant surroundings. It means a gradual, but, in 
 70 
 
LABOR 
 
 the end, complete, remaking of the environment 
 for the workers. And an environmental change 
 so vast will recreate the physical life of the na- 
 tion. 
 
 These measures are nothing but simple primi- 
 tive justice. They are merely animal rights. 
 They do not deal with the basic spiritual needs 
 of the community. Having won his emancipa- 
 tion from poverty and the serf conditions of in- 
 dustry, the worker must face the intellectual bar- 
 renness of his life. Through no fault of his own 
 he is poorly fitted for the role he is now called on 
 to play. He is uneducated, unimaginative, un- 
 equipped to create the values in life which an 
 industrial democracy will require in order to sur- 
 vive the di'eary hours of monotonous machine 
 work, however shortened and however highly 
 paid, and the increased hours of leisure. Fail- 
 ing a solution for his overplus of vitality and for 
 the unemploj^ment of his higher faculties, he will 
 be thrown back on rebellion as release for his un- 
 functioning energy. 
 
 The supreme need of English labor is wise 
 leadership. That leadership will not allow this 
 new energy, released by better wages and short- 
 •71 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ened hours, to spend itself in strife and rebellion. 
 The tragedy of the labor movement has been that 
 its leaders have often been sucked up by the Gov- 
 ernment, becoming official investigators, parli- 
 amentarians, committee-men. Or the skilled in- 
 telhgent worker has passed over into the ranks 
 of the employer. The succession of lost leaders 
 has quenched the enthusiasm of the mass of the 
 people, lessened their power of vision, and made 
 them cynical of lifting themselves to a full, free 
 life. If the shoulders of the people are used by 
 their most vital representatives only to be climbed 
 upon into positions of individual prestige, the 
 people themselves will be little bettered by gen- 
 erating men of power. The labor leader must 
 find his career inside his class. He must forego 
 the easy advantages of a thousand-pound gov- 
 ernment salary. There are few wise leaders to- 
 daj^ inside the ranks of the workers. 
 
 As the result, the immediately practical next 
 steps in the social revolution are clearly seen, but 
 the creative readjustment that will make Eng- 
 land into a free, liberal community is not seen. 
 The worker is about to share control of his work- 
 ing conditions with the "management." His 
 72 
 
LABOR 
 
 hours will be shortened, his wages will be in- 
 creased, — the increase has already reached about 
 one third of the industrial population, — he will 
 have a voice in workshop conditions, his physical 
 environment in his leisure hours will be amelior- 
 ated. His house will be situated in a decent com- 
 munity, with space around it for flowers and home 
 gardening. Vocational training will be given to 
 his children. This will come by a series of ex- 
 perimental measures, beginning with part-time 
 employment in industry for those between the 
 ages of fourteen and eighteen. 
 
 But a greater reconstruction than all this 
 journeyman's work is needed. If the workers 
 are able to develop leaders and to retain them, 
 that leadership will concern itself in part with 
 the cultural life of the people. There is no great 
 future for labor except through education. The 
 American film, the public house, the ha'penny 
 newspaper, and professional foot-ball are not 
 sufficient of themselves to make a new world. If 
 English labor contents itself with gains in the 
 mechanic and physical conditions of life, the form 
 of solution will crystallize into its own kind of 
 neo-Toryism. The same meaningless material- 
 73 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ism will continue to sterilize and wither the minds 
 of men. Now the minds of officials and experts, 
 workers and employers, are malleable, now the 
 national consciousness has been melted into hot 
 and fluid form. Now is the time to shape and 
 fuse that molten mass. 
 
 "We are going around to-day with a different 
 brain under our cap from the brain we carried 
 three years ago," a leading official of the Amal- 
 gamated Society of Engineers said to me. 
 
 This is true of him and his fellow- workers, true 
 of the politicians, and true of the employers. 
 Before that brain cools to a new case-bound 
 orthodoxy it must come to grips with larger prin- 
 ciples of social reconstruction than any it has 
 been dealing with in trade-union regulations. 
 There is no discharge in this war. We need a 
 new community, eager and unsatisfied, aiming 
 after a nobility of life of which the modern world 
 has had no vision. Let labor look to its task. 
 Time presses. In five years England will have 
 cooled down, and the impulse of the war, throw- 
 ing old values into the furnace, will have spent it- 
 self. Men will reproduce the old world, with its 
 barrenness of materialism, its hunt after cheap 
 74. 
 
LABOR 
 
 amusements, its immense mediocrity, its spiritual 
 deadness, its nervous restlessness, its suppres- 
 sions of vitality, and its explosions of rebellion, 
 the same old round of dirty little intrigue, be- 
 cause there will be no gi'eat purpose to which life 
 is directed, no creative dream of the people. 
 
 And in command of the community will be the 
 same old gang of clever politicians feeding out 
 materialistic catchwords of "Peace and prosper- 
 ity," the adroit editors ministering to sensation 
 as a substitute for creative activity. If the work- 
 ers dodge and postx)one this fundamental point 
 in their emancipation, they will give us a world 
 little better than the Victorian mess. They will 
 give us something very like a prosperous Ameri- 
 can industrial city such as Detroit. The privi- 
 leged class, with its neat formulae of restricted 
 education and established church, has long lost 
 its control of the community. The brief reign 
 of the captains of industry, contributing no ideas 
 on ethics and social relationship, ended in August 
 of 1914. Now comes the worker. Let him bet- 
 ter the management of life. Patient, kindly, 
 slow, very loyal to the man and the cause in which 
 he believes, the English worker is the greatest 
 75 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 democratic force in the world. For our own sal- 
 vation we must call on him to use his brain. He 
 allowed the first industrial revolution to swing in 
 on toj) of him in its meanest and most sordid 
 form. Now that he takes control of the second 
 industrial revolution, he must not try to compress 
 humanity into narrower terms than those which 
 the innumerable varieties of the human spirit have 
 always demanded. The masters of industry 
 tried this, and wrecked their world. 
 
 Into the forefront of their immediate program 
 of action the workers must put the demand for 
 an abolition of child labor and for the creation of 
 a general, full-time elementary schooling up to 
 the age of sixteen years. There must be sec- 
 ondary and continuation schools for all promis- 
 ing pupils up to the age of eighteen. There must 
 be a larger number of universities, and a democ- 
 ratization of all the universities. The best men 
 among the workers must be as thoroughly 
 equipped in modern science, economics, and so- 
 ciology as the governing class used to be in the 
 humanities. The hope of an enlightened democ- 
 racy lies in the general extension of state educa- 
 tion and in the expansion of individual initiative 
 76 
 
LABOR 
 
 in such experiments for adults as the Workers' 
 Educational Association. 
 
 But the workers must insist that the education 
 shall not be limited to vocational training, to 
 science of research and application, to the impart- 
 ing of facts. Education must give an interpre- 
 tation of life. It must construct and impart a 
 system of ethics fitted to our time. A living 
 wage is no answer to such a tangle as that of sex ; 
 it is no answer to the concerns of empire and the 
 treatment of the colored races. These are ethical 
 matters, demanding hard thinking and new in- 
 terpretations of old values. There are a dozen 
 problems clamoring for an answer, and on no one 
 of them is there an adequate body of recorded 
 facts, with the tendencies deduced from them. 
 Apparently, everything is to be solved by plung- 
 ing boldly into activity and letting results come. 
 What one feels the absence of in the labor move- 
 ment is fundamental brain-work. Here are new 
 processes being developed, new areas opened, a 
 revolutionary shifting of the directive control of 
 the modern world from the little liistoric group 
 of captains to the vast army of the people them- 
 selves; and yet there is no reahzation that so 
 77 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 mighty a transfer of forces calls for a philosophy 
 and ethics of its own. If the workers fail us in 
 this, the patient old-time spirit will brush aside 
 their little artificial structure like an empty shell 
 and begin building again. 
 
 The whole range of moral problems has been 
 left out of the reckoning. Changed conditions 
 have resulted in an entire alteration of human re- 
 lationship; but no one has stated the new ethics 
 that will give guidance to the plain man's de- 
 sire for a free, human, liberal life and for an an- 
 swer to the meaning of life. The cry of Dosto- 
 yevsky still lifts itself in our night: "Surely I 
 have n't suffered simply that I, my crimes, and 
 my sufferings may manure the soil of the future 
 harmony for somebody else. I want to be there 
 when every one suddenly understands what it has 
 all been for. All the religions of the world are 
 built on this longing, and I am a believer." 
 
 What interpretation of modern life have we 
 had? Not one. Frederick Taylor tells us to 
 bind every thrust of the hand, every throb of the 
 brain, into an iron scheme of regularity; Tolstoy 
 tells us to jump out of the system altogether. 
 But neither they nor our other literary and scien- 
 78 
 
LABOR 
 
 tific prophets have faced all the facts resohitely 
 and thought their way through to a synthesis. 
 Neither peasant mysticism nor scientific man- 
 agement will put greatness into the lives that 
 ninety out of every hundred obscure persons must 
 live. We cannot hope for any saving word from 
 the clever manipulators who cut the cost of pro- 
 duction or from isolated artists, high above the 
 combat. The word must come from the worker 
 who, refusing to be factory-bound, turns from his 
 machine after extracting a living wage and be- 
 comes an interpreter for his fellows. We wait 
 for this word. It will be a word made flesh, and 
 it will dwell among us. It will not utter itself 
 in handicraft conmiunities or on the lonely farm. 
 It will neither flinch from the irmnutable eco- 
 nomic basis of life nor try to feed the himfian spirit 
 on applied science and novel devices of speed- 
 ing-up alone. It will be a word of faith. 
 
 Modern essayists write retrospectively of the 
 "age of faith" as if faith was possible only among 
 naive men in an age of mental darkness. But 
 faith is the product of a vitality that is fully ex- 
 pressed. It has therefore always been the pos- 
 session of vital and effectual men, and is found 
 79 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 alike in Cromwell and Walt Whitman. It is as 
 inevitably the sanction of wholesome living as joy- 
 is the accompaniment and sanction of the crea- 
 tive impulse in love and art. It is not a bhnd 
 belief in what is not true. Faith is the expres- 
 sion of a belief in life. The last century has been 
 faithless not because it was dynamic and enlight- 
 ened, but because it was darkened and weary. 
 Democracy, with all its striving, has produced 
 thus far only three men of genius, Mazzini, 
 Lincoln, and Walt Whitman, and one of them 
 said: 
 
 Give me, give him or her I love this quenchless faith. 
 
 Is it a dream? 
 
 Nay, but the lack of it the dream. 
 
 And failing it life's lore and wealth a dream, 
 
 And all the world a dream. 
 
 We moderns have side-stepped these funda- 
 mental questions of a spiritual basis for existence 
 because they troubled our surface life. Mean- 
 while we heaped up the immeasurable inner forces 
 of unanswered desires, unexpended spiritual vi- 
 tality, and frustrated impulses until they finally 
 came roaring through and overswept Europe. 
 
 There was a time when religion answered this 
 80 
 
LABOR 
 
 need of the race for a vital expression. It still 
 answers the need of a part of the community. 
 There are liberal tendencies inside the chm'ch 
 making for a faith which does not offend men's 
 intellects and does not preach submission and re- 
 nunciation. A small, but influential, group of 
 workers still govern their lives by religious faith. 
 But religion in any organized form, in any terms 
 that are concrete and susceptible of measurement 
 and analysis, has ceased to exist for the mass of 
 the people. The old religious penalties and sanc- 
 tions have been undermined by modern thought. 
 Our new, vague social consciousness has failed 
 as yet to develop any stringent system of ethics 
 of its own, any code of relationship which is bind- 
 ing. In labor a class war, in sex a medieval sup- 
 pression, were the extent of present-day vision 
 up to the hour of the war. For many genera- 
 tions the life of spiritual aspiration has been 
 starved. There is no longer any appeal made to 
 it. Our development is altogether in the direc- 
 tion of a materialistic conception of life, by leg- 
 islation to conquer poverty, by machinery to 
 achieve happiness. It looks on organization as 
 the sole method of progress, efficiency as the end 
 81 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 of being, science as answering all the needs of 
 the human consciousness, and scientifically di- 
 rected force as the final master of human affairs. 
 It is not that the young or the poor go wrong, 
 but that we all go wrong in our commercial civi- 
 lization. We all live for sensation, for a visible 
 standard of success in terms of sense-pleasures. 
 To make life easy, to escape the old perils and 
 hardships, the old disciplines and responsibilities, 
 has become the chief aim of the modem commu- 
 nity. 
 
 England must make imperious demands of the 
 new democracy. We refuse to rest satisfied with 
 their improved housing, easier transportation, 
 better working conditions. These are only the 
 means to worthy living. They do not deal with 
 the business of living itself. If the workers of 
 England can create a community that "looks 
 good," the example will be irresistible, and civ- 
 ilization will respond to it in every nation. It is 
 only in the creation of such communities, where 
 the life of peace is a thing of joy, that we can 
 look for the end of wars. But in their community 
 they must find a place for the life of the spirit, 
 for faith, for the finer values of nationality, for 
 
LABOR 
 
 the rewards of merit, energy, and initiative. 
 Because initiative in the old industrial serfdom 
 only bound them the tighter to the management, 
 they have practised "ca canny." But when they 
 take control, failure in initiative will cut the tap- 
 root and spinal nerve of their productivity, their 
 prosperity, and final well-being. They are 
 called on for a wholly other set of qualities than 
 those which they have developed under the 
 stresses of wage conflict. Every situation now 
 demands a different reaction from the one pro- 
 duced when a profiteering employer pulled the 
 strings. Every new invention, every automatic 
 machine, every shortened process, every device 
 for directing muscular force that will cut the cost 
 of production, is working for their benefit. But 
 their newly used initiative must carry further 
 than the workshop. It must wreak itself on the 
 community, and devise a wisdom of life, fulfilling 
 the inextinguishable longing of the human heart, 
 which has gone unanswered in recent years till 
 it found its answer in world war. 
 
 Unquestionably in the last fifty years the labor 
 movement, reacting vigorously against the de- 
 fenses of privilege projected, often unconsciously. 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 by organized religion and class education, has 
 made a di'ive against the life of the mind and 
 the life of the spirit. Itself a vital movement, 
 fighting for freedom and justice, it has included 
 among its enemies forces which are themselves 
 the very source of freedom and justice. It has 
 done this because these forces had created insti- 
 tutions, such as the established church and the 
 great universities, which had lagged in the move- 
 ment toward continuing emancipation. But la- 
 bor cannot carry on a war with intelligence and 
 spirituality without in the end being burned up 
 by their fine violet ray. No philosophy of in- 
 come will survive against the higher demands of 
 the human spirit. Labor must be willing to 
 work with these victorious forces, not against 
 them. In scorning the free play of intellect in 
 the realms of art and pure research, and in scorn- 
 ing the efforts of the spirit to find an interpre- 
 tation of life leading to spiritual peace, the labor 
 movement has hardened and strengthened the 
 very materialism which is its own worst enemy. 
 If labor holds that it is too busy with its imme- 
 diate emancipation to trouble with "theoretical 
 considerations," it will be in the position of an 
 84 
 
LABOR 
 
 army which allows itself to be outflanked and 
 surrounded because it is concentrated on a drive 
 at the center. This is the gravest issue which 
 labor faces. It has won its fight for a decent 
 standard of living and for a measure of control 
 in industry, but it will certainly lose the future 
 if it continues to regard the writer, artist, and 
 ethical teacher as parasites, and if it continues to 
 see them as idlers who are living indolently on 
 the hard work of better men. The labor move- 
 ment is itself largely the product of a few think- 
 ers, unconnected with organization, members of 
 no party. It will destroy its own sources of 
 supply and will become dried up if it discourages 
 fresh liberations inside its own organism. Its 
 one outlet into the future is its capacity for 
 throwing out experiments in the creation of new 
 varieties, like a plant. It must distrust its own 
 orthodoxy and status quo, its own accepted for- 
 mulae and popular teachers, as it distrusts the ut- 
 terances of bishops and class-bound captains of 
 industry. Only so will it manifest a principle 
 of vitality charged with unfailing impulses. 
 Falhng short in this, it will betray itself as only 
 a single unrelated, short-hved impulse, clothing 
 85 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 itself in one more limited institution, which will 
 become its tomb. The worker must not only 
 tolerate radical interpretative thinking outside 
 his own ranks ; he must welcome it among his fel- 
 lows. The initiative of his leisure hours must 
 lead out into regions of which he has been shy 
 and suspicious. He must develop his own teach- 
 ers and prophets and artists. The men of 
 Ghent had already done a little of this inside their 
 cooperative community. The English worker 
 must be as glad of his sculptor and his poet as he 
 is of his labor leader. By the creative use of his 
 leisure he will justify his control over the com- 
 ing age. In place of smart revues and senti- 
 mental plays perhaps he will give us drama, which 
 has been an unused literary form for three cen- 
 turies, worthy of revival. 
 
 For one hundred j'-ears the world has been si- 
 lent on the meaning of life. The masters were 
 busy with their new devices to squeeze profits, 
 and the workers were too heavy with their toil 
 to think at all. But by these unseen moral com- 
 pulsions, by the values we create, every free act 
 of our life is governed. Everything we say and 
 86 
 
LABOR 
 
 do is shot through with the color and accent of 
 our conception of hfe. 
 
 If life is "playing the game," what is the game, 
 and what are the rules? If life consists in mak- 
 ing good, what is the good we are making, and 
 what is the method of the making? If life is 
 noblesse oblige, who are the elite, and what is the 
 nature of their obligation? 
 
 The Christian ethics, for instance, have never 
 been tried. Do the workers intend to attempt 
 them? Will they state them for us in modern 
 terms? What precisely is our moral foundation 
 to-day? What is the basis of our happiness and 
 virtue? 
 
 The suppression of the human spirit, the soul, 
 — that congeries of impulse, desires, and mem- 
 ories, — has gone on under the industrial revolu- 
 tion with its applied science, its emphasis on real- 
 ism, and its mechanical detail. How faintly the 
 life of industry has taken hold of the human 
 spirit was revealed by the great burst of released 
 force that broke through with the war. The na- 
 tions had been gathering steam for several gen- 
 erations till they blew the hd off. All the time 
 87 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 that the hands were busy in repetitive processes 
 the secret subconscious mind was generating its 
 own forces. Suddenly men saw a release from 
 modern life, an escape from the machine, and a 
 substitute for the materialistic conception of ex- 
 istence, and seven nations went out with faith in 
 their hearts. The workers themselves were 
 among the first to go not because they were 
 herded and conscripted, but because adventure 
 and change and faith had returned to a very flat 
 world. There came an ahnost universal exulta- 
 tion that at last there was something in which to 
 believe, something impersonal and vast on which 
 the primal forces of emotion could discharge 
 themselves. The old industrial order received 
 its sentence then; but unless the new industrial 
 democracy wins for us a creative peace, it, too, 
 is doomed. It must give us an interpretation of 
 life which commends itself to our nobler faculties 
 and not alone to our body needs, or men will again 
 turn themselves to killing in order to escape the 
 greensickness of materialistic peace. 
 
 88 
 
LABOR 
 
 BEASONABLE SATISFACTION 
 
 (No man in England has a better right to speak on the principles 
 of reconstruction than A. E. Zimmern. He is known to all scholars 
 as the author of that distinguished book, "The Greek Common- 
 wealth.'" He is known to English labor as one of the promoters of 
 the Workers' Educational Association. He has been a member of 
 the Reconstruction Committee for the British Government. What 
 he and his group believe is rather likely to influence the direction of 
 tendency in the social movement, and some of their belief will prob- 
 ably be enacted into law. He has very courteously given me this 
 statement of his views on the problems of "The Pioneers.") 
 
 My own view about the campaign for Ger- 
 manizing England industrially is that it can't be 
 done. The Englishman has a power of passive 
 resistance equal to that of no one else in the 
 world except it be the Turk. You can't drive 
 him. German education would be impossible 
 here because the Enghsh school-boy would not 
 stand it. The same is true all round, and it is 
 this tough and conservative individualism which 
 has been the great obstacle to the swift adapta- 
 tions which the war has made necessary. That 
 being so, one is thrown back, when one looks for 
 directions of reform, upon the alternative policy 
 of making the workman think the work worth 
 while. This brings one to the problem of "joy 
 in work" and to the ideas and plans of Ruskin 
 and Morris. 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Ruskin and Morris were in many respects fool- 
 ish medievalists, but I always think that in their 
 insistence that the work itself, not wages or 
 ownership or anything else, was the central prob- 
 lem, they were in the true English tradition. I 
 think the future historian of the English work- 
 ing-class movement will regard it as a calamity 
 that they never really converted the trade-union 
 movement to take their ideas seriously and make 
 them practical. Instead, the trade-unionists 
 were gradually led astray (as Morris was, too) 
 by the invasion of Marxian ideas from Germany, 
 which has put the whole labor movement in a 
 false position for a generation; for it has made 
 the most independent section of the most indi- 
 ridualistic people in the world profess the creed 
 of Socialism without knowing what it is, with the 
 odd result that the Independent Labor party, 
 which introduced Socialism into the labor move- 
 ment in the late eighties, is now engaged in the 
 far more congenial task of combating state 
 supremacy. 
 
 However, this is all a digression to explain 
 why I think the time is ripe for a new orientation 
 90 
 
LABOR 
 
 of labor thought on the lines of the Ruskin-Mor- 
 ris tradition. 
 
 I think the conception of "joy in work" needs 
 careful analysis. I am sure that "interest" is n't 
 the real thing we must aim at. The craftsman's 
 joy in its pure form is rare, and the fruit of soli- 
 tude and self-discipline. The English are not a 
 race of artists. They are a race of practical, 
 cheerful, sociable, industrious people with a high 
 general average of abihty. Such people do not 
 aspire to joy; what they want is to get reason- 
 able satisfaction out of their daily work, and the 
 social atmosphere in which they work is perhaps 
 the chief natm-al source of that satisfaction. 
 That is why I believe that all these expedients of 
 shop committees, etc., do really go far to touch 
 the root of the matter. 
 
 There is another point, which I think is very 
 important, and that is better arrangements re- 
 garding the choice of employment. I believe 
 that if, without any other changes at all, you 
 could simply put all misplaced square pegs into 
 square holes and vice versa, you would do an 
 enormous amount to increase "satisfaction." 
 91 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 This is a problem of keeping the working-class 
 child at school long enough to be able to discover 
 its special bent, and then providing skilled voca- 
 tional guidance. A lot of work has been done on 
 these lines by Thorndike, Bloomfield, and others 
 in the United States, and we could do vastly more 
 here. 
 
 I think monotony should be met by regular ar- 
 rangements for varying the job. There is a vast 
 amount of experiment to be done on these lines. 
 I expect you would find that the East-Enders 
 who go hopping in Kent work all the better for 
 it afterward. 
 
 Leisure, of course, is being dealt with by the 
 Workers' Educational Association, but I think 
 we are only at the beginning of the communal 
 provision of leisure and of real education for the 
 adult citizen. This is one of the main functions 
 of a university in a modem community, and its 
 buildings ought to be systematically used for 
 such purposes in vacation time. In fact, the ed- 
 ucational plant, like the factory plant, ought 
 never to be idle. 
 
 This brings me to the poet and the artist. I 
 have thought a good deal about their absence, be- 
 92 
 
LABOR 
 
 cause I have the example of Athens constantly 
 in my mind. I think the main reasons are two: 
 
 (1) That the modern world is too noisy and 
 confused. We need absolutely to cultivate quiet. 
 The telephone, for instance, is a devil's invention 
 for heaving up delicate growths of thought by 
 the roots. Most of our possible modern poets 
 are journalists; that is, they never keep their 
 poetry in till it is mature. This is specially true 
 in the United States, which is a land overflowing 
 with imagination and creative feeling, which 
 hardly ever materializes in endming literary 
 forms. 
 
 (2) We lose a huge amount of our artistic and 
 poetic material by our neglect of education in 
 adolescence. The reasons why modern town 
 life has not produced its Robert Burns is that the 
 modern industrial system crushes men's spirit in 
 adolescence and drives them to drink or worse, 
 from which they emerge, if at all, incapable of the 
 biggest work. 
 
 I don't think we can ever hope to reform our 
 
 social system without the artist's help, because 
 
 only the artists can give our industrial workers a 
 
 standard. Democracy in industry is all very 
 
 ,93 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 well up to a point, but masons and bricklayers 
 are no more qualified to design a house than 
 navvies are to decide on how a bridge is to be 
 built. The bridge will tumble and the house will 
 be ugly. This is the fallacy of the arts and 
 crafts movement, which seems to assume that 
 hard work, creative energy, and joy can produce 
 beauty. But beauty has laws as sure as the laws 
 of dynamics, and only a combination of natural 
 endowment and hard thinking can discover them. 
 The artist is before all things a scholar. To be a 
 painter or an architect is to be at school and to 
 have a school, as the Italians knew. But schol- 
 ars are rare. Let us find those we have, and 
 honor them and listen to them ; but do not let us 
 flatter the workman by telling him he is equally 
 competent to make their decisions, or that he can 
 experience the same creative and reflective joy. 
 
 04 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WOMEN 
 EMANCIPATION 
 
 To-day women are facing the same hard 
 fight for political recognition and industrial 
 status that men faced one hundred years ago. 
 They are taxed without being represented; they 
 are worked without being properly paid. No 
 phrase sums up the measure of their desires, for 
 the desire to be free is larger than any policy, and 
 creates its program in action. And with each 
 gain the desire grows greater and more definite, 
 and extends the program commensurate with its 
 own sense of life. At no moment and at no 
 point can it be codified, because it is under way. 
 And this desire, propelling the woman's move- 
 ment, is only one projection of a deep and po- 
 tent instinct that is operating through men and 
 women, through nations and classes. Already it 
 has set Em-ope on fire. It may yet sweep the 
 world. This impulse of creative force has 
 96 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 welled up from the depths of life and gone out in 
 many directions. As nationality, it has stirred 
 France and Poland and Croatia. It has seethed 
 through the colonies and turned the empire into 
 the British Commonwealth. It has touched the 
 labor movement into a revolutionaiy force. I 
 saw the drive at Ypres. I circled Verdun and 
 heard those guns. I have seen three hundred 
 thousand men massed in a small area, and the 
 regiments of relief swinging up the dusty road. 
 But I hear other marching feet than those, and 
 I know that this war is a little thing compared 
 with what the silent miUions are soon to be doing 
 to this old earth. The hammers of their recon- 
 struction will make louder thunder than any of 
 Picardy. The world is struggling to set itself 
 free, and there has been no such stirring in a 
 century. This movement toward freedom may 
 be shackled and turned to base uses, like the 
 forces liberated by the French Revolution; but 
 the vigor and contagion of the movement are as 
 yet beyond the control of any authority, and may 
 achieve a great reconstruction before they die 
 away. 
 
 This creative impulse the women of to-day 
 96 
 
WOMEN 
 
 share with the miners of South Wales and the 
 poets and peasants of Ireland. The "woman 
 question" has been segregated as if it were a 
 unique and unrelated problem which could be 
 handled in a water-tight compartment. The 
 purpose of the woman's movement, both trade- 
 union and suffrage, is to integrate the "woman 
 question" with the general movement toward 
 democratic control. The charge has been made 
 that women lack the capacity for organization, 
 that they do not possess the native and instinc- 
 tive cohesion that finds expression in trade- 
 unions. The answer of their leaders is that ab- 
 sence of organization is a characteristic of un- 
 skilled, ill-paid, and casual labor, whether that 
 labor is male or female. Where women have 
 been admitted to skilled trades, as in the cotton 
 industry, they have formed powerful unions and 
 kept step with the men. Failure to organize is 
 not a failure of sex. It is a matter of training, 
 opportunity, and wages. As fast as skilled 
 trades are thrown open, as fast as men's trade- 
 unions unbolt the door, as fast as a living wage 
 is paid, women respond with the same qualities 
 of cohesion, the same faculty of organization, the 
 97 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 same understanding of the principle of demo- 
 cratic control, that men have revealed. 
 
 But to be granted this chance to display capac- 
 ity for self-govermnent in industry the vote is 
 necessary. The vote is necessary because wages 
 tend to slide down when the worker is impotent 
 politically. The woman worker is unable to 
 bring pressure on employers and the Govern- 
 ment to enforce her demands. As an instance, 
 the leaders point to the underpayment which has 
 been given for over two years to many thousands 
 of women in government-controlled establish- 
 ments. Even in a period of high wages, women 
 workers in large numbers have been existing on 
 a weekly return of three or four dollars. A liv- 
 ing wage is five dollars a week, and even that is 
 severely low at the present prices. Granting the 
 difference in cost of living between America and 
 England, which is ceasing to be a wide differ- 
 ence, the recent decision of Massachusetts for a 
 minimum wage of $8.50 a week for the woman 
 gives a better standard of living than the British 
 Government minimum of a pound a week. To 
 obtain such a minimum in the sweated industries 
 
WOMEN 
 
 the women say they require the vote as a method 
 of bringing pressure on the Government. 
 
 But the}^ also say they must have the vote in 
 order to win the full cooperation of the men's 
 trade-unions. Actually, male labor will make a 
 serious blunder if it excludes women from mem- 
 bership in trade-unions, because, in place of an 
 ally, it will have an unwilling enemy who will 
 inevitably beat down the wage-scale. But to 
 make the men see the desirability of including 
 women in the fight for the high standard of liv- 
 ing, the women must come with political power 
 in their hands. Without the vote, the men re- 
 gard them as a multitude of claimants, doubling 
 the cost of organization, doubling the number of 
 workers, without contributing to the man's 
 strength. As a matter of fact, it is to the in- 
 terest of the male trade-unions to welcome 
 women workers even if they remain unenfran- 
 chised. It is to their interest because, if women 
 remain as a helot class, underpaid, unorganized, 
 they will be used to scab the labor market. The 
 men's trade-imions will be swamped by this new 
 labor supply, unprotected and competing for 
 99 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 jobs. To save reconstruction from such mis- 
 takes, the women wish the vote so that they will 
 be permitted to join male labor in the common 
 fight. The reconstruction which is under way, 
 much of it the blind operation of natural forces, 
 some of it the careful progi'am of industrial 
 thinkers, will be incomplete if women are omitted 
 from the trade-unions' councils and the par- 
 liamentary committees. 
 
 Great Britain and Germany were the two 
 nations of the modern world where the male mind 
 was in full control of the channels of influence 
 before the war. That woman's fields of activity 
 were church, children, and kitchen was believed 
 in England as in Prussia. The average man 
 thought woman a slightly inferior creature, polit- 
 ically incompetent, industrially incapable, men- 
 tally ill endowed. Unconsciously, he has wished 
 to keep her in the ranks of an unrepresented, 
 exploited, and casual-labor class. It has re- 
 quired an immense force of concentrated will, 
 a wide-spread organization, and a constantly 
 exerted pressure of what ^Ir. Lloyd-George calls 
 "strident nagging" for woman to win the power- 
 ful, but now veiy delicately balanced, position 
 100 
 
WOMEN 
 
 which she holds in the industrial world. She is 
 seeking to win status. Status, or "standing," is 
 that position which a person or a class holds 
 because it is able to enforce its claims by political 
 and economic power. Influence, whether silent, 
 unconscious, or indirect, is non-existent except as 
 the person or class possesses a measure of demo- 
 cratic control over the conditions of life. 
 
 This fight for recognition is in competent 
 hands. Mary MacArthur, Maude Royden, Mrs. 
 Fawcett, Mrs. Despard, Mrs. Pember Reeves, 
 Mrs. Phihp Snowden, Clara Collet, Mrs. Sidney 
 Webb, Mrs. Bosanquet, Miss Atkinson, Sylvia 
 Pankhurst, Eleanor Rathbone, Clementina 
 Black, and a dozen more leaders are women of 
 intelligence, sanity, and of much personal charm. 
 They are making careful studies of industrial 
 and social conditions. They are "next-step" re- 
 formers, basing their program of action on 
 intensive investigation, analysis, and diagnosis. 
 
 The woman's movement is fighting a low- 
 wage scale. It is fighting bad-shop conditions 
 and bad-home conditions. It is concerned with 
 woman as an industrial worker and as a mother. 
 It has a progi-am of reform that deals with 
 101 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 woman in each of her two capacities. It is fight- 
 ing to free the narrow, suppressed middle-class 
 woman, to give her a good life of self-expression. 
 It is fighting to enable high-powered, well- 
 educated women to count in the life of the com- 
 munity, to win for them fuller representation at 
 the universities, a larger measure of influence in 
 civil service and in government committees con- 
 cerned with industrial conditions and community- 
 welfare. Suffrage and trade-unions are two of 
 the instruments with which to achieve status 
 through organization. 
 
 In a matter so vast and various as the woman's 
 movement any positive statement of aim and 
 direction is likely to be disputed. It would be 
 impossible that the leaders should be committed 
 to one single reform or set of measures. Each 
 group apprehends a special need with intensity. 
 What to get and how to get it are not seen single- 
 eyed b}^ these groups with the calm concentration 
 of Tammany Hall. The catalogue of their 
 names shows the variety of their activities: 
 Women's Labor League, the National Fed- 
 eration of Women Workers, the Women's 
 Trade-Union League, Women's Industrial 
 102 
 
WOMEN 
 
 Council, Women's Cooperative Guild, the Wom- 
 en's Municipal Party, Catholic Women's League, 
 and many more. And of suffrage societies there 
 are the National Union of Women's Suffrage 
 Societies, the Women's Social and Political 
 Union, the Conservative and Unionist Women's 
 Franchise Association, the Women's Liberal 
 Federation (and Forward Suffrage Union), the 
 Catholic Women's Suffrage Society, the Wom- 
 en's Freedom League, the National Industrial 
 and Professional Women's Suffrage Society, the 
 New Union, the New Constitutional Society, 
 the League of the Society of Friends, the 
 People's Suffrage Federation, the Acti-esses' 
 Franchise League, the Society of Women Grad- 
 uates, the Women Writers' Suffrage League, 
 the Younger Suffragists, the London Graduates' 
 Union for Women's Suffrage, the Gymnastic 
 Teachers' Suffrage Society, the Artists' League, 
 the Suffrage Atelier, and many other organiza- 
 tions. In what follows I give only a massing 
 together of personal impressions from talks with 
 many women interested in the forward move- 
 ment. I think that every one would ratify some 
 part of the program. Probably none would 
 103 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 authorize the full program as embodying her own 
 activity and desire. What I think the woman's 
 movement of Great Britain is aiming at in their 
 fight for status, which will be mainly waged 
 through the instruments of trade-unions and 
 suffrage, includes: 
 
 (1) Economic independence. To understand 
 this, we have got to clear our talk of popular 
 phrases. One of the portmanteau phrases of our 
 daj^ is that of "women going into industry." 
 Women always were in industry till recently. 
 Idle and unoccupied women were the exception 
 in the older England. The Victorian Age in 
 terms of human welfare was in this respect a 
 reactionary age. The old-time industry of 
 women was of course home industry. When 
 most of the productive employments were lifted 
 out of the home, women remained in the home, 
 throwing a dead-weight on the productivity 
 of the nation that it never before had to 
 carry. The woman had always been a pro- 
 ducer of clothing and food, and had shared 
 the burden of requirements demanded by the 
 household. Suddenly the man was left stand- 
 ing alone, with the weight of a wife and chil- 
 104 
 
WOMEN 
 
 dren, sister and aunt, on his single powers of 
 production. That very recent institution, the 
 man-supported family, is a failure. It is a fail- 
 ure because the individual man alone camiot buy 
 the food, the lodging, and the clothing which 
 make the physical basis of a good life. Slum- 
 dwelling, under-nourishment, and disease are the 
 proof that the man has failed to carry the burden 
 of several human beings on his single pair of 
 shoulders. The immense numbers of unmarried 
 men (over three million), the restriction of the 
 birth-rate, are further proofs of the breakdown 
 of that modern and bad institution, the man- 
 supported family. The present well-being of 
 hundreds of thousands of working-men's homes is 
 due to the fact that one and two and even three 
 women are now wage-earners who before "helped 
 around the house." It is not alone that the wage 
 to the individual man has gone up for perhaps 
 one third of the working population; it is that 
 multitudes of women are earning money to-day 
 who before were unemployed. I found in the 
 Du Cros factory, for instance, that the majority 
 of the women were the wives and relatives of the 
 men workers who had gone to war. In the old 
 105 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 days no one said, "A woman's proper place is the 
 home," meaning by the home a retreat stripped of 
 productive industry. The home meant a place 
 of manufacture, where the woman shared with the 
 man the burden of production. 
 
 The problem of the future is this : now that her 
 work is at a geographical distance from her home, 
 has she the vitality to carry on her activity at two 
 widety separated points? It was simple to turn 
 from the milking in the shed to the baby in the 
 kitchen ; but it is an unsolved problem how to rear 
 a family in a side street and tend a lathe in the 
 Woolwich Arsenal. War work for women has 
 sharpened this problem. It is still an open ques- 
 tion whether the excellent wage made by the 
 young mother has been a sufficient offset to the 
 fact of her absence from home. I have had testi- 
 mony that the children under five years of age, 
 left in the hands of relatives or friends, are better 
 cared for because of the increased family budget. 
 I have also had testimony that the actual care of 
 the young child is not as good as when the mother 
 is at home. With overtime and war strain, all 
 former investigations would go to show that the 
 106 
 
 J 
 
WOMEN 
 
 pressure of the last two and a half years on the 
 organism of the woman will prove a permanent 
 damage to the future of the race. The housing 
 where large numbers have been shoveled together 
 far from home is admittedly bad. The severe 
 train journeys and the lack of moral oversight for 
 the younger women are also admittedly bad. 
 There is an immense amount of spade work to be 
 done before we know even the factors in the 
 woman question. We must study the full curve 
 of' the woman's life, her adolescence, the changing 
 curve of wifehood and motherhood, the nervous 
 reactions in relation to function. We have been 
 generalizing on the "nature of woman" when we 
 have only the slightest psychological basis. It is 
 impossible to formulate a policy or even a pro- 
 gram before we have a multitude of recorded 
 observations. In place of these we are treated 
 to large and noisy claims and vehement denials. 
 Women en masse have done their best by going 
 ahead and acting; but social students have not 
 done their best, because they have joined the 
 movement and swelled the volume of voices 
 instead of extracting the data. 
 107 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 To return to the list of aims in the woman's 
 movement. I think that women beheve that 
 better status will be obtained by 
 
 (2) Increased sociabihty. It is not alone for 
 the economic reason that woman enters the indus- 
 trial world in increasing numbers and, as in this 
 war, joyfully exchanges the home and domestic 
 service for the life of the factory. Industry is 
 sociable. Its organization, the various contacts of 
 relationship, answer a craving in her nature as in 
 the man's. Life has become an increasingly 
 friendly thing down the ages, and the lonely 
 sei-vant or housewife misses a fulfilment which 
 even the underpaid shop girl finds. That the 
 shop girl fails of values which the working-man's 
 wife possesses is equally true. It is for the 
 future to include both sets of values in the one 
 life. In our overstress of economic determinism 
 we are apt to forget that people do things because 
 they wish to, as well as because they have to. So 
 in all the maladjustments of women in industry 
 we must remember that they are enjoying the 
 conditions that surround the new work — ^the asso- 
 ciations, the sociability — better than they enjoyed 
 the isolated, unproductive home. To overstate 
 108 
 
WOMEN 
 
 the injustice and suffering of the industrial 
 situation shows a lack of perspective on human 
 history. Comfort and well-being, the margin of 
 leisure, the elements of happiness, are gi*eater for 
 the mass people than at any other period. A 
 sullenness and despair have gone from the earth. 
 The curse is being removed. Women are 
 akeady sharing in this betterment, and they have 
 recently elected the industrial world as a field of 
 activity not because the factory process or the 
 department-store detail offers in itself a worthier 
 work than the care of children, but in part 
 because the conditions sm^rounding the industrial 
 world are freer and friendlier than the household 
 conditions. There is an atmosphere of change 
 and growth and sociability in paid work, and a 
 freedom of hours when the work is done. There 
 is probably small answer to many needs of 
 woman's nature in clerical routine or mechanical 
 process work in factory, office, and store. It is 
 doubtless as sorry a thwarting of full self-ex- 
 pression for her as it is for the man. But she 
 finds a partial answer to her needs, a partial ex- 
 pression, in the act of going out to a work of 
 definitely assigned hours, of money payment, of 
 109 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 set periods of freedom and recreation, of associa- 
 tion with a group of fellow-workers, and the 
 wider opportunity for social intercourse on self- 
 respecting terms with men. 
 
 And so we come to what I beheve is implicit 
 in the movement toward industrial work for 
 women. I am sure that one reason why they do 
 not care to remain half occupied in their own 
 homes, and why the best of them scorn domestic 
 service, is that they wish : 
 
 (3) A freedom of choice in selecting the mate 
 — a freedom which was imperfectly granted to 
 the woman in the restricted domestic area where 
 she formerly passed her life. She has rejected 
 the old policy of passive waiting while she played 
 the role of dutiful daughter and older sister, cul- 
 minating in the grayness of unselected "old 
 maid," the aunt and nurse of other people's chil- 
 dren. To obtain this freedom of choice she has 
 stepped out into the wider arena of the industrial 
 world. Between the ages of eighteen and 
 twenty-five she is often not a determined worker 
 in this field. She puts her spending money into 
 attractive clothes and "a good time" as an in- 
 vestment in aiding her to select a mate. 
 110 
 
WOMEN 
 
 (4) An equality in the home. As a wage- 
 earner she can decree the terms of her position 
 in the household. She become:^ one of the two 
 heads of the household, and ceases to be the un- 
 paid housekeeper. 
 
 (5) Love. The deepest craving of her nature 
 is to be loved. The old-time home did not fully 
 meet this need, because love is based on equahty, 
 and she was not an equal. 
 
 (6) Intellectual and spiritual recognition. 
 She wishes her mentality, the qualities of her be- 
 ing, to be understood by the man she loves and 
 to be used in the life of the community. She has 
 capacities for municipal housekeeping, for wel- 
 fare legislation, for civil service, which will en- 
 rich the state. 
 
 (7) A conmiunity motherhood. A majority 
 of women will find self-expression in the home, 
 but there will always be large numbers who will 
 turn to the outer world to express their mother- 
 ing instinct. They will express it by nursing, 
 school-teaching, reform movements, welfare 
 work, and in the humanizing of industry. 
 
 (8) Career impulse. Increasing numbers of 
 women find the same fullness of life in certain 
 
 111 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 forms of modern work that men find. They are 
 developing directive capacity, accm-acy, a mas- 
 tery over large groups of facts and a power of 
 generalization. 
 
 Finally, we come to the most fundamental of 
 all the claims made by women. They wish: 
 
 (9) Birth-control. The modern woman 
 wishes a final voice in the decision as to the nmn- 
 ber of her offspring. She refuses to place her- 
 self at the disposal of the man, to be used as he 
 sees fit. Many feminists will angrily deny that 
 this is a tendency of the woman's movement. 
 Probably no leader will state openly that this 
 tendency exists among modern women. But the 
 vital statistics of the various countries establish 
 the fact, and Great Britain, apart from the low- 
 est elements of the population, has for forty years 
 revealed a falling birth-rate. One can exempt 
 many persons and many groups from the im- 
 plication that they have furthered this tendency, 
 and still be well inside what the facts show in 
 stating that a powerful portion of the woman's 
 movement, while not openly advocating birth- 
 control, have nevertheless practised it, and that 
 the emancipation of women is proceeding to the 
 112 
 
WOMEIS^ 
 
 accompaniment of a falling birth-rate. The un- 
 willingness here to state the belief on which one 
 acts is probably the last relic of the shame of sex 
 which English and Americans share in equal 
 measure. 
 
 The relationship of worker to master has 
 passed through slavery, serfdom, and the wage- 
 nexus up to free labor. The relationship of 
 women and man has had no such sharp stages, 
 marked by a time division. But woman has 
 been, variously and sometimes in the single rela- 
 tionship, the instrument of household service, the 
 instrument of pleasure, and the instrument of 
 race procreation. In none of these relationships, 
 as houri, squaw, or mother in Israel, has she been 
 the free agent. Her position has been assigned 
 her by man. The code of ethics governing her 
 conduct has been created by what man thinks 
 about her, and what he decrees she ought to be 
 and to produce. He has assigned the limits, the 
 conditions, and the kind of her activity. As she 
 steps out into freedom, and, in particular, strikes 
 a balance between her function as worker and 
 citizen and her function of motherhood, she pre- 
 sents the community with this far-reaching prob- 
 113 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 lem of birth-control. In what is one of the few 
 great books of this century, "Why Men Fight," 
 I read: 
 
 Very large numbers of women, when they are suffi- 
 ciently free to think for themselves, do not desire to 
 have children, or at most desire one child in order not 
 to miss the experience which a child brings. There 
 are women who are intelligent and active-minded who 
 resent the slavery to the body which is involved in hav- 
 ing children. There are ambitious women, who desire 
 a career which leaves no time for children. There are 
 women who love pleasure and gaiety, and women who 
 love the admiration of men ; such women will at least 
 postpone child-bearing until their youth is past. All 
 these classes of women are rapidly becoming more nu- 
 merous, and it may be safely assumed that their num- 
 bers will continue to increase for many years to come. 
 
 It is too soon to judge with any confidence as to the 
 effects of women's freedom upon private life and upon 
 the life of the nation. But I think it is not too soon 
 to see that it will be profoundly different from the 
 effect expected by the pioneers of the women's move- 
 ment. Men have invented, and women in the past have 
 often accepted, a theory that women are the guardians 
 of the race, that their life centers in motherhood, that 
 all their instincts and desires are directed, consciously 
 or unconsciously, to this end. Tolstoy's Natacha 
 illustrates this theory: she is charming, gay, liable to 
 
WOMEN 
 
 passion, until she is married; then she becomes merely 
 a virtuous mother, without any mental life. This re- 
 sult has Tolstoy's entire approval. It must be ad- 
 mitted that it^is very desirable from the point of view 
 of the nation, whatever we may think of it in rela- 
 tion to private life. It must also be admitted that it 
 is probably common among women who are physically 
 vigorous and not highly civilized. But in countries like 
 France and England it is becoming increasingly rare. 
 More and more women find motherhood unsatisfying, 
 not what their needs demand. And more and more 
 there comes to be a conflict between their personal de- 
 velopment and the future of the community. 
 
 The diminution of numbers, in all likelihood, will rec- 
 tify itself in time through the elimination of those char- 
 acteristics which at present lead to a small birth-rate. 
 Men and women who can still believe the Catholic faith 
 will have a biological advantage; gradually a race 
 will grow up which will be impervious to all the assaults 
 of reason, and will believe imperturbably that limitation 
 of families leads to hell-fire. Women who have mental 
 interests, who care about art or literature or politics, 
 who desire a career or who value their liberty, will 
 gradually grow rarer, and be more and more replaced 
 by a placid maternal type which has no interests out- 
 side the home and no dislike of the burden of mother- 
 hood. This result, which ages of masculine domination 
 have vainly striven to achieve, is likely to be the final 
 outcome of women's emancipation and of their attempt 
 115 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 to enter upon a wider spliere than that to which the 
 jealousy of men confined them in the past. 
 
 On the other hand, in a recent talk which I 
 had with Havelock Ellis he expressed hiipself as 
 wholly in favor of the birth-control movement. 
 He believes it will tend to do away with war and 
 poverty. He spoke with approval of the pub- 
 licity campaign carried on in America by Mrs. 
 Sanger, and he showed me a copy of a little maga- 
 zine of birth-control, issued in Cleveland, Ohio. 
 In his latest book, "Essays in War-Time," he 
 writes : 
 
 It used to be thought that small families were im- 
 moral. We now begin to see that it was the large fam- 
 ilies of old which were immoral. Quality rather than 
 quantity is the racial ideal now set before us. 
 
 He speaks of the evil Russian factory conditions as 
 "the natural and inevitable result of a high birth-rate 
 in an era of expanding industrialism. Here is the 
 goal of unrestricted reproduction, the same among men 
 as among herrings. This is the ideal of those persons, 
 whether they know it or not, who in their criminal rash- 
 ness would dare to arrest that fall in the birth-rate 
 which is now beginning to spread its beneficent influ- 
 ence in every civilized land." 
 
 He sees birth-control as a natural process, with 
 116 
 
WOMEN 
 
 laws that underlie the voluntary and deliberate 
 factors. "To improve the environment is to 
 check reproduction," so that birth-control be- 
 comes part of the entire forward movement of 
 the race. "Those who desire a high birth-rate 
 are desiring, whether they know it or not, the in- 
 crease of poverty, ignorance, and wretchedness." 
 All this concerns the nation within itself. With 
 the international aspect of birth-control, which is 
 the heai-t of the problem, the next chapter deals. 
 We are confronted here by the most significant 
 tendency in modern civilization. As yet we are 
 meeting it with silence or with rhetoric, with a 
 Mosaic morality or a callous cynicism ; but of pa- 
 tient study there is little. The modern woman 
 has precipitated upon us many problems, — "dilu- 
 tion" of labor, and union rules, and all the rest, 
 — but no other problem so searching, so funda- 
 mental, as that of birth-control. The correct so- 
 lution will be determinative of the future of the 
 race, the nation, and the world. 
 
 Like every other living and growing thing, 
 the woman's movement will continue to puzzle us, 
 and we shall catch up with it only to find it has 
 swung out far ahead and over a wider area. 
 117 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 THE FEMINISTS OF THE WAR OFFICE AND 
 ADMIRALTY 
 
 The War Office and the Admiralty are prov- 
 ing themselves in this war daring innovators of 
 radicalism. They mil be ranked in the futm'e 
 alongside of the syndicahsts and the state social- 
 ists as initiators of a new social order. They have 
 accepted the "new morality" of the most advanced 
 school of Ellen Key, and have enacted it into 
 legislation. What they have done is to concede 
 the claims of "sex agitators" and grant an en- 
 dowment for maternity to the women of Great 
 Britain. They have not paused at orth(5dox 
 motherhood, sanctioned by court and church, but 
 in their impetuous feminism they have legitimized 
 unions without the benefit of clergy, and are car- 
 ing for uimiarried wives and mothers. They 
 have made the advanced program of the woman's 
 movement their own, and have swallowed whole 
 the scouts, cavalry fringe, and lonely outposts 
 of sex radicalism. The British people had 
 largely confined the woman's question to a suf- 
 frage and trade-union movement, a poHtical 
 movement. They had fought shy of the sex im- 
 118 
 
WOMEN 
 
 plications (maternity endowment, unmarried 
 motherhood) upon which certain advanced think- 
 ers in Germany and the Scandinavian countries 
 had long been insistent. But at one bold stroke 
 the audacious pioneers of the army and navy have 
 opened the full question, and brushed aside the 
 reserve and timidity which Britons, like Ameri- 
 cans, manifest in the presence of procreation. 
 The result is a scheme as amazing as if Kitchener 
 and Havelock Ellis had worked in genial col- 
 laboration. Militarism in England has proved 
 a powerful dynamic for democratic control. It 
 has bettered the status of labor, and it has created 
 the new British commonwealth of five self-gov- 
 erning democracies. The longer it is on top, the 
 more equality it generates among its conscripts. 
 But nothing it has done is so subversive of the 
 old order as this endowment of maternity. 
 Into what fresh fields of liberalism the staff- 
 officers and sea-lords will break during the 
 coming months no observer will now dare 
 predict. 
 
 Eleanor Rathbone, the famous town councilor 
 of Liverpool, says of these military and naval 
 feminists : 
 
 119 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 In the system of separation allowances they have 
 been conducting what is, in effect, the greatest experi- 
 ment that the world has ever seen in the State endow- 
 ment of maternity. At the outbreak of the present 
 war separation allowances were promised, first to the 
 wives and children, and afterwards, in succession, to 
 all other classes of dependents of both soldiers and 
 sailors. The scale is sufficient at least to place the 
 large majority of dependents of soldiers and sailors in 
 as good or better a position financially than that which 
 they occupied before the war. The separation allow- 
 ance is the possession of the wife and not of the hus- 
 band, and cannot be drawn by him even with her con- 
 sent. Thus, the allowance has, in fact (whatever the 
 intention of the Government may have been), two char- 
 acteristics which we should expect to find in a sys- 
 tem of State endowment of maternity, viz. : it is a 
 statutory payment to a woman in respect of her func- 
 tions as wife and mother, and it is proportionate in 
 amount to the number of her children. 
 
 What really matters is not that the greater part of 
 the upper, middle, and upper working-classes restrict 
 their families, but that the strata below them, includ- 
 ing the whole slum population, practise no such re- 
 striction. They multiply quite freely, and public 
 health authorities combine with private benevolence to 
 do just enough to keep the babies so born alive, but 
 not enough to make them healthy. Hence, we are, as 
 a nation, recruiting the national stock in increasing 
 120 
 
WOMEN 
 
 proportions from the lower and least desirable ele- 
 ments in the population. The first advantage of sepa- 
 ration allowances is, then, that it removes the tempta- 
 tion to undue restriction of families from those far- 
 seeing and cautious parents who now practise it, and 
 that it gives to the 3'ounger members of large families 
 a better chance of healthy maintenance than they have 
 £ver had before. 
 
 It will be interesting to see how these women will 
 take it when the war is over and they are asked to 
 go back to their old status of dependency. I confess 
 to hoping that the seeds of *'divine discontent" will 
 have been implanted in them too deeply to be eradi- 
 cated, and that we feminists will then find our oppor- 
 tunity. The economic soundness of the State endow- 
 ment of maternity has always appealed to me, even 
 more strongly, if possible than its humanitarian and 
 eugenic advantages. Many people do not seem even to 
 have grasped the elementary truth that the work of 
 bearing and rearing the rising generation is the occu- 
 pation of all occupations that is most absolutely essen- 
 tial to the existence of the State. The women who are 
 engaged in this occupation have to be maintained, and 
 so have their children until they are of an age to keep 
 themselves. The money that this costs has to come 
 from somewhere. 
 
 These separation allowances are the first seri- 
 ous attempt made by the Government to deal 
 121 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 with the question of population, the most funda- 
 mental question which the nation faces. If half 
 a million of the young men are killed or hope- 
 lessly incapacitated by this war, the resources of 
 the country are diminished beyond repair unless 
 a method of replenishment is instituted. Our 
 past method of allowing the slum population to 
 multiply, and forcing our better-class workers to 
 restrict their families, is national suicide. Eng- 
 lish thought is almost silent on this question of 
 whence the next generation is to come when the 
 number of the fathers is lessened. There is a 
 buzz of talk on tillage, cattle-raising, fertihty of 
 soil, but of how to get the human product there is 
 little said. Bertrand Russell says : 
 
 It seems unquestionable that if our economic system 
 and our moral standards remain unchanged, there will 
 be, in the next two or three generations, a rapid change 
 for the worse in tiie character of the population in 
 all civilized countries, and an actual diminution of 
 numbers in the most civilized. 
 
 There is reason to fear in the future three bad re- 
 sults: first, an absolute decline in the numbers of 
 English, French, and Germans ; secondly, as a conse- 
 quence of this decline, their subjugation by less civil- 
 ized races and the extinction of their tradition ; thirdly, 
 122 
 
WOMEN 
 
 a revival of their numbers on a much lower plane of 
 civilization, after generations of selection of those who 
 have neither intelligence nor foresight. If this result 
 is to be avoided, the present unfortunate selectiveness 
 of the birth-rate must be somehow stopped. 
 
 The problem is one which applies to the whole West- 
 ern civilization. There is no difficulty in discovering a 
 theoretical solution, but there is great difficulty in per- 
 suading men to adopt a solution in practice, because 
 the effects to be feared are not immediate, and the sub- 
 ject is one upon which people are not in the habit of 
 using their reason. If a rational solution is ever 
 adopted, the cause will probably be international 
 rivalry. It is obvious that if one state, say Germany, 
 adopted a rational means of dealing with the matter, 
 it would acquire an enoraious advantage over other 
 states unless they did likewise. After the war it is pos- 
 sible that population questions will attract more atten- 
 tion than they did before, and it is likely that they will 
 be studied from the point of view of international 
 rivalry. This motive, unlike reason and humanity, is 
 perhaps strong enough to overcome men's objections to 
 a scientific treatment of the birth-rate. 
 
 Havelock Ellis suggests the extension of birth- 
 control to the lowest elements in the population, 
 so that the ignorant and diseased and feeble- 
 minded will not breed out of proportion to the 
 123 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 rest of the community. But birth-control alone, 
 even when generally applied inside a nation in- 
 stead of being applied as now only to the intel- 
 ligent and wholesome elements, does not meet the 
 international situation, which is one where the 
 militaristic and autocratic nations, like Germany, 
 Russia, and Japan, go on multiplying, and so al- 
 tering the balance of power. Two wars have re- 
 vealed that a stable population, like the French, 
 no matter what its national well-being and its 
 courage, is not in itself powerful enough to resist 
 the invasion of a mihtary nation superior in num- 
 bers. A generally appHed birth-control does not 
 meet the actual situation of an ever-expanding 
 Slav race, with the yellow races in the near back- 
 ground and the early future in world arrange- 
 ments. We cannot rely on an eternal world 
 peace to permit us to reduce the populations of 
 the democracies. 
 
 If England becomes a nation of a permanent, 
 balanced, static civilization of forty milhon per- 
 sons, that gives the future to prolific races, and 
 the liberal democratic experiment is doomed. In 
 America we are going this way blindly. Our 
 old stock is practising birth restriction and is pass- 
 124! 
 
WOMEN 
 
 ing out of existence. We have hidden from our- 
 selves the perils and ultimate disaster of this pro- 
 cess by importing fresh hordes of vital peasants 
 from southern and southeastern Europe ; but the 
 process is working to the extinction of the old 
 America, and it is substituting different races, of 
 alien blood and belief. A control of our life is 
 being exercised by other races, and in a few gen- 
 erations we shall have an America as distinct 
 from Puritan New England and the Cavaher 
 South as Dublin is different from Manchester. 
 Immigration is the easy and fatal solution for a 
 lessening stock in America, but it is no answer 
 for England. Englishmen will never let them- 
 selves be di-owned out by tides of Sicilians, 
 Slovaks, and Russian Jews. The future of Eng- 
 land rests on whether its women are mothers, and 
 whether those mothers and their children are well 
 provided for. All other problems of reconstruc- 
 tion are derivative as compared with the creation 
 of life and the establishment of a healthy 
 and numerous child population. Lowering the 
 death-rate by good milk and sanitation and hous- 
 ing and medical care is only a partial cure for a 
 faUing birth-rate. And saying, "Let women 
 125 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 work in the factories and professions and be 
 mothers at the same time" does not meet the 
 fact that the factory and the home are separate 
 places. 
 
 "More and better children" is obviously the 
 only solution for a Western democracy in a world 
 where neighboring nations are not under demo- 
 cratic control. So we are forced back to some 
 such answer as that of the feminist movement, 
 led by the War Office and the Admiralty. Do 
 not penalize by poverty the woman who gives 
 sons and daughters to the state; endow mother- 
 hood. Population is a community and state con- 
 cern. A nationalized motherhood is of more im- 
 portance than nationalized railways. The mili- 
 tary authorities have blazed the way by a reck- 
 less disregard of laissez-faire and conventional 
 morality. They have laid down the principle of 
 state guardianship for the profession of mother- 
 hood. It now rests with the common sense of 
 England — a conmion sense reinforced by the in- 
 stinct of self-preservation — to refuse to permit 
 the great experiment of the War Office and the 
 Admiralty to die away. 
 
 126 
 
WOMEN 
 
 BOWING THEM OUT 
 
 The women of England, having received the 
 thanks of a grateful kingdom, are now about to 
 be rushed to the door and kicked down-stairs. 
 They will be considered unmannerly if they do 
 not pick themselves up from the door-step and 
 disappear unostentatiously into the night. The 
 process of accelerating them into their place is 
 already under way. The speaker's committee 
 on the franchise has reported, with a careful 
 evasion of woman suffrage. The British bar 
 has just voted down the admission of "duly 
 qualified women to the profession" by an over- 
 whelming majority. The sober sense of the 
 members came to voice in the orator who was 
 able to speak for "a good many members of the 
 bar serving with the colors. They had the first 
 claim to say to what extent the old tradition 
 which confined admission to the bar to the male 
 sex should be maintained. To take such a de- 
 cision in their absence would be unjust to them." 
 
 The man at the front is being worked over- 
 time in these days. He has to stand duty in wet 
 trenches, and then the ghostly projection of him 
 127 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 is yanked back to elderly gatherings in London 
 to protest against alterations in the ancient way 
 of doing things. 
 
 So woman's fight for recognition reaches its 
 third campaign. In the days before the war^ 
 there was a dead-weight of opposition, made up 
 of ignorance, distrust of change, and sex scorn. 
 Then came the need of woman's help in five hun- 
 dred processes of industry, in medicine, and 
 organization. If girls made shells, steered de- 
 livery-wagons, conducted hospitals, served on the 
 police force, managed business, and adjusted in- 
 dustrial disputes, there was little cogency in say- 
 ing that women could not do man's work. As 
 one of the women who helped to pull England 
 through said : "Before the war women were only 
 the mothers of men. Now they had risen to the 
 dizzy heights of the makers of machine-guns." 
 The tide was with them, and every wind that blew 
 filled their sails. 
 
 Now comes the third and bitterest phase of the 
 long fight. "Thank you kindly, but it is time for 
 you to go." Bad years are ahead for the women 
 of England. But let no one worry unduly. 
 They have come to stay, and they will obtain the 
 128 
 
WOMEN 
 
 vote. During the transition period, when the 
 shell factories are becoming industrial plants, 
 when the returning soldiers will have first call on 
 the jobs, when the men's trade-unions are making 
 up their minds whether women are their allies or 
 their enemies, and when Parliament is deciding 
 whether its ancient, solitary reign will be mo- 
 lested by these energetic new-comers, the female 
 semi-skilled workers will have a severe experi- 
 ence. The unskilled workers will have the same 
 sordid experience they have always had. This 
 period of transition may extend through several 
 years. Gradually the creation of new indus- 
 tries, making use of the new automatic machinery 
 introduced under war pressure, will again offer 
 jobs to the demobilized women. Winning the 
 suffrage, women will have the power to enforce 
 their demands for proper payment, and as voters 
 they will suddenly become welcome additions to 
 the male trade-unions, and together they will con- 
 tinue the fight for a high standard of living for 
 both men and women. 
 
 About eight hundred thousand women have 
 recently entered industry, transport, commerce, 
 government employment, and agriculture. Five 
 129 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 hundred thousand of these are busy in munition- 
 making. This increase came from five classes: 
 first, more than one hundred thousand came from 
 domestic servants ; second, from the ranks of out- 
 door workers and small employers; third, from 
 women remaining in industry after marriage and 
 to a later age, and girls fresh from school ; fourth, 
 married women, widows, former dependents, 
 returning to employment; fifth, middle-class 
 women, society women, entering industry and 
 commerce. 
 
 Many of these women will return to the home 
 at the close of the war, but a large percentage 
 have come to stay. All these have replaced the 
 man in semi-skilled and unskilled work, one 
 woman for one man. This is direct substitution. 
 Indirect substitution is found when woman takes 
 the place of an unskilled or a semi-skilled man 
 who in turn takes the place of a fully skilled man. 
 Group substitution is when a group of women 
 takes the place of a smaller group of men, and 
 substitution by rearrangement when women, plus 
 automatic machinery, do work previously requir- 
 ing skilled workers. The introduction of women 
 130 
 
WOMEN 
 
 by these methods of substitution is virtually gen- 
 eral throughout the trades. 
 
 In mechanical engineering, in "controlled" 
 firms, the money wages received on piece-work 
 are far above those earned by women before the 
 war. Ten dollars a week is rather common, and 
 instances of thirteen dollar a week day-rates are 
 known. By a series of orders a minimum wage 
 of a pound a week for forty-eight hours has 
 gradually been established. 
 
 In the cotton trade, boot-and-shoe industry, 
 bleaching and dyeing, woolen and worsted, china 
 and earthenware industries, and tailoring, wages 
 have been much bettered during the war. 
 
 The same care in substitution has not been 
 made in agi'iculture, in biscuit and bread, nibber 
 works, confectionery and sweets. The woman's 
 wage here has tended to increase during the war, 
 but probably not to equal the man's rate. 
 
 Summing up, the substitution of women for 
 men has increased the money wage for women. 
 In trades with definite agreements the women's 
 rates approximate the men's. Where there has 
 been no agreement, the women's wage has been 
 131 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 better than before the war, but is still far too low. 
 
 Of women in women's work, in the fuse and 
 powder trades, as the result of arbitration, a gain 
 has been made. In electrical engineering and 
 telephone work, except for certain cases, the rate 
 has changed but little. Why has woman won a 
 decided advance in mechanical engineering and 
 not in electrical engineering? The answer is that 
 she is organized in mechanical engineering. 
 Skilled groups of women workers in the power- 
 machine trade have won real advances. In sugar 
 confectionery, tailoring, and shirt-making a fair 
 advance has been made. But all three trades are 
 closely related to war work. Where the woman's 
 trade organization has been strong she has ob- 
 tained a decided rise in wages, whether she has 
 been doing women's work or substitution work 
 in men's jobs. But the bulk of women's indus- 
 tries have not kept step with the increased cost of 
 living, nor has substitution for men necessarily 
 obtained the man's full rate. Munition-workers 
 have obtained a fair minimum promised them by 
 the Government exactly in so far as their organ- 
 izations have enforced the promise. 
 
 It is clear, then, that it is possible at any time 
 132 
 
WOMEN 
 
 to obtain a decided advance in women's wages, in- 
 cluding sweated industries. This advance will 
 be obtained when, and not until when, the trade- 
 union movement enforces it. The trade-union 
 movement will probably not enforce it until 
 women have the vote. 
 
 For two and a half years women industrial 
 workers as a class have had more money than 
 ever before. What has been done with it? It 
 has gone into milk for the children, meat for a 
 few meals a week instead of once a week, heat in 
 the rooms, a clean blouse for the little girl, a pic- 
 ture-show for all the children. It has gone into 
 war savings. It has purchased status, that most 
 precious of all things. Money buys self-respect 
 and a sense of well-being. For the first time in 
 the life of many of these women they have not 
 been obliged to go under-nourished, a little 
 pinched, a little chilly, dressed in a garb that 
 stamps them of the lower class. They have put 
 off the faded shawl, the dreary blouse, the dis- 
 colored straw hat, the boots with sagging heels, 
 and the heavy-threaded stockings, thick at the 
 ankles. Is it anything but good that some of 
 them have rented a piano for the home, and now 
 133 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 have a bit of fun and music in crowded rooms ? I 
 have a friend who has oversight of some thou- 
 sands of these workers. He told me of a girl 
 who bought three suits of silk underwear at 
 thirty-seven shillings a suit. It is nice to feel 
 well-dressed from the skin out, when all the days 
 of one's youth one has been in the miiform of the 
 poor. 
 
 But he told me another thing. When one of 
 the workers died of consumption, he sold 223 
 tickets at sixpence, a shilling, and half a crown 
 each among the other workers for the widow and 
 two children. Every week has its benefit 
 for some family of the shop. Eveiy week, with 
 an open hand, the workers pay out their money 
 for concert or theatrical entertainment to make a 
 fund for people in trouble. For hundreds of 
 thousands of these women the years of war have 
 brought the first free spending money they 
 have ever known, and there is something appeal- 
 ing, if we knew it, in the history of every shilling 
 they have spent. 
 
 The war has introduced grave dangers to the 
 health of women by night work; overtime; hot 
 atmospheric conditions such as occur in certain 
 134 
 
WOMEN 
 
 processes in woolen textile; severe muscular ac- 
 tion, as in the lifting of heavy weights; and by- 
 poisoning, as in some of the processes in shell- 
 filling. In munition work there has been a nerv- 
 ous strain connected with certain of the proc- 
 esses and the dangers of fire and explosion. In 
 addition, a few factories are in Zeppelin areas, 
 and on a telephone warning all lights go out, and 
 the women lie flat on the floor till the danger is 
 past. When the word comes to them to rise, one 
 or two in a department are found in a faint. 
 
 To offset this, the Government has made the 
 most determined effort in the history of any pub- 
 he institution to enforce proper conditions of 
 work, to fight against overtime, to establish clean- 
 liness, sanitation, and nourishment. The wel- 
 fare department, under the ministry of muni- 
 tions, conducted by perhaps the best known so- 
 cial worker in the Enghsh-speaking world, See- 
 bohm Rowntree, has literally labored day and 
 night to guard the girls and women of Great 
 Britain. It has sought to preserve five hundred 
 thousand women from results of war pressure 
 which would have been disastrous. As a peace 
 measure, welfare work is still an open question 
 135 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 when conducted by private enterprise unless it 
 is clearly an addition to a living wage and not a 
 clever substitute for it. But as a government 
 measure in a time of the severest crisis in the 
 history of the world it deserves nothing but 
 praise. 
 
 Of the eight hundred thousand women who 
 have transferred themselves into new work, how 
 many are going to stay? No one knows. An 
 organization to combine women in certain trades 
 sent out recently a form of questions with the in- 
 quiry, "Do you wish after the war to return to 
 your former work or to stay in what you are do- 
 ing now?" Of three thousand answers, twenty- 
 five hundred replied that they wished to remain 
 in the new work. That is, five sixths. On the 
 other hand, an investigator who has made a study 
 of social conditions among the Coventry workers 
 tells me that the majority of the women say they 
 will leave industry and take up home life after 
 the war. Some of them are married women who 
 are now making the family income while the hus- 
 band is at the front. Others are upper-class 
 women who are "filling in" from patriotic mo- 
 tives for the duration of the war only. Others 
 136 
 
WOMEN 
 
 are girls with their "boys" at the front. The 
 young man will return from the war "fed up" 
 with the life of a "stag camp," keenly desirous 
 of a home and a family. Each locality, then, has 
 to be studied, for each offers its own set of con- 
 ditions. But out of the melee we can see several 
 hundred thousand women, new-comers in the 
 trades of men, remaining. We must remember 
 that the old work no longer is open to them to 
 the same extent as in the days before the war. 
 It is probable that some of the luxury trades have 
 ceased forever. Cormnon sense, taxation, and 
 the organized state will probably not permit the 
 old-time expenditure on millinery, ball-dresses, 
 and fancy sweets. Domestic sen^ice will not 
 again suck up one milhon and three quarters 
 women. The house that kept twenty-four serv- 
 ants will keep ten, the family that had three will 
 "do" with one. There is no direction for women 
 to go but forward. 
 
 Will there be work for them ? No one knows. 
 Coventry has already received orders for 1918, 
 and it is probable that industry there will run on 
 at full capacity for a year or two at least after 
 the war. In Sheffield the employers plan a 
 137 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 swift conversion to the trades of peace. The 
 great steel firms anticipate an undiminished de- 
 mand for their produce. What made shells will 
 be turned into railway supplies, for instance. 
 Already they have orders that guarantee the im- 
 mediate future — orders from Great Britain and 
 Russia. They state that they will continue the 
 women at work and will at the same time fit in 
 the men. But such a report is unusual. 
 
 There are men's trade-unions, as in the in- 
 stance of the transport-workers, who stood by the 
 job until the women received the same rate of 
 pay that they possessed. One or two other 
 men's unions have promised to make the same 
 fight after the war for the women. But these 
 instances of rendering the work of reconstruction 
 easy are unique, and the women must probably 
 make their own fight, unaided by the Govern- 
 ment, by the men's trade-unions, and by the em- 
 ployers. Unorganized and unenfranchised, they 
 will be the center of unrest and suffering, a run- 
 ning sore in industry, imperiling the standard of 
 living established by the men's organizations, 
 scabbing wages, and weakening the trade-union 
 movement. With votes and wide-spread unions, 
 138 
 
WOMEN 
 
 they would become a vital element in the emanci- 
 pation. 
 
 What women face at the end of the war is the 
 chaos into which they fell at the beginning of the 
 war, when over a million and a half of em- 
 ployed women were thrown out of work or placed 
 on short time. With the coming of peace the 
 semi-skilled women will be demobilized from the 
 munitions factories and dumped upon the labor 
 market. At the same time two and a half mil- 
 lion men will leave war trades and flood the labor 
 market. And the army will be demobilized. 
 Much of the new machinery created for war needs 
 will be available for the industries of peace; but 
 the period of transition will be long, because the 
 plant must be adjusted to the new requirements, 
 markets for the product developed, and capital 
 found. It may be two years, it may be five 
 years, before what has been a shell factory be- 
 comes an engineering plant, turning out an equal 
 volume of production. During the time in which 
 the business is finding itself the women workers 
 are going to be the last class in the labor market 
 to be considered. The old skilled, semi-skilled, 
 and unskilled workers returning from the army, 
 139 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 the men munition-workers, the partly wounded 
 soldiers, will have prior consideration. They 
 will be safeguarded by a carefully wrought 
 scheme of demobilization, by a properly adjusted 
 unemployment insurance, by a pension system. 
 It rests with the women, by agitation and pres- 
 sure, to establish for themselves a standard of 
 living, and to hold fast to the undoubted immense 
 gains they have made during the war. 
 
 The task is probably not one primarily of 
 creating work. The rebuilding of Belgium and 
 northern France, the deterioration of plant in 
 Great Britain, the closer industrial association of 
 England with her colonies, the needs of Russia 
 — all these give promise of a stimulated market 
 for British products. The task is one of organ- 
 ization, devising a machinery for connecting the 
 worker with the job, safeguarding unemploy- 
 ment, and maintaining the standard of living. 
 The new minister of labor is arranging to breathe 
 life into the sleepy institution of labor exchanges, 
 and to add eight hundred to the number. The 
 Government has offered the extension of com- 
 pulsory unemployment insurance. This meets 
 only the needs of some of the war workers and 
 140 
 
WOMEN 
 
 meets those needs only in part. Seven shillings 
 a week amounts to poor relief, and does not re- 
 construct the industrial situation of the total 
 group. 
 
 Certain of the women leaders have suggested 
 a wide-spread unemployment insurance which 
 shall preserve the standard of living; an analysis 
 of the market as to where workers will be re- 
 quired, with the distribution of such informa- 
 tion through trade-unions and employment ex- 
 changes ; and a supply of blank forms to be filled 
 up by the workers desiring future employment; 
 due notice of dismissal to be given by "con- 
 trolled" establishments, and return railway fares 
 to be paid to those workers who have come from 
 a distance; and the use of government factories 
 for a continuing national work. Further, they 
 have suggested a system of training in new trades 
 for women displaced from work. Such is the im- 
 mediate program. 
 
 But back of it lies a deeper need. The sug- 
 gestion has been made for a minimum wage. 
 This could well be made part of the general pol- 
 icy, which was already beginning to be formu- 
 lated before the war for a minimum wage in agri- 
 141 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 culture and the underpaid men's trades. Ex- 
 perts had agreed before the war that the primary 
 condition to be met was that, with the least pos- 
 sible delay, all workers of normal ability should 
 receive as an absolute minimum a reasonable liv- 
 ing wage. By this is meant a wage which will 
 enable an adult man to maintain a family of nor- 
 mal size in a state of physical efficiency, and 
 which will allow a margin for recreation. With 
 the prices of July, 1914, this was twenty-seven 
 shillings a week, allowing five shillings for rent. 
 With present prices this has become thirty-six 
 shillings. But to establish a minimum of thirty- 
 six shillings a week at one stroke is impracticable ; 
 so the present demand is for a minimvmi of thirty 
 shilHngs. The minimum suggested for a woman 
 was sixteen shillings before the war. It is now a 
 pound a week (the rate gradually established by 
 the Government in munition factories). Some 
 of the experts ruled out the suggestion that a 
 woman should be paid as a minimum enough to 
 maintain a family. They argued that minimum 
 wages should be arranged with a view to normal 
 conditions, and though there are many excep- 
 tions, the normal condition is for man to main- 
 142 
 
 I 
 
WOMEN 
 
 tain a family and for a woman not to do so. 
 This contention will of course be disputed by 
 many feminists on the showing of the facts. But 
 what is clear in the matter is that there is a rapidly 
 increasing tendency toward a minimum wage, 
 and that a minimum-wage act must include 
 women. 
 
 Other measures of reconstruction are being 
 pressed by the leaders of working-women. In- 
 vestigation is needed as to what employments 
 are hurtful to a woman's organism. Reform 
 of the factory laws is included in the changes 
 that are now seen to be required. The eight- 
 hour day must be enforced. President Wilson 
 by his decision in the railway strike has enforced 
 a principle to which the trade-unions all over the 
 world must respond. Women officials are re- 
 quired in greatly increased numbers to safeguard 
 the position of women in industry. Not only 
 must the number of women factory inspectors be 
 increased, but it may prove to be necessary that 
 members of the new profession of welfare work- 
 ers in factories shall be appointed by the state 
 rather than paid for by the employer, and the new 
 labor ministry must have among its under-secre- 
 143 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 taries a representation of women. The trade- 
 unions must grant admission to women in return 
 for monetary contributions, and the women must 
 have a measure of control of the machinery of the 
 union. The children who by means of a special 
 certificate have leaked into industry must be re- 
 turned to school. This at one sweep would re- 
 lieve the labor market of one hundred and eighty 
 thousand persons in industry and agriculture. 
 It is probable that all these reforms are dependent 
 on the winning of the suffrage. 
 
 DISORGANIZATION 
 
 The chaos out of which woman's work is 
 slowly emerging will be revealed by a modern 
 instance better than by tons of generalization. 
 I have asked a young woman of excellent middle- 
 class family, now financially pinched, to make a 
 chart of her recent life-history. Better than any 
 "wail" it shows the cul-de-sac of the old "genteel" 
 occupations. It explains why she has turned to 
 clerical work in the War Office, paying a salary 
 of twenty-seven shillings a week. It shows why 
 she will not return to the old job after the war. 
 Like a few hundred thousand other women, she 
 144 
 
WOMEN 
 
 has entered organized life determined to stay. 
 Employers, the state, and trade-unions must 
 reckon with her. Her chapter of dreary episode 
 is followed by a chapter in sharp contrast on the 
 policewomen, who have inserted organization 
 into a muddled community. The two chapters 
 together are the concrete demonstration of the 
 economic and social disturbance which has pre- 
 cipitated women into the central activities of the 
 community. 
 
 My friend's position was that of "lady help," 
 the kind of work which is "woman's work," and 
 has the approval of anti-feminists and other re- 
 actionaiy theorists. I have preserved her ar- 
 rangement and phrasing. 
 
 145 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 COMPANION HELP IN BOARDING-HOUSE AT 
 ST. LEONARDS 
 
 £20 ($100) salary a year. 
 1 shilling, weekly laundry. 
 Tips, gloves, flowers, or sweets. 
 
 6:30 A.M. Rise. 
 
 7:00 Dust dining-room and drawing-room, water and wash 
 
 all plants, arrange flower-vases and put out all des- 
 sert, make servants' and own bed, tidy own bedroom. 
 
 9:00 Pour out all coffee and tea and cocoa, help with serv- 
 
 ing breakfast. 
 
 10:00 Make all single beds, help maid with double ones 
 
 (about twenty-two bedrooms, two houses adjoining). 
 Dust all bedrooms, superintend maid with all up- 
 stairs work and turning out of rooms, give out all 
 linen, see to sorting same. 
 
 12:00 M. Mend all torn linen, interview guests for rooms. 
 
 1:00 P.M. Help serve lunch, give out and check all beer and 
 stout sold. 
 
 2:00 till 4:00. Free to go out or rest. 
 
 4:00 Cut up all cakes for tea, and hand round tea with 
 
 maid in drawing-room. 
 
 5:30 Mending. 
 
 6:30 Time allowed myself to change for dinner. 
 
 7:00 Serve soup, vegetables, and sweets. 
 
 8:00 Entertain in drawing-room, singing and accompanying 
 
 songs, arrange card-tables, talk to gentlemen in 
 smoking-room. 
 
 11:00 Put out all lights in both houses, then allowed to go 
 
 to bed. 
 
 146 
 
WOMEN 
 
 LADY HELP AT RECTORY, WITH SIX IN FAMILY 
 AND NO SERVANT 
 
 £18 ($90) salary a year. 
 1 shiUing, laundry weekly. 
 
 6:00 A.M. Rise. 
 
 6:30 Clean big kitchen range, clean two sitting-room grates, 
 
 sweep two big rooms, and dust. 
 
 9:00 Cook breakfast (hot), lay cloth, serve, clear away. 
 
 10:00 Make beds with lady, empty toilets, sweep and dust 
 
 four bedrooms. 
 
 11:00 Cook and prepare hot lunch, wash all vegetables, just 
 
 dug out of garden, clean windows inside which 
 needed doing, clean silver and brass in sitting-rooms, 
 clean door-step every other day. 
 
 12:00 Bi. Tidy up kitchen before lunch, wash over kitchen with 
 mop, also scullery (stone floors), wash hearth. 
 
 12:30 P.M. Lay lunch and serve. 
 
 1 :30 Clear lunch away and wash up, lady helping to dry up. 
 
 2:15 Time allowed to tidy up and have rest. 
 
 3:45 Get tea for four, clear away, and wash up. 
 
 6:00 Bathe and put little boy to bed, get supper for same 
 
 and his little brother. 
 
 7:00 Prepare hot supper for four. 
 
 8 :00 Serve supper, clear away, and wash up. 
 
 9:00 Put hot bottles in four bedrooms. 
 
 9:30 Finished work; coidd go to bed if I liked. 
 
 147 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 LADY HELP AT HOUSE, WHERE NO SERVANT IS KEPT 
 
 Five in family, parents, one little girl of five, twins ten weeks old, 
 
 in delicate health. 
 
 £12 ($60) salary a year. 
 
 6:30 A.M. Rise. 
 
 7:00 Make and take up early tea to bedroom, dress little 
 
 girl. 
 
 8:30 Sweep dining-room, dust, and lay cloth. 
 
 9:00 Look after twins through breakfast, have mine as best 
 
 could, also attend little girl. 
 
 10:00 Help both t^vins get ready, make beds, dust and sweep 
 
 four bedrooms, empty toilets, tidy bathroom, take all 
 three children out, babies in pram (perambulator). 
 
 12:30 P.M. Bring children home, make bottles, lay luncheon on 
 cloth. 
 
 1 :00 Look after three children at lunch. 
 
 3:00 Take three children out, have entire charge of three. 
 
 4KK) Get tea, make bottles, take children out for short time, 
 
 do shopping. 
 
 6:00 Put babies and little girl to bed, give them bottles. 
 
 7:00 Get supper and lay cloth, clear away and wash up, 
 
 listen to babies the rest of the evening, make their 
 bottles. 
 
 11:00 Could go to bed. Had one twin in my room all night, 
 
 had to attend to it and make bottles every two hours 
 through the night; baby slept very badly. 
 
 148 
 
WOMEN 
 
 LADY HELP AT PRIVATE HOUSE AT BLACKHEATH, 
 
 WITH PARENTS AND TWO CHILDREN, 
 
 NO SERVANTS 
 
 £20 ($100) salary a year. 
 
 6:00 A.M. Rise. 
 
 6:30 Take up early morning tea, sweep dining-room and 
 
 hall, clean kitchen, light fire, clean grate, cook hot 
 breakfast, light copper on Mondays, and fill same. 
 
 8:30 Serve breakfast. 
 
 9:30 Clear breakfast and wash up. 
 
 10:00 Empty toilets, dust stairs and landing and bath-room, 
 
 sweep and dust four bedrooms, dust drawing-room. 
 
 11:00 Take children out to do shopping. 
 
 12:00 M. Prepare and cook hot lunch, make puddings for hot 
 supper. 
 
 1:00 P.M. Serve lunch, lay cloth, clear away, wash up, and make 
 tea. 
 
 3:00 Time allowed to tidy and wash myself. 
 
 3:45 Get tea, clear away and wash up, ironing to be done. 
 
 6:00 Take children for walk, get their supper. 
 
 7:30 Cook supper, lay cloth, and wash up. 
 
 9:00 Work finished, go to bed. 
 
 149 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 LADY HELP AT HOTEL IN LONDON 
 
 £36 ($130) salary a year. 
 1 shilling, laundry weekly. 
 
 7:00 A.M. Rise. 
 
 7:30 Dust dining-room, drawing-room and hall, see to 
 
 flower-vases, help maid carry up all breakfasts from 
 basement to dining-room, varying in number, clear in 
 between, and keep tables quite tidy and freshly laid. 
 
 10:30 Go up-stairs with maid, make all beds by myself, fill 
 
 jugs, tidy bathroom, dust and sweep ten bedrooms. 
 
 12:20 P.M. Tidy for lunch, help maid lay luncheon cloth, carry up 
 some trays. 
 
 1:00 P.M. Wait on guests at lunch. 
 
 2:00 Clear away lunch and wash silver, knives, and glass. 
 
 3:00 Mend torn linen, answer front door-bell, shopping. 
 
 4:00 Lay and get tea, usually two meals of tea at different 
 
 times, then mend linen until six o'clock. 
 
 6:30 Help maid lay dinner-cloth. 
 
 7:00 Bring each separate course from kitchen up-stairs, wait 
 
 on guests in dining-room. 
 
 8:00 "Wash up silver, knives, and glass. 
 
 8:45 Finished; go home. 
 
 150 
 
WOMEN 
 
 LADY HELP AT LADIES' HOSTEL FOR WAR WORKERS, 
 DAILY COOK KEPT 
 
 £18 ($90) salary a year. 
 
 6:00 A.M. Rise. 
 
 6:30 Fill big tea oven, make ready morning tea, lay break- 
 
 fast for eighteen, cut up four plates of bread and 
 butter. 
 
 7:30 First breakfast for seven. 
 
 8:30 Rest, have breakfast, serve and wait on every one, 
 
 hand cups round. 
 
 9:30 Empty all toilets, fill all jugs in fifteen bedrooms, 
 
 cubicles mostly, sweep and dust bedrooms, sweep 
 stairs (four flights). 
 
 12.00 M. Lay luncheon-cloths. 
 
 1:00 P.M. Serve luncheon and wait on twenty people. 
 
 2:00 Clear away luncheon. 
 
 3:00 Wash up silver, glass, and knives. 
 
 3:20 Time allowed for rest and to tidy myself. 
 
 4:00 Get tea for seven people. 
 
 5:30 Wash up tea-things. 
 
 6:00 Lay cloth for twenty for evening meal; meal lasts till 
 
 9 P.M. 
 
 9:00 Wash up. 
 
 10:00 Go to bed. 
 
 151 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 LADY WAITRESS AT ARMY PAY OFFICERS' MESS 
 
 Ten shillings salary a week. Had to pay four shillings a week for 
 bedroom out of it; only to work from Monday to Friday. 
 
 9:00 A.M. Help the cook prepare all puddings, rub bread-crumbs, 
 chop suet, etc., peel all vegetables, three or four dif- 
 ferent sorts. 
 
 11:30 Put up several big hospital tables, arrange all chairs, 
 
 etc., carry down everything for cloth from kitchen 
 down a yard, with no protection from rain or snow, 
 to a hall let for the purpose. 
 
 1 :00 P.M. Carry down all courses for hot lunch, clear away every- 
 thing, back again to kitchen, wait on officers at lunch. 
 
 3:00 Sweep hall and cloak-room, remove everything from 
 
 hall, take down tables, sweep kitchen and passage, 
 help cook with all the washing up. 
 
 6:00 Usually finished; pay breaks. 
 
 152 
 
WOMEN 
 
 TEMPORARY HELP AT A LODGING-HOUSE AT 
 BRIGHTON, WHERE MAID IS KEPT 
 
 Seven shillings sixpence ($1.80) weekly and tips. 
 
 6:30 A.M. Rise. 
 
 7:00 Take up early tea for five people, hot water to carry 
 
 up for seven or eight, sweep two big sitting-rooms, 
 and dust, lay breakfast-cloths in both rooms (differ- 
 ent floors). 
 
 9:00 Take up breakfast for seven people in one room and 
 
 ten in the other. Get breakfast for staff and take in. 
 
 10:00 Clear away breakfasts, make beds with lady, empty all 
 
 toilets, sweep and dust seven or eight bedrooms. 
 
 12:15 P.M. Lay cloths in both sitting-rooms, carry up lunch, clear 
 away in between. 
 
 2:00 Wash up silver, knives, and glass. 
 
 3:00 Time allowed to wash and tidy. 
 
 3:45 Get tea for both sitting-rooms, also staff's tea, wash up, 
 
 and clear away. 
 
 6:00 Take up hot water to bedrooms, turn down all beds, 
 
 empty toilets, and fill jugs. 
 
 7:00 Lay cloths for supper, clear away, and wash up silver 
 
 knives and forks. 
 
 10:00 Finished; go to bed. 
 
 Seven shilling and sixpence, and "finished; go to bed" — the 
 Woman's Movement is in those words. 
 
 153 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 England's policewomen 
 
 Long before the war the women had proved 
 their case, but the door remained bolted. It was 
 the war that broke down the door, and let a rush 
 of women through into industries and profes- 
 sions. In a few months they altered the con- 
 sciousness of England and won their spiritual 
 freedom. The vote, industrial equality, control 
 of their life, will inevitably follow. There are 
 five hundred thousand of them making shells. 
 An entire military hospital has been placed in 
 their control and under their exclusive manage- 
 ment — doctors, surgeons, orderlies, messengers, 
 superintendents. That was done by the War Of- 
 fice, which has never been a rash or radical innova- 
 tor in England. The War Office is now issuing 
 requests for women doctors. It finds them as 
 steady in emergency, as delicate in nice manip- 
 ulation, as their brothers. The old cant about 
 physiological barriers has been broken down by 
 the pressure of a million casualties. Women are 
 di'iving heavy trucks, running elevators and 
 trams, even managing places of business, includ- 
 ing a bank. 
 
 154. 
 
WOMEN 
 
 As yet it is in large part the same millions of 
 women who were earning wages before the war 
 that have taken possession of the new activities. 
 Probably not more than five hundred thousand 
 women have stepped over from idleness into the 
 day's work. But half a million is a large in- 
 crease, and that half-milhon are only the van- 
 guard of the army that will be conscripted by 
 England's need of every adult for increased pro- 
 duction. The significance of the change does not 
 lie as yet in the number of previously unem- 
 ployed women who have entered wage-earning 
 occupations. The significance lies in the new 
 professions and the processes of industry which 
 they have taken over. It lies in the work once 
 closed to them, which is now opened for all time. 
 A measure of freedom has been won that never 
 existed before. Their right to play a part in the 
 industrial and professional world had been chal- 
 lenged. Their presence in the modern economic 
 world had been resented. Inside of two years 
 woman has ceased to be a question, and has 
 become an accepted fact. 
 
 It is a mistake to think that the hundreds of 
 thousands of women who are helping to carry on 
 166 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 industry while the young men fight were or- 
 ganized and engineered by new-comers, that a 
 spontaneous uprising took place. The women 
 who led the new movement into hospitals, muni- 
 tions, the tram-cars, and the police were the 
 seasoned executive women who had long been 
 successful wage-earning workers in nursing and 
 school teaching, women who had long fought for 
 social reform in labor conditions, housing, and 
 the care of children. The amazing alteration 
 in the economic position of women in England is 
 not the work of amateurs. It is the sudden 
 ripening of an immensely laborious, painfully 
 slow growth. 
 
 Opponents of the woman's movement have 
 watched with a keen eye for a disintegration of 
 the home resulting from the entrance of numbers 
 of "home" women into munition factories. Neg- 
 lected children, shoddily dressed and poorly fed, 
 were what they feared to find. The showing has 
 been all the other way. The reports from Wool- 
 wich, for instance, show that the school-children 
 are better nourished and better clothed than iii 
 the days when the mother was a hack in the home 
 over a wash-tub. A wage to a mother of £2.10 
 156 
 
WOMEN 
 
 has not wrecked the British lower-class house- 
 hold, but has improved it. 
 
 Radicals have played the same part in the 
 woman's movement that they have played in the 
 labor movement. It is not that the mass agrees 
 with them or likes them or follows them; but 
 they have clarified and given a coherence to 
 vague subconscious desires of an inarticulate 
 community. They have presented a sharply 
 etched program to a blind urge. Their program 
 is: 
 'Votes for women. 
 
 Economic equality. 
 
 An open field in the industrial world. 
 
 Those clear-cut demands give the movement a 
 coherence, a cutting edge. But those demands 
 are not the woman's movement. They are 
 merely the instruments with which it can work its 
 will. When it has received its instruments, it 
 will then proceed to do its work. 
 
 To change the figure, it is easy to see the 
 portion of the iceberg that is above the water and 
 visibly heaving down upon our man-made, man- 
 favoring institutions. But seven eighths of the 
 mass is below the surface. The genius of the 
 157 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 woman's movement lies deeply submerged mider 
 surface revolt, economic injustice, and resent- 
 ment at man's unconscious scorn for the female 
 mentality. The genius of the woman's move- 
 ment lies in the imperious demands of her nature 
 for worthy expression. Industry, hke the suf- 
 frage, is a means by which she achieves her 
 personal freedom and equality. It is a spiritual 
 condition which she is seeking, not alone a new 
 activity. Fame and money are not the supreme 
 incentives to her that they are to man. For that 
 reason her entrance into politics and work offers 
 the promise of a humanized industry and a better 
 state. 
 
 My own personal impression in the first half- 
 year of the war was that the women were quicker 
 to get a start on than the men. There was 
 almost a scramble on the part of women of leisure 
 to volunteer for relief work. The women solved 
 the problem of Belgian refugees by taking them 
 into their homes, by organizing village colonies 
 for them, by finding them work. In those early 
 months I attended many dozens of recruiting 
 meetings. I found that two of the most popular 
 speakers were Mrs. Drummond (the "General") 
 158 
 
 I 
 
WOMEN 
 
 and Mrs. Pankhurst, leaders of the suffrage 
 movement. A group of women saw the war in 
 its meaning to Great Britain, the costhness of 
 waging it, the immensity of the effort which 
 would have ^ to be put forth, long before the 
 general public opinion of England was awakened. 
 Women have revealed adaptability in their 
 war work. They have swung swiftly to meet 
 new conditions and solve unexpected situations. 
 A good instance of the service they have done 
 England is that of their organization of a pohce 
 force. War conditions had created certain perils 
 to the community. The absence of the father 
 away at the front is not a benefit to the children 
 at home. Boys were running wild and thieving. 
 Other boys were being overworked. Immense 
 numbers of men on leave in great cities are a 
 menace to the well-being of excitable girls. War 
 creates its own atmosphere, and there were both 
 a looseness and a tension, strange combination, 
 in the life of kliaki-clad England. A group of 
 women saw the peril and had a remedy. Led by 
 Miss Allen and JVIiss Damer Dawson, they 
 formed the Women Pohce Service in August of 
 1914!. There were half a dozen of them. The 
 159 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 members have grown to three hundred, and they 
 are now serving not only London, but Grantham, 
 Bath, Hull, Folkestone, Wimbledon, and Rich- 
 mond. Their duties are patrolling, attendance 
 at police courts, home visiting, supervision of 
 music-halls, cinemas, public dance-halls, and 
 inspection of lodging-houses. They take the 
 depositions of children and women, watch the 
 parks, stations, and docks, meet Belgian ref- 
 ugees. At certain munition factories they keep 
 the women's gate, searching the women, and per- 
 mitting no stranger to enter. 
 
 Their uniform is a blue miUtary tunic, divided 
 skirt, riding-breeches, riding-bowlers, and top- 
 boots. The chiefs wear peaked caps. Their 
 organization is one of chief officer, superintend- 
 ents, inspectors, clerical staff, sergeants, and 
 constables. 
 
 When they made their start, fifty of them were 
 drilled by a sergeant of police in a back yard of 
 the suburb of Hornsey. The first town they 
 worked in officially had a diocese of twenty-five 
 thousand inhabitants and thirty thousand sol- 
 diers. Their work from the beginning has been 
 more preventive than repressive. They handle 
 160 
 
WOMEN 
 
 trouble before it becomes a court case as well as 
 after. They suggest solutions. 
 
 Commandant Damer Dawson, the chief officer, 
 speaking of Leicester Square, the very heart of 
 the night life of London, said: 
 
 Take, for instance, Leicester Square. You hear 
 people say that Leicester Square is infested by "night 
 hawks" and bullies and so forth, and that it is also in- 
 fested by abominable women. No abuse has been 
 spared. It has been poured upon the women who make 
 a trade and living out of immorality, but very few have 
 said a word about the other sex, which is bound to be 
 connected with the life of the London streets. One 
 might think that there are only two classes of people 
 on the London streets, the police and the prostitutes, 
 and that the rest are innocent people. However, it is 
 not for me to give you a lecture on the state of the 
 London streets, except inasmuch as it touches our po- 
 lice work and our experiences night after night. 
 
 We find that things have very much changed since 
 the war began, and are changing very quickly. There- 
 fore you can not possibly write to the papers or argue 
 about any social condition which existed even a few 
 months ago. You must go straight to the streets 
 night after night and follow up cases as you find them ; 
 and this is what you find. There are bullies there, both 
 men and women bullies, but not to the same extent that 
 
 161 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 there used to be, for this reason: you have to deal 
 with modem women on the streets, and you will find 
 that the temptations thrown before these young women 
 from the time that they are "flappers" is enormous. 
 Mind you, they are light-hearted, aching for excite- 
 ment, and they are non-moral. That is the result of 
 social conditions. They have no moral training; their 
 parents give them none, and they have very little at 
 school, and they have very little religious enthusiasm. 
 Therefore they come out into the world non-moral. 
 Nevertheless, they are exceedingly human, and deter- 
 mined to have a good time at all costs. They are 
 mostly girls who have tasted the bitterness of life, 
 girls among the five millions for whom there may not 
 be a husband, and therefore they have got to make 
 their own living. 
 
 Then there come thousands of men, with hundreds 
 and thousands in money to spend, and the young women 
 pay the price. Do you think they know the price, nine 
 out of ten of them, the disease and the misery that are 
 going to ensue.'' Of course they do not know. 
 
 The policewomen are able to touch a certain fringe 
 of this work. None of us can claim anything more; 
 but we are able to act as a tremendous deterrent. In 
 the first place, certain streets which we patrol at 
 nights we are able to keep absolutely clear. Young offi- 
 cers, boys of seventeen and eighteen, who have hardly 
 left their mothers, are taken to these streets by women 
 who ought to know better ; but when they see the police- 
 162 
 
WOMEN 
 
 women they bolt. Ours is only patchwork, but it is a 
 help. In a great many cases we are able to get hold 
 of the young girls and to save them. Young girls and 
 young men get to know us, and we move them on. The 
 very fact that a policewoman is in the street acts as a 
 potent moral shame to what is going on. 
 
 I was very struck with an illustration of this which 
 occurred the other day. 
 
 "Are they friends of yours.'"' said a policewoman to a 
 couple of young fellows who had taken hold of two 
 girls. 
 
 "How dare you !" said one of the men, quite furious. 
 "Of course I know them; they are cousins." 
 
 "I am the wife of an officer," said the policewoman, 
 "and as you are an officer wearing the king's uniform 
 I take your word for it." 
 
 Ten minutes later the young officer overtook her and 
 said, "They were not my cousins, and I thought you 
 would like to know I am going home." 
 
 Any person of experience reading that knows 
 that Miss Dawson and her co-workers have a 
 broader and more fundamental knowledge of our 
 modern social problems than the average male po- 
 liceman. The only police method in dealing with 
 the "social evil" has been that of repression and 
 harrying, interwoven with graft, and it hasn't 
 advanced us any in the direction of a solution. 
 163 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Take another instance. A serious fight was 
 taking place between two drunken soldiers who 
 should have been in camp. The men had taken 
 off their coats to fight. The pohcewomen cleared 
 the crowd, separated the fighters, persuaded 
 them to put on their coats, shake hands, and 
 return to camp. The old orthodox pohce 
 method for such a fracas was a clubbing. The 
 only test of a method is, Does it work? The 
 new women's way works. Success has been their 
 answer to tradition. 
 
 These new women officers have cut their way 
 through red tape and obtained the right to act 
 decisively and promptly. The military author- 
 ities have given them the right of entry into 
 houses in certain restricted districts, so that they 
 can take hold of a situation before a rumpus sets 
 in. The policewomen observed a drunken sol- 
 dier enter a house which they knew to be occupied 
 by a woman whose husband had just left for the 
 front. This house had been previously suspected 
 by them. They fetched the military picket, who 
 came at once to the house, and with some diffi- 
 culty forced an entrance. The soldier was 
 caught and arrested. Several children found in 
 164 
 
WOMEN 
 
 the house in a dirty and diseased condition were 
 taken care of by the policewomen and handed 
 over to the inspector. Before the picket could 
 enter, the woman escaped by means of a trap- 
 door which connected with three other houses. 
 
 These peace patrols have dug themselves into 
 the community. One of them is a probation 
 officer. The police use her to interview women 
 who are being "summoned." There was an 
 entire city street in a row, like one of our before- 
 the-war Southern vendettas. Half the street 
 had summoned the other half to court. The 
 policewoman marched the whole street back home, 
 and settled the case out of court. 
 
 A constant protective watch is kept over the 
 lives of children. From time to time reports 
 have reached the policewomen of young children 
 of school age working excessive hours during the 
 school week. It was decided to approach the 
 head-masters of several schools who welcomed 
 help in the matter and promised detailed reports. 
 In one district they found twenty-four paper- 
 boys with hours varying from 7V2 to 25 per school 
 week. The beginning hour in the morning seems 
 to be from 6 to 6:30 a. m., so that the majority 
 165 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 of these children will be working without proper 
 attention to food and habits. Many may go to 
 school without any regular breakfast. Of these, 
 two are eight years old, one getting up at six 
 o'clock, the other at 6 :30 a. m. ; one of them work- 
 ing 12^/^ hours, the other 7/4 hours. 
 
 Twenty-two boys take milk around. Their 
 ages vary from 8 to 13, their hours from 7/4 to 
 12^/2 per school week, beginning work from 4 :30 
 to 6 o'clock A. M. One boy of 8 works 20 hours 
 a week beginning at 4:30 a. M. Two boys, 13, 
 house-boys, work 7/4 hours. Two boys work in 
 coal-yards; one is 13 and works 19 hours per 
 school week, beginning at 8 a. m. ; the other boy, 
 aged 11, helps his father, and works 5 hours per 
 school week. 
 
 The question of child-labor presents itself as 
 one of the root problems of the hour for local as 
 well as for national authorities. The police- 
 women see some of the results of boy fatigue and 
 malnutrition in the listless, uninterested young 
 people standing and loitering about, ready to 
 follow after any new excitement. 
 
 There are towns where no by-laws exist reg- 
 ulating the employment of children imder 
 166 
 
 i 
 
WOMEN 
 
 fourteen. The question has been before the 
 education authorities for many years, and the 
 enforcing of certain drafted by-laws is hkely to 
 remain in status quo owing to war conditions. 
 Employers prefer childi'en to elderly labor, and 
 many parents regard their offspring as financial 
 assets. The work of these women guardians will 
 result in a better protection of child life, because 
 they have exposed the evil conditions. The 
 policewoman is an official mother. She does not 
 use physical violence. She talks with the boys 
 about gambling and smoking and thieving. She 
 warns the girls. There are no fixed posts. 
 Often she covers an area of two and a half miles, 
 as in the borough of Paddington. 
 
 War has let loose the high spirits of boys, and 
 some of them, with the added stimulus of Amer- 
 ican films, have taken to the life of pirates. 
 London streets are a tumbling sea of adventure, 
 where grocers' carts are the helpless frigates to 
 be manned and pillaged. The new women 
 "cops" pull the boys off the carts, and advise them 
 to let the tea and jam travel on unmolested. 
 
 This strange excitement of war touches the 
 imagination till it sees placid planets as the prod- 
 167 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 uct of German chemists. During one of the 
 recent Zeppelin raids on the east coast, police- 
 women working in the town were instructed by 
 the authorities to patrol the streets and do their 
 best to prevent panic or crowds collecting. On 
 coming upon a knot of excited people at a street 
 corner the policewomen assured them that there 
 was no further danger, as the Zeppelins had left 
 and that every one could return home in safety. 
 Some soldiers remonstrated, and said it was cruel 
 to ask the women to take their children home. 
 They pointed to a light in the sky, which they 
 declared to be a bomb dropping. The women 
 wept and begged not to be sent home. The 
 policewomen calmed them, explaining that what 
 the soldiers saw was no bomb, but the planet 
 Venus rising in the sky, and persuaded the crowd 
 to disperse quietly and the parents to take their 
 tired children home. 
 
 All this soothing, daring work results from 
 stiff training. These women go through two 
 months of instruction in drill, first aid, special 
 legal acts relating to women and children, and 
 the procedure and rules of evidence in police 
 courts. They are shown how to stand, to walk, 
 168 
 
 i 
 
WOMEN 
 
 and attain dignity of carriage, for a slouchy 
 woman carries no authority. They are taught to 
 talk clearly and avoid mumbling, so that their 
 evidence will convince the court. They are told 
 off to bring in reports on a tour of the streets: 
 "Come back and tell what j^ou have seen." This 
 develops accuracj^ and power of observation. 
 Patrolling in the public parks calls for patience 
 to endure the monotony of long, watchful wait- 
 ing, keen insight to detect undesirable citizens 
 who will endanger children at play, psychological 
 skill in knowing the mental criminal, who works 
 by stealth and loathes publicity. 
 
 Street work demands knowledge of the social 
 features of the district, what to do with diseased 
 and sick persons, where to send drunks. The 
 authority must be broad-minded, using a warning 
 word instead of arrest where the offense is petty. 
 
 Oversight in factories requires an officer type 
 of woman who will keep the women smart and 
 good tempered, who will deal justty with grum- 
 bles, and never bear a personal gi'ievance. 
 
 The policewoman is different from the rescue- 
 worker, the "missionary," and the social worker. 
 She is a practical executive who can not long 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 delay with the one case, for there hes on her beat 
 a mile of streets with a dozen other cases. She 
 must show self-control and the willingness to 
 hand over the problem to other agencies. Where 
 her function ceases, there the mission of the social 
 worker begins. In the ranks are nurses, medical 
 women, school-teachers, women from govern- 
 ment service, sanitary inspectors. Several ma- 
 trons of infirmaries and hospitals are making 
 good head officers because they are accustomed to 
 leadership. The ages of policewomen run from 
 twenty-five to forty-five. Between thirty and 
 forty is the best age, because the woman is self- 
 reliant, has conquered her hysterias, and is in 
 full command of her powers. These women 
 have succeeded because they have known how to 
 avoid interference with the province of the men 
 police. They have practised a division of work. 
 There was a city where a particular wooded lane 
 had been a hanging-out place for fourteen years. 
 Constables and the bishop had been powerless to 
 alter conditions. Four policewomen walked the 
 length of it, spoke to thirty-six couples, waited 
 with backs turned till they had accepted the sug- 
 gestion, and cleaned the place up. 
 170 
 
WOMEN 
 
 "Which of you is the mother of the baby in the 
 pink cap who has been left outside in the rain for 
 twent}^ minutes?" asked a poHcewoman of a 
 group drinking in a pubhc house. The mother 
 had to come, because the opinion of the other 
 guests was with the officer. 
 
 Two girls were reported by the police author- 
 ities to the policewomen as missing, one of them 
 for fifteen weeks and the other for over five, and 
 were suspected of living in some fields near a 
 large camp. The policewomen on bicycles 
 searched for them for two days, and finally dis- 
 covered them in a filthy and starving condition 
 and took them back to their parents. They have 
 since applied to the policewomen to put them 
 in touch with a home which deals with such 
 cases. 
 
 England is a mixed democracy much like ours, 
 with fine elements and ignoble elements. But 
 these clear-eyed women of the police force, like 
 the nurses and welfare secretaries, gave me an 
 assurance that an immense, untapped resource is 
 there to renew fife after the wreckage of these 
 years. 
 
 War has discovered them. Peace must con- 
 171 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 tinue to make use of them. England has need 
 of them. 
 
 Undoubtedly to the student of peoples there 
 was much that was dreary under the beauty and 
 peace of the old England that existed before 
 1914 ; but what was most oppressive was the con- 
 dition of women. Drunkenness and militancy 
 were only two symptoms of a disease that was eat- 
 ing out the heart of an ancient civihzation. 
 Women were suppressed. They carried the con- 
 sciousness of being caught in a social system that 
 allowed no free play for instinct, intelligence, and 
 energy, a system that forbade useful work, that 
 silenced self-expression, that doomed the average 
 middle-class woman to idleness under the mask 
 of respectability, and the lower-class woman to 
 drudgery. There comes a time with a theory 
 when action is the only test, and British women 
 have proceeded to put into practice their claims. 
 I use the policewomen as an illustration of the 
 new activity which has touched all classes. 
 What I wish to show is not their isolated per- 
 formance. What they have done is only one 
 instance of the release of energy which has won 
 spiritual freedom for the women of England. 
 172 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 IRELAND 
 THE IBISH QUESTION 
 
 I BELIEVE that the most helpful view I can 
 give of the Irish question is a simple record of 
 my brief visit, with the talks I had with Irishmen. 
 I have no solutions, but I have a real sympathy, 
 and I believe that the way to better relationship 
 lies in the creation of an atmosphere of sym- 
 pathy, which will result in intellectual under- 
 standing. I write nothing here in a spirit of 
 contention. I trust that no offense will be taken. 
 
 The Irish Rebelhon had seemed to me a piece 
 of strange, mystical futility. The failure of 
 Ireland to be stirred by the plight of Roman 
 Cathohc Belgium had seemed to me a failure in 
 idealism. The iiTCconcilable Irish in America 
 had seemed to me a set of men "scrapping" 
 volubly for the sake of words and dissension. 
 
 I found in Ireland a national aspiration that 
 173 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 moved me as the French spirit of nationality has 
 moved the world for now these two years. The 
 proud and charming Irish people, with a culture, 
 tradition, hterature, race, religion, natural geo- 
 graphical unity, and economic system of their 
 own, believe they have the right to as full a meas- 
 ure of self-government as Canada possesses, in- 
 cluding control of finances. Sane opinion in Ire- 
 land is well aware that in any solution Ireland re- 
 mains inside the federation of the British common- 
 wealth; but the status toward which the intel- 
 ligent Irish work is that of a self-governing 
 nation, like the free colonies. 
 
 Increasingly the present generation of Irish- 
 men realizes that if old-age pensions, state insur- 
 ance, land purchase, cooperative grants, the 
 police, estates commission, and congested-districts 
 board have to be paid for by controlled govern- 
 ment and crippled autonomy, the answer is a 
 refusal to accept their benefits. Ireland must 
 pay her own way if subsidy implies control. 
 "Irish expenditure should be limited by Irish 
 revenue." This is one of the matters in which 
 some of the older Irish political leaders have 
 failed to represent the younger element. 
 174 
 
IRELAND 
 
 A living element of young Ireland to-day is in 
 revolt against these older leaders. The men who 
 have patiently and self-sacrificingly fought for 
 the rights of Ireland through long years are still 
 in control of the Irish party at Westminster. A 
 part of young Ireland is as weary of them as a 
 city state once grew of Aristides. To debate the 
 justice of this state of mind is to multiply words, 
 but not to clarify the situation. 
 
 The young men believe that the ideas in con- 
 trol of Irish policy are the ideas of old men out 
 of touch with present aspiration. These young 
 men have determined that their own ideas shall 
 ^prevail. 
 
 Tradition is the one essential element in nation- 
 ality. Tradition is the memory of a common 
 experience, the deposit of a common suffering for 
 an idea. Of tradition Professor Ramsay Muir 
 has written: 
 
 The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the 
 one indispensable factor which must be present what- 
 ever else be lacking, is the possession of a common tra- 
 dition, a memory of sufferings endured and victories 
 won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the 
 dear names of great personalities that seem to embody 
 175 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 in themselves the character and ideals of the nation, in 
 the names also of sacred places wherein the national 
 memory is enshrined. 
 
 A race of writers sprang up in Ireland who 
 had fed on the ancient Gaelic sources. The Irish 
 people rediscovered that they came of a race who 
 had elected their chieftains and who had possessed 
 the land communally. The legends of poets and 
 saints and heroes were recalled to a racial imagi- 
 nation which is responsive, and that fine infection 
 began to spread through the farms and cities. 
 Ireland is not alone in this. She is only a sharer 
 in a general mass consciousness. A movement 
 of nature has operated throughout the modern 
 world. No man can trace its source and origin. 
 It marches irresistibly without visible leadership. 
 It has taken control of a dynastic war, and made 
 it a world war of peoples. It draws the 
 scattered di*y bones of Poland back into a living 
 organism. It lifted the France of the Dreyfus 
 Trial into the glory of the Marne and Verdun. 
 It coalesced the quarrelsome individualism of 
 England into the unified, victorious socialistic 
 state. The expression of this world movement 
 is local and intense in Ireland. Clear thinking 
 176 
 
 I 
 
IRELAND 
 
 is necessary, large concessions, a forgiving state 
 of mind, sound economic and sociological meas- 
 ures, a series of prosaic next steps. A sane 
 trade-union policy, cooperation, education, reli- 
 gious tolerance, clean local politics are demanded 
 to free Ireland from poverty and dissension. 
 Some of this ground-work is already being done. 
 Much is still required. In the Anglo-Irish ques- 
 tion there are many points of resemblance to that 
 of capital and labor. Just as the lot of labor has 
 grown steadily better through recent generations, 
 so the condition of Ireland is improving year by 
 year. There have been extensions of justice. 
 Ameliorative agencies are at work. Only four 
 years ago Erskine Childers, the protagonist of 
 Home Rule, wrote : 
 
 A great change has taken place in the- condition of 
 Ireland during the last nineteen years. We all know 
 its main characteristics, and I need only summarize 
 the result. By contrast with her situation in 1893, 
 Ireland may be said to be completely tranquil and com- 
 paratively prosperous. More than half the tenants of 
 Irish land are on the road to freehold ownership; the 
 rest have their rights guarded and their rents limited 
 by law. The great cardinal land reforms, late, terri- 
 bly late, though they came, laid the foundations of a 
 177 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 new social order, and rendered possible a change for 
 the better in every phase of national life. Though all 
 work not done by Ireland herself for her own good 
 must necessarily be defective, we may frankly admit 
 that both English parties in recent years have endeav- 
 ored to do their best in limited directions to repair the 
 frightful ravages wrought by past misgovernment. 
 The extension of local government to Ireland, focus- 
 ing the minds of Irishmen upon many of their own 
 local problems, has powerfully contributed to the im- 
 provement. Decent, healthy dwellings are replacing 
 the old mud cabins of the laboring classes. There is 
 a National University; there is a central department, 
 with popular influence behind it, for safeguarding and 
 stimulating agriculture and industry. Nearly three 
 millions of money are distributed in Old Age Pensions. 
 Economic serfdom has disappeared. A load of exorbi- 
 tant rent, and a still heavier load of haunting inse- 
 curity, have been removed. The spirit is freer, the 
 physical welfare greater. Production is slowly in- 
 creasing, and commerce is slowly expanding. 
 
 The national university in the great Irish 
 cities has been a belated, but now partly ef- 
 ficient, piece of justice. These colleges carry 
 on scientific research to further industrial devel- 
 opment. There is training adapted to the needs 
 of the locality. Trinity produces young doctors, 
 178 
 
IRELAND 
 
 lawyers, and literaiy men known throughout the 
 English-speaking world. The Irish land com- 
 mission, the estates commission, the congested- 
 districts board, labor in their own way to restore 
 the land to the peasant proprietors and to give 
 them decent lodging. The department of agri- 
 culture and teclinical instruction for Ireland 
 informs the peasants in modern methods of agri- 
 culture and the development of horticulture. 
 The Irish Agricultural Organization Society is 
 the long official name for the cooperative society 
 of which Sir Horace Plunkett is president, which 
 has 1023 societies, 350 creameries, 95 auxihary 
 creameries, 233 credit societies, 222 agricultural 
 societies, and a membership of 106,301 persons. 
 It has a turnover of $90,000,000. The local 
 government board has given Ireland an increas- 
 ing opportunity in self-government. Indus- 
 trially Ireland builds ships, makes linen, whisky, 
 stout, ginger-ale, agricultural implements, bis- 
 cuits. Agriculturally she raises food-stuffs and 
 exports cattle, sheep, horses, butter, eggs. Agri- 
 culture and its direct connections employ eighty 
 per cent, of her population, industry twenty per 
 cent. 
 
 179 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 The institutions of education and executive 
 management, the governmental and voluntary 
 departments, the returning prosperity of her 
 forming community, the growing wealth of 
 industrial Ulster — all these are making Ireland 
 a better place to live in than it was in the nine- 
 teenth century. Ireland is not going down. 
 She is coming up, and all that improvement is 
 without reference to the Home Rule question. 
 
 In the literary world Ireland is veiy much on 
 the map. I saw three groups of Irish players, at 
 the Abbey Theater, the Empire, and the Irish 
 Theater in Hardwicke Street. These groups 
 gave six plays, containing accurate observation 
 of life and a dramatic idea, rendered with a charm 
 of interpretation. There is to-day no dramatic 
 growth so native and racy in America or Eng- 
 land. The Irish writers and poets are among 
 the best in our language. Lady Gregory, Yeats, 
 James Stephens, A. E., Katharine Tynan, Dora 
 Sigerson, Dunsany, George Moore, and Bernard 
 Shaw are worthy representatives of a creative 
 tradition. These poets and prose writers are not 
 like those of England and New England, men 
 speaking a literary dialect unrelated to the 
 180 
 
IRELAND 
 
 aspiration of the mass of the people. The Irish- 
 men of talent are giving a voice to their race. 
 Irish art is a national expression. 
 
 The Irish are a religious race, wherein they 
 differ from the Americans, French, and English 
 of this generation. Unionists and Nationalists 
 are believers. This fundamental conception of 
 life colors their education, literature, and political 
 ideas. For this reason, as well as for many other 
 reasons, it is impossible for an outsider to leg- 
 islate for them. No policy that omits the sac- 
 ramental view of life can survive in this land of 
 simple and profoimd faith. 
 
 Such are a few aspects of a community as 
 varied and delightful as I have ever visited. 
 Now I return to my analogy of capital and labor. 
 With each increase of well-being, the laboring 
 classes have only struggled the harder for further 
 gains. They aim at a share in control, not at 
 well-fed contentment in a benevolent industrial 
 autocracy. It is so with the Irish. They have 
 made astonishing gains since 1893. 
 
 "Now, we know very well what the Unionists 
 are saying about this improvement," vvrrites an 
 Irish scholar. "They are saying that it has not 
 181 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 only removed the necessity for Home Rule, but 
 weakened the desire for Home Rule." 
 
 But the very improvement — improvement in 
 education, in agriculture, in self-government — 
 has only heightened the self-consciousness and 
 intensified the nationality of Ireland. It would 
 be nonsense to say to-day that Ireland is ''com- 
 pletely tranquil." Granting that the basic prob- 
 lems are those of self-development, a wise eco- 
 nomic policy, a general, compulsory education 
 (now a father can pay a fine of a few shillings a 
 year and keep his child at work instead of at 
 school), a cooperation in every department of 
 community life, instead of the present dissension, 
 which cuts efficiency into small wrangling bits, 
 yet the fact remains that the central cause of 
 unrest, the creator of difference, is the feeling of 
 political servitude. 
 
 The study of the Gaelic language is by some 
 regarded as the hope of Ireland and by others as 
 the mother of rebellion. A good-natured ref- 
 erence to Protestants was interpreted by the man 
 sitting behind me in the Empire Theater as an 
 attack on Presbyterianism, and he shouted out 
 his resentment. The trail of political division is 
 182 
 
IRELAND 
 
 over every cell of the national consciousness. 
 Not one of Ireland's pressing problems can be 
 solved in the present atmosphere. 
 
 In the formative years of my life I was 
 educated by an Englishman, an Oxford man. 
 For nine years an Englishwoman has been a 
 member of my household. jMost of my spare 
 time in the last sixteen years has been spent in 
 England — eight visits, and a residence of two 
 years at one time. I don't pretend to generalize, 
 but I do claim the right to record personal im- 
 pressions that are based on a fairly wide observa- 
 tion and experience. I find the largest measure 
 of personal liberty in England of any country 
 which I have visited. I believe the masses in 
 England to be the kindliest people known to me. 
 And this well-nigh general kindliness and this 
 belief in the rights of the individual man have 
 made England a champion of freedom and jus- 
 tice, for freedom and justice are the social ex- 
 pression of individual good-will and of reverence 
 for personality. 
 
 Edward Carpenter says of his people : 
 
 The leaden skies of England, and something (if I 
 may say so) rather gray and leaden about the people, 
 183 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 have since my early days had the effect of making me 
 feel not quite at home in my own country. I longed 
 for more sunsliine, and for something corresponding to 
 sunshine in human nature — more gaiety, vivacity of 
 heart and openness of ideas. 
 
 In dealing with an unsuppressed, gi-aceful, and 
 charming race like the Irish, the Englishman is 
 at a hopeless disadvantage. The mental alert- 
 ness, the flow of language, the swift responsive- 
 ness of mood, leave him shy and inarticulate, and, 
 outpointed at every thrust, he takes refuge in his 
 heaviness. The result is offense given and 
 received. It is the tragedy of the English that, 
 kindly and honorable as they are, they have 
 established no real relationship with the most ex- 
 quisitely imaginative people in the world. 
 
 Just now England is in the most bitter war- 
 fare of her thousand years. It is humanly im- 
 possible for her to turn aside from the work in 
 front of her to solve the wrong inside her com- 
 monwealth. To shout her down is to strengthen 
 her enemy at the moment of combat, and her 
 enemy is the enemy of the human race. To 
 weaken her is to weaken the last defense against 
 that force which would destroy nationality 
 184 
 
IRELAND 
 
 throughout Europe. So the cause of Ireland, 
 hke that of exploited labor and suppressed 
 women, must wait the greater decision to the 
 east. But when peace comes, the turn of Ireland 
 comes, and she will be heard at the "romid table" 
 of the imperial conference. The modified Lloyd- 
 George "settlement" will again be suggested. 
 That provides for the Home Rule Act for 
 twenty-six counties of Ireland, but excludes from 
 its operation six counties of Ulster which cannot 
 be brought under its terms except by a new act 
 of the imperial Parliament. This proposed 
 settlement goes far in removing Ireland from the 
 former parochial dealings with England, and 
 places Ireland as a self-governing unit within 
 the new British commonwealth. It gives her a 
 better status than in the past, but it leaves un- 
 solved the question of partition, and it withholds 
 financial control. The situation will never be 
 solved at one stroke, however bold, but, rather, 
 by a series of next steps. The same cause for 
 which the EngHsh die in Picardy in the noblest 
 war of their history awaits their chivalrous 
 response across the Irish Sea. A little nation 
 desires to be free. In the final judgment of men 
 185 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 England's greatness in this day will be measured 
 by the treatment she metes to Ireland. 
 
 YOUNG ENGLAND SPEAKS 
 
 At my request, one of the younger English 
 statesmen has written this reply to the foregoing 
 chapter: 
 
 If the Irish question has to be solved at all, it 
 has to be solved by young England and young 
 Ireland together. The very fact, admitted by 
 all sane opinion in Ireland — that Ireland must 
 remain inside the federation of the British com- 
 monwealth — means that the solution is a common 
 and mutual one which cannot in the nature of 
 things be decided by the unaided efforts of Ire- 
 land herself. For one thing, take the question of 
 finance. Perhaps the most urgent problems in 
 Ireland are the social reforms which can be car- 
 ried through only by the expenditure of money. 
 Not only would an absolutely independent Ire- 
 land be unable to devote money to new reforms, 
 but she would even have to reduce many of the 
 social expenditures now existing under the heads 
 of old-age pensions, state insurance, congested- 
 186 
 
IRELAND 
 
 districts board, etc. Youiig Ireland says that 
 she wiU reduce her expenditure and limit it by her 
 own revenue rather than accept a subsidy from 
 England implying English control. Yomig 
 England, on the other hand, is obliged to reply, 
 in words famihar to American political thought, 
 that a subsidy from England to Ireland without 
 some control would be taxation of the English 
 people without representation, and is therefore 
 constitutionally unthinkable as ami:hing like a 
 permanent arrangement. But the actual con- 
 stitutional comiterpart of payments between 
 states united in the same federated common- 
 wealth is a matter of adjustment which need not 
 imply any loss of independence or self-govern- 
 ment. The only thing necessary to the creation 
 of such constitutional machinery is mutual con- 
 sultation. 
 
 And somewhere here lies the real tragedy of the 
 Irish Rebellion. Young England — ^the England 
 that was finding itself in "The Round Table," 
 in the Workers' Educational Association, and 
 to a certain extent even in the Unionist Social 
 Reform Committee — had, before the war, become 
 inexpressibly weary of the atmosphere in which 
 187 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 the Anglo-Irish question was carried on at West- 
 minster. They knew not only the failure of 
 English government in Ireland, but also the 
 souring and clogging effect of the Irish party at 
 Westminster upon the Government of England. 
 They, in common with many well-known Irish- 
 men in Ireland who had cut themselves off from 
 political factions during the last fifteen years — 
 the Plunketts, the Mounteagles, the Russells — 
 recognized men like Connolly and the whole 
 young Irish party, whose aspirations you have 
 described, as far more competent to deal with the 
 problem in a fundamental way than the Nation- 
 alists at Westminster. Such members of young 
 England found their ideas best summed up by 
 that poem in which A. E. confesses "the golden 
 heresy of truth." They really thought that out 
 of young Ireland was growing a party with 
 whom they could work in the immediate introduc- 
 tion of Home Rule within a federated British 
 Empire which more than anything else satisfied 
 their longing for a comprehensive policy. 
 
 Such men, cast down into the depths by the 
 bickerings of July, 1914, rejoiced to see their 
 hopes confirmed by the sweeping change in Eng- 
 188 
 
IRELAND 
 
 land which followed the outbreak of war — by the 
 obliteration in all but a few journalistic and par- 
 liamentary circles of the old pre-war contests. 
 
 The hopes of this young England, which is 
 now to a man in the trenches or in government 
 departments absorbed in the overwhelming duties 
 of war, have been cheated much as the hopes of 
 those young American enthusiasts who in 1911, 
 during the Lawrence strike, hailed the syndi- 
 calists and Giovanitti as truer representatives of 
 the aspirations of labor than the older trade- 
 unions, have been soured and destroyed by the 
 petty bitterness and futility of "the masses." 
 But the disappointment was far more deadly. 
 The Irish Rebellion was to them the stab in the 
 back from just the people with whom they felt 
 best able to cooperate after the war, and it was 
 a stab all the more fatal because young England 
 did not lose its respect for leaders like Connolly. 
 They still say they would rather have seen Ire- 
 land under the government of a man of this 
 stamp than ten men from the Ulster army or 
 from the orthodox Nationalist party. 
 
 The average man in the street in England 
 to-day, so far from wishing to govern Ireland, 
 189 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 has only one idea, to clear out of Ireland as 
 quickly as possible. Ireland to him is not a field 
 for the administrative qualities of the Enghsh 
 any more than Quebec or the Transvaal. It is a 
 field for their political qualities. It is a part of 
 the self-governing empire, not one of the depend- 
 encies; it is a nation of equals, co-authors with 
 the Enghsh of the British Empire, co-settlers 
 and comrades-in-anns, not a "backward race." 
 Yomig England insists that, while a despairing- 
 severance of relations between England and 
 Ireland in the spirit of Joan of Arc "as to the 
 peace with the Enghsh, the only one possible is 
 that they should go back to their own comitry in 
 England," though it would be better than the 
 present situation, would be as futile and umieces- 
 sary as Lee in 1861 believed the severance of 
 Virginia from ^lassachusetts. There is no need 
 for Ireland to starve herself of money in the 
 belief that a federal government at Westminster 
 must mean loss of self-government in Ireland. 
 And just because Ireland is not a backward race 
 or merely a wronged race, young England can- 
 not be content with the apphcation to her of the 
 policy of Indian reformers in the United States, 
 190 
 
IRELAND 
 
 "Give the Indian his portion and clear out.'* 
 The only thing that could prevent the inevi- 
 table righteous and peaceful settlement of the 
 Irish question would be a feeling in young Eng- 
 land that the Irish revolutionists have gained 
 applause not for all their aspirations and pohcies 
 with which young England ardently sym- 
 thized, but for the last mad mistake which led 
 young Ireland to desert the cause of liberty at 
 the very moment of Verdun. It is this applause 
 coming from America — the bitterness of Roman 
 Catholic pulpits in Boston and Chicago, the rail- 
 ings of mass meetings in New York, the irrespon- 
 sible perorations of Irish-American politicians 
 — that chiefly threatens the future of Ireland. 
 Young England saw a vision before the war, and 
 that vision has been confii-med by the sufferings 
 of the war. Young England will come back 
 from the trenches few (how few!) in numbers, 
 but with new determination for the future. 
 They cannot and will not accept from America 
 that last and worst doctrine of reaction, the 
 doctrine of Lot's wife, who, looking back on a 
 past already redeemed, remained a pillar of bit- 
 terness for all future generations. 
 191 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 THE SIAMESE TWIN 
 
 To talk about Ireland and omit Ulster is to 
 construct an Algebra by omitting cc, A portion 
 of Ulster is resolutely determined to stay outside 
 Irish self-government. This section is friendly 
 to England, is in favor of British rule in Ireland, 
 is Protestant, and is industrially a powerful 
 community. To go into the history of this di- 
 vision would be barren, so I pick up the situation 
 as it is to-day. A large number of young Irish 
 Nationalists wish the coming Ireland to be 
 a seamless garment, one and indivisible. A 
 famous song in Ireland is that of Thomas Davis, 
 "A Nation Once Again": 
 
 And then I prayed I yet might see 
 
 Our fetters rent in twain, 
 And Ireland, long a province, be 
 
 A nation once again. 
 
 The phrase "a nation once again" is as famous 
 in Ireland as "government of the people" among 
 us. When the plan of excluding certain coun- 
 ties of Ulster fell through, the sentiment of young 
 Nationalist Ireland turned against any compro- 
 mise which would omit any part of Ireland from 
 192 
 
IRELAND 
 
 Home Rule, and the song was parodied "Three 
 Quarters of a Nation Once Again." 
 
 A farcical skit was recently produced at the 
 Abbey Theater in Dublin, called "Partition." 
 It shows a house lying exactly on the border-hne 
 of Ulster and Leinster, so that one half the house 
 is in each province. ("There is a village," says 
 the program, "half of which would be under the 
 proposed Home Rule Jurisdiction and the other 
 half under the control of the Executive for the 
 excluded counties.") Andy Kelly, who lives in 
 the house, shifts his furniture to the Ulster side 
 when the Home Rule bailiffs come to sell him 
 up. When both sets of bailiffs come, he draws 
 a chalk mark, and piles his household stuff in the 
 center of the room. A fine scrap breaks out be- 
 tween the representatives of the two govern- 
 ments. Andy's summary of the situation is 
 this: 
 
 "I 'm a Siamese twin. I 'm a sort of a two in 
 wan, an' now look here, it 's the queerest thing 
 — what kind of a hole would ye be in if wan of 
 the twins was to steal somethin' an' maybe th' 
 other lad as innocent as a baby, shure ye could n't 
 cut them in two an' ye could n't put both o' them 
 193 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 in jail wid wan o' them maybe provin' an 
 alibi." 
 
 The play ends with "General fighting, furni- 
 ture all over the place, women screaming. The 
 village cornet-player is heard in the distance 
 playing 'A Nation Once Again.' " As the cur- 
 tain falls, Andy says, "Begobs the Siamese t^vins 
 will be kilt and buried in the wan coffin." 
 
 Professor John MacNeill, who was head of the 
 Irish Volunteers before the Easter Rising, and 
 who is now serving a life sentence in prison as a 
 "rebel," wrote concerning the Ulster cul de sac: 
 
 "I urge the Irish people to permit no sur- 
 render on the partition question." 
 
 And these are his reasons : 
 
 Politically speaking, Ulster is made up of a compact 
 Nationalist West in Donegal, a less intact Unionist 
 East in Antrim and Down, with two great Nationalist 
 limbs and two great Unionist limbs alternately lying 
 almost from side to side of the province. If you take 
 two of those horseshoe-shaped breakfast rolls and 
 dovetail one into the other, you will have a rough ap- 
 proximate plan of political Ulster. 
 
 The partition of Ulster would give rise to a state of 
 things for which one would have to go to the Balkan pen- 
 insula under the Disraelian "settlement" for a parallel. 
 194 
 
IRELAND 
 
 If you cut the more compact areas of the Plantation 
 off from Ireland de jure and de facto, you will make 
 a real enemy of their inhabitants, and arm them with 
 greater powers of mischief than they have ever pos- 
 sessed since the days when the old race and the new 
 were at open war. You would have a recognized 
 Lesser Britain, and a lesser Britain irredenta stretching 
 right through the heart of Ulster, with kinsmen and 
 sympathizers all over Ireland. What opportunities 
 for a lively time ! And the Ireland irredenta made fast 
 in the midst of the British territory would not be be- 
 hindhand. 
 
 If Catholic and Protestant roughly correspond in 
 Ireland to Nationalist and anti-Nationalist, there must 
 be some other cause than religious sentiment operating 
 through religious sentiment to create national disunion. 
 
 The Ulster Unionist has been taught to regard him- 
 self as a full-blooded Teuton and his Catholic neighbor 
 as a full-blooded Celt. It is not a fact of race, but 
 an illusion of race, that makes Ulster Unionists pro- 
 British and anti-Irish. 
 
 There are not two Irish nations. A foreign "fac- 
 tion" is a familiar feature in many a national history. 
 We have in the Irish nation of to-day a foreign fac- 
 tion. I have found myself in Belfast right in the zone 
 of fire between two stone throwing mobs, one Catholic, 
 the other Protestant. Nobody will persuade me that 
 either Irish nationality or British supremacy was the 
 spirit that projected those showers of missiles. It was 
 195 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 simple primitive savagery with religion for an excuse 
 and politics for a super-excuse. 
 
 Suppose we Nationalists declare every man who 
 uses anti-Protestant party cries, or in any way inter- 
 feres with Protestant demonstrations, to be the worst 
 enemy of his country's cause. I would begin the task 
 of persuasion with the economic unity of Ireland as 
 the main argument. Once Ireland ceases to be a goose 
 to be plucked, it will be impossible to persuade the 
 English people to charge themselves any longer with 
 responsibility for her internal affairs. With the ex- 
 cess of Irish taxation once down, the burden of Irish 
 internal administration would have been unshouldered 
 by the British Parliament. Home Rule without finan- 
 cial reform is a mere fantasy. So long as Ireland con- 
 sents to pay Great Britain three millions a year clear 
 profit for being misgoveraed, so long will the Unionist 
 Party succeed in persuading the British elector to make 
 no rash changes. It is safe to say that one-tenth or 
 £30,000 is drawn out of the city of Belfast alone, and 
 one-fifth, £60,000, is filched from the Unionists of Ul- 
 ster. The question for Nationalists is the money 
 question. The country will soon want to know what 
 its political leaders are going to do about this appal- 
 ling robbery. No self-government worth having will 
 ever be gained except by the previous victory of a 
 practically united Ireland over British spoliation. 
 
 I give his analysis in detail, because it is the 
 196 
 
IRELAND 
 
 clear expression of a wide-spread, subconscious 
 desire of Irish Nationalists for a united Ireland. 
 James Stephens, the charming Irish writer 
 whose "Crock of Gold" and "Here Are Ladies" 
 are known to American readers, says in inter- 
 preting the desire of Ireland to assume control 
 of her national life : 
 
 This ideal of freedom has captured the imagination 
 of the race. It rides Ireland like a nightmare, thwart- 
 ing or preventing all civilizing or cultural work in this 
 country. 
 
 And the way to obtain freedom he gives : 
 
 The safeguards which Ulster will demand, should 
 events absolutely force her to it, may sound political or 
 religious, they will be found essentially economic, and 
 the root of them all will be a water-tight friendship 
 with England. We must swallow England if Ulster is 
 to swallow us. 
 
 Opposed, then, to the idea of an Ulster bit- 
 terly hostile to any form of union with the rest 
 of Ireland, we have the plan of a colonial self- 
 government for Ireland inside the British com- 
 monwealth, with a guaranteed friendliness of re- 
 lationship with England and with Ulster. 
 
 How to obtain this in practice? An answer 
 197 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 was given to me by A. E. A. E. is the greatest 
 living "pure" Irishman. By his "purity" I mean 
 that he has lived his life in Ireland instead of 
 crossing the channel for his career like Shaw. 
 Many Irishmen of talent have transplanted 
 themselves where fame and power and the de- 
 lightful contacts of a prosperous civilization can 
 be had on easy terms. But Paris and New York 
 and London have piped in vain to George Rus- 
 sell. Poet, dramatist, journalist, editor, painter, 
 essayist, prophet of cooperation, organizer — he 
 has carried on his various and vital activities in 
 his homeland. "A. E. is the one great thing left 
 to us besides the Nelson Pillar," said James 
 Stephens to me. Russell writes one of the rich- 
 est and most perfect prose styles of the present 
 day, and he has devoted that technic to the 
 production of "The Homestead," the official 
 organ of the Irish cooperative movement. Very 
 literally he stands on Irish soil, and speaks 
 to the peasant population. He is fifty-one years 
 old, with the laughter and generous heart of a 
 boy, and he will die with all his fine hopes in him. 
 There is something chivalrous about him, some- 
 thing young and fierce and burning. His face 
 198 
 
IRELAND 
 
 is the face of the portrait of William Morris: 
 the abundant beard, the living eyes, the look of 
 the mystic who puts his dreams into action. He 
 is the same sort of many-handed, many-minded 
 man. This is the way out of the English-Ulster- 
 Nationalist muddle as he sees it and as he gave 
 it to me. To get the full drive of it, one must 
 see the bulky, shaggy man, simpler and more 
 human than most men, with fun and vitality in 
 his talk. He said: 
 
 The Irish question is not only national, but involves 
 questions of international economics. Irish linen is 
 sent over the world. Belfast ships are sold to British 
 and American buyers. Belfast ginger-ale is sold in 
 California. Industrial Ulster fears the laws that 
 would be passed in a legislature where seventy-five per 
 cent, of the members would be representatives of small 
 farmers, men whose views are parochial and who have 
 no knowledge of the intricate problems manufacturers 
 engaged in international trade have to solve. Irish 
 Nationalists ought to meet those views, and prove to 
 Ulster that her trade interests would not be preju- 
 diced in an Irish parliament, and give real and not 
 verbal guarantees on this point. Protestant Ulster 
 fears religious discrimination in a parliament which 
 might be three-quarters Roman Catholic. The most 
 powerful political organization in Ireland, the Ancient 
 199 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Order of Hibernians, is a sectarian and semi-secret 
 society of which no Protestant can be a member. Ul- 
 ster has some reason to be troubled. When we con- 
 sider Home Rule for Ireland, there are five things 
 which must be considered: 
 
 1. The point of view of Great Britain. Great Brit- 
 ain will always rightly demand that Ireland be friendly 
 to the imperial alliance. It is clearly impossible that 
 England should allow an unfriendly power to have free- 
 dom for independent action in Ireland. 
 
 2. The point of view of the Irish Nationalists. 
 They desire the political unity of Ireland, and will not 
 have partition. They desire full Irish control over the 
 trade policy and over taxation. Until they win that 
 full control, they will have continuous agitation and 
 there will be unfriendly feelings between the two coun- 
 tries. 
 
 The point of view of Ulster in the following matters : 
 Ulster requires assurances that the self-governing 
 Ireland she enters into will be friendly to Great Brit- 
 ain. Ulster carries on an immense trade with Eng- 
 land. She builds ships for England. She exports 
 linen and other goods. She has orders from great 
 shipping firms and from the admiralty. These orders 
 would not go to a self-governing Ireland with nagging, 
 unfriendly politicians in control, and Ulster's trade 
 would decline. She could be crippled economically by 
 race hatreds expressed In an Irish parliament. 
 200 
 
IRELAND 
 
 Ulster demands guaranties both economic and reli- 
 gious as to her own position in a self-governing Ire- 
 land. The Nationalists should meet Ulster on all 
 these points. It should be demonstrated to her that 
 under Home Rule Ireland will be friendly to Great 
 Britain, and just to the religious and industrial life 
 of Ulster. Nationalists, in my opinion, should offer 
 Ulster political power equal to her economic power. 
 This might be arranged partly by proportional repre- 
 sentation by dividing Ireland into twelve great constit- 
 uencies, so that the Protestants could return members 
 from districts where they are now without a repre- 
 sentative. I suggest also that the senate, or upper 
 house, should have a veto power for a certain number 
 of years until the traditions of government were fixed, 
 say ten or twelve years, and that a majority of mem- 
 bers in the senate for that time should be nominated 
 by Ulster. We have a model in the Canadian Senate, 
 which is always packed with a majority adverse to the 
 party in power. This is accomplished by permitting 
 the party in power to nominate vacancies in the senate. 
 The party coming in finds a majority of the opposing 
 party in the Senate, and the old party so retains a 
 measure of control. The Irish senate might be formed 
 on the assumption that Irish Unionists had gone out 
 of power and had left the senate packed with a two- 
 thirds majority of their party. Such a device could 
 not be continued indefinitely because it is not demo- 
 201 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 cratic. But use that method for ten or twelve or even 
 fifteen years until the political tradition of self-gov- 
 ernment had become fixed and Ulster is reassured. 
 For the Irish question, we need a psychological solu- 
 tion, because in the years of dissension the people have 
 tied their souls into knots. I am sure the Ulster men 
 Would not use the power of veto against national in- 
 terests for the period they were given it. 
 
 Sir Edward Carson has said that what Ulster 
 feared was not bad law-making. "What we do fear 
 is oppressive administration." They fear that public 
 offices will be packed with friends of the party in power, 
 that the policy of "to the victors belong the spoils" 
 will be practised. It is necessary to reassure Ulster 
 that all public posts would be removed from jobbery, 
 and that merit should have its open chance of win- 
 ning promotion. The way to do this is to make all 
 government positions, all posts paid for out of public 
 moneys, whether under boards of guardians or county 
 councils, part of a national civil service, so that job- 
 bery on account of religion or politics would be im- 
 possible. Along these lines of concession and balance 
 of power I do not regard the special Ulster problem 
 as insoluble. 
 
 England should make the Irish question a national 
 question with herself, not a party question. When- 
 ever war is on, a coalition government is formed. So 
 it should be in dealing with Ireland. Ireland should 
 202 
 
IRELAND 
 
 be treated by a coalition of forces in England, con- 
 sidering its Irish polity as a national question. If 
 Ireland were so dealt with, the opposition of Ulster to 
 settlement would lessen. 
 
 The present method of splitting Ireland and mis- 
 governing it has led to a reduction of its population by 
 one-half in seventy years. That is bad for Ireland 
 and it is bad for England, because Ireland's exiles in 
 other countries develop bad feeling against England. 
 
 There are only two ways to deal with Ireland, either 
 complete union, with absolute equality, or else com- 
 plete Irish control of purely Irish affairs. The Home 
 Rule bill as passed would not settle the question, be- 
 cause it does not grant to Ireland the fixing of taxa- 
 tion and the trade policy. Whoever has financial and 
 economic control of a people fixes the character of the 
 civilization of that people. There is no British reason 
 for passing a Home Rule bill unless to settle the ques- 
 tion. Either England must control Ireland by making 
 Irish people into English people in sentiment and cul- 
 ture, or else she must grant to Ireland the status of a 
 dominion. England must retain control of military, 
 naval, and foreign policy. Let Ireland send repre- 
 sentatives not to the British Parliament, but to the 
 new imperial parliament, which is certain to be formed 
 after the war. Let her pay her contribution to im- 
 perial defense prepared by assessors appointed for 
 that purpose by Great Britain and the dominions. 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 What we should aim at is a kind of Sinn Fein impe- 
 rialism, a complete control of internal affairs and a 
 participation in the empire's polity. 
 
 The feeling for complete independence had gradu- 
 ally been dying down to a romantic feeling such as 
 Scotchmen feel for Prince Charlie. Then came the 
 Ulster and Nationalist Volunteers, the recruiting cam- 
 paign, the rebellion, the executions, martial law, and 
 the old feeling rose up again. It has become an in- 
 tolerable nuisance not to have these political questions 
 settled. I think myself too much importance is at- 
 tached to the location of government, and I have my- 
 self more hope in voluntary economic and cultural 
 movements than in acts of Parliament. But with the 
 present political unrest, there is no fixed policy in the 
 economic life of Ireland. Business men wish a fixed 
 policy. They wish to have more certitude in business 
 matters. If Ireland was contented, it could turn to 
 the problems of internal government. We have over 
 two thousand national teachers paid less than thirty 
 ' pounds a year. The money has been put on the con- 
 stabulary, which is over-manned. A government has 
 its choice of leaving people ignorant and spending 
 money on a police force to keep them in order or of 
 educating them and cutting down the constabulary. 
 England plumped for the police. No country can gov- 
 ern another country properly, and never has any 
 country done so. Countries can unite with another in 
 W4i 
 
IRELAND 
 
 a federation, but no country can rule another. You 
 see the attempt made by Germans and Russians in 
 Poland. But it can only succeed by exterminating the 
 people governed. The plantations in Ireland were an 
 attempt at that. 
 
 In the last one hundred years Ireland lost the power 
 to speak Gaelic. Only 600,000 of her people speak 
 the language to-day. And yet Gaelic literature con- 
 tains the dreams and soul of the Irish people for two 
 thousand years. It is one of the oldest and most beau- 
 tiful literatures in Europe. That lost race memory is 
 a loss in the dignity and spirituality of their life. 
 Imagine the Greeks without Homer. So it has been 
 of late with the Irish in the loss of their national lit- 
 erature — legends and poetry. The Irish do not read 
 English literature nor have they accepted English cul- 
 ture. That ancient literature of theirs ran like an 
 underground river for the last century till it came well- 
 ing up again in Standish O'Grady, Stephens, Yeats, 
 and Synge. There is a reshaping of legendary tales, 
 and Anglo-Irish literature will be powerfully affected. 
 Gaelic schools have sprung up. O'Grady and Synge 
 knew Gaelic. Padraic Colum knows it. Stephens can 
 read it. MacDonagh and Pearse knew it. The Celtic 
 spirit of Ireland is emerging in the poems and tales 
 of modern Anglo-Celtic literature which are as accept- 
 able to Ulster as to the rest of Ireland. 
 
 A. E.'s solution, then, is to clear the political 
 205 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 question by concession and guaranty, to forget it, 
 and to get down to business — ^the business being 
 cooperation. Is this the dream of Ireland's most 
 glorious dreamer, or is there salvation that way? 
 
 I left Mr. Russell, and stepped down-stairs in 
 Plunkett House to the executive offices of the 
 cooperative movement. 
 
 "While the gun-running was on," said one of 
 the cooperative organizers to me, " our move- 
 ment was including both parties in the fight. 
 Carson's men were arming themselves, and the 
 Volunteers were arming against them. But 
 both sets were working together in our society. 
 Each had their guns buried with which to shoot 
 the other, but they were busy in one creamery, 
 working in harmony, and pooling their economic 
 life. They differ pohtically, but their interests 
 are one." 
 
 poverty: the real irish question 
 
 The real Irish question is poverty. Agricul- 
 tural labor receives less than three dollars a week. 
 The tenant and owner and laborer, when av- 
 eraged up, receive only $3.50 a week. Even the 
 brief and dubious money gains of war-time are 
 206 
 
IRELAND 
 
 not an offset for depreciated "plant," and the 
 stock of cattle and equipment of agricultural 
 utensils are steadily depreciating in these days of 
 an increased export trade. The slums of Irish 
 cities are among the worst in Europe. Dublin 
 is known as the "one-room city," because over 
 sixty thousand of her people are congested. 
 Industrial labor is underpaid. Preferential 
 through rates on the railroads have given Irish 
 markets to Enghsh producers. Many of the 
 farms are too small for economic worldng, and 
 what there is of them is not good enough soil. 
 Much of the best tillage remains in the hands of 
 the landlords, and is used for gi-azing instead of 
 for the production of crops. The hope of Ire- 
 land lies in trade-unionism, education, and coop- 
 eration. Ireland's real problem is to increase 
 production and distribute prosperity. 
 
 I found Ireland stimulated by the report that 
 Henry Ford was planning a factory in Cork. 
 He was said to have taken an option on a race- 
 course, to plan the diversion of the river, and to 
 guarantee a minimum wage of twenty-one shil- 
 lings to his workers. The story ran that he had 
 visited his mother's birthplace in Cork, and out 
 207 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 of the personal tie grew his plan to revive the 
 industrial life of Ireland. If the very i-umor has 
 given cheer to an underpaid population, how 
 much new hope will flow in if Irish-Americans, 
 whose hearts bleed for Ireland, will invest some 
 of their money in Irish agriculture and industry ! 
 A few million dollars invested where their heart 
 is will relieve a pressure on Ireland, which to-day 
 is resulting in bad housing, under-nourishment, 
 overwork, and an undue proportion of pauperism. 
 The real Irish question is not solved by political 
 wrangling and chronically jangled nerves inside 
 the island, or by hot temper at long distance. 
 The Irish- Americans who have planted the tradi- 
 tion of Ireland's wrongs in the United States 
 are two generations out of date. If they would 
 get into touch with young Ireland, they would 
 find they were chewing over stale grievances 
 which the march of thought has long passed by. 
 They are as much out of date as Marxian so- 
 cialists. The present campaign is based on 
 concrete issues, requiring a record of facts, and 
 organization. American money is not needed 
 for nationalistic propaganda. It is needed for 
 agricultural and industrial development. Our 
 208 
 
IRELAND 
 
 rich Irish-Americans can do an immense service 
 to Ireland. They can aid to set her free, but not 
 by parhamentary debates, speech-making cam- 
 paigns, and pitiful, abortive rebelhons. They 
 can set her free by standing security for land 
 improvement, better housing, the purchase of 
 machinery and fertilizer plants. 
 
 Had the Irish question been settled (by the 
 Irish question I must insist that I mean not the 
 comic-opera politics of gun-running, but the 
 agricultural and industrial redemption of Ire- 
 land) , this war would have been an easier task for 
 England. The submarine blockade would have 
 been a minor factor. Ireland's natural market 
 is England. England is on an industrial basis, 
 and needs the food-stuff of an agricultural coun- 
 try like Ireland. Every mistake England has 
 made in the long past in Ireland has cost her 
 severely in money and lives in this war. A 
 unified, economically prosperous Ireland could 
 have fed England, and left her free to raise her 
 army and make munitions, and the submarine 
 would have been powerless to touch one shipload 
 of produce plying across the Irish Channel. As 
 it is, England has had to buy her supplies from 
 209 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 several nations, and the long sea-haul has been 
 over open waters where the submarine has sunk 
 an ever-growing number of food-ships. By 
 postponing the settlement of Ireland's status as 
 an autonomous nation inside the British com- 
 monwealth, England has lessened her own food- 
 supply and lengthened the war. As long as 
 Ireland is politically in a fever, she refuses to 
 settle down to her real job of mastering the con- 
 ditions of her own life, which will be determined 
 by better land and more land, better methods of 
 cropping, fertilizers, machinery, labor supply, 
 organization for producing and selling, and rail- 
 road facilities. There would be little value in 
 writing one more contentious article on Ireland. 
 So with the charges of a national incompetency 
 and inefficiency, which those who deny self- 
 government to Ireland allege as the ground for 
 their denial. They find this incapacity due to 
 three defects in Irish character: laziness, a tend- 
 ency to dissension, and a tendency to grafting. 
 They say that the Irishman is not a confirmed 
 worker, that he loves to wrangle, and that he 
 favors his friends at the expense of his com- 
 munity when he is in political office. The Irish 
 210 
 
IRELAND 
 
 reply, "the penal laws, the ascendancy system, the 
 union with its anti-Irish 'National ' schools, its 
 *West Briton' ideals, martial law, these are the 
 causes of that national incompetency of ours." 
 One remembers in this connection the famous 
 passage of Graham Wallas in *'The Great 
 Society" on the rights of little nations : 
 
 Athens during the last quarter of the fifth century 
 B. c. was not well governed ; and if the British Empire 
 had then existed, and if Athens had been brought within 
 it, the administration of the city would undoubtedly 
 have been improved in some important respects. But 
 one does not like to imagine the effect on the intellec- 
 tual output of the fifth century b. c. if even the best 
 of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's public-school subalterns had 
 stalked daily through the agora, snubbing, as he passed, 
 that intolerable bounder Euripides, or clearing out of 
 his way the probably seditious group that were gath- 
 ered round Socrates. 
 
 The time for argument on what Matthew 
 Arnold called "barren logomachies" is past. Ire- 
 land will soon receive her independence in the 
 British commonwealth. The time for action has 
 come, and that action must proceed out of Irish- 
 men in productive agi-iculture, efficient industry, 
 and clean and tolerant government. 
 211 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Among the happy communities of the past 
 were the Greek city states, the twelfth-century 
 communes, and the pioneering settlements of 
 America. They were happy because the citizens 
 had a measure of equalitj^ and because the terms 
 of life included spiritual values. Life was not 
 organization, knowledge, work, pleasure, effi- 
 ciency, but through these means developed an 
 excellence of its own finer than the machinery 
 through which it functioned and the material on 
 which it worked. By the natural conditions of 
 the country and the temperament of the people 
 Ireland is fitted to be one of the happy commmii- 
 ties of human history instead of a land of sorrows. 
 Peasant proprietorship in a fertile country 
 among a people of social and imaginative nature 
 ought to take the curse from life, because life 
 under such conditions offers equality, intercourse, 
 prosperity, and a free play for spiritual values. 
 
 No old time battle-cry or politico-economic 
 dogma can survive in the light of to-day's facts. 
 Landlordism was the old cry, and it expressed a 
 hideous injustice. But "if all rent were abol- 
 ished in Ireland to-morrow the chief difficulties 
 of the Irish farmer would remain what they are. 
 S12 
 
IRELAND 
 
 It would not raise the price of anything the 
 farmer has to sell, or increase the produce of an 
 acre of his land." "The long war over the land, 
 which resulted in the transference of the land 
 from landlord to cultivator, has advanced us part 
 of the way, but the land acts offered no complete 
 solution. We were assured by hot enthusiasts 
 of the magic of proprietorship, but Ireland has 
 not tilled a single acre more since the land acts 
 were passed. The welfare of Ireland depends 
 mainly upon the welfare of the Irish farmer." 
 
 So it is worth considering his case in detail. A 
 clear statement of it is given by A. E., who is 
 one of the three men at the head of the cooperative 
 movement. He says: 
 
 The small farmer is the typical Irish countryman. 
 The average area of an Irish farm is twenty-five acres 
 or thereabouts. We can imagine to ourselves an Irish 
 farmer with twenty-five acres to till, lord of a herd 
 of four or five cows, a drift of sheep, a litter of pigs, 
 perhaps a mare and foal : call him Patrick Malony and 
 accept him as symbol of his class. . . . He is fruitful 
 enough. There is no race suicide in Ireland. His 
 agriculture is largely traditional. His butter, his 
 eggs, his cattle, horses, pigs, and sheep are sold to 
 local dealers. He might be described almost as the 
 213 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 primitive economic caveman, the darkness of his cave 
 unillumined by any ray of general principles. . . . 
 The culture of the Gaelic poets and story-tellers, while 
 not often actually remembered, still lingers like a fra- 
 grance about his mind. We ponder over Patrick, his 
 race, and his country, brooding whether there is the 
 seed of a Pericles in Patrick's loins. Could we carve an 
 Attica out of Ireland? 
 
 Before Patrick can become the father of a Pericles, 
 before Ireland can become an Attica, Patrick must be 
 led out of his economic cave. . . . Our poets sang of 
 a united Ireland, but the unity they sang of was only 
 a metaphor. It mainly meant separation from an- 
 other country. Individualism, fanatically centering 
 itself on its family and family interests, interfered on 
 public boards to do jobs in the interests of its kith 
 and kin. The cooperative movement connects with liv- 
 ing links the home, the center of Patrick's being, to 
 the nation, the circumference of his being. ... I be- 
 lieve the fading hold the heavens have over the world 
 is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual 
 life. The cooperative movement alone of all move- 
 ments in Ireland has aspired to make an economic soli- 
 darity in Ireland. 
 
 The social and economic service of coopera- 
 tion is this: it enables farmers to own and 
 use modern machinery, to buy feeding material, 
 manures, and seeds, and to construct fertilizer 
 214? 
 
IRELAND 
 
 plants at low cost, standard quality, and on large 
 scale. It gives control over markets, and slowly 
 improves the transportation facilities for produce. 
 It sells to advantage through its own agents 
 instead of through a long circuit of middlemen. 
 It gives a system for borrowing money at a lower 
 interest and for a longer term. It pools the ideas 
 of many men and gives an interchange and inter- 
 action of ideas, leading to close, hard economic 
 thinking, invention and discovery, and a wide- 
 spread intellectual fertilization. In one place 
 where a creamery was nearly started, the cooper- 
 ators report, the whole scheme was destroyed by 
 the announcement of a leader of public opinion 
 that "every pound of butter must be made on 
 Nationalist principles or not at all." But the 
 work of uncoiling ancient grievance from con- 
 structive enterprise goes on, and prosperity cures 
 ill will. You will see in a single village the 
 cooperative societies supplying seeds, manures, 
 and machinery to the farmers, establishing 
 credits, marketing eggs gathered by the women, 
 running a station to improve the breed of poul- 
 try, conducting a knitting industry, and selhng 
 groceries and provisions. 
 215 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 There comes a limit of saturation, and coop- 
 eration has probably sucked up as many peasants 
 as its present capacity admits. That capacity 
 must be increased if cooperation is to increase 
 in the next twenty years at the rate of the last 
 twenty. More and better land, now held by 
 landlords for grazing, must be freed for tillage. 
 The existent railways must provide better facili- 
 ties for farmers. A system of spur railways to 
 mine-pit heads and of light railways through 
 neglected districts must be established. The 
 village of Belmullet in western Mayo is forty- 
 six miles from a railroad. There are anthracite 
 seams a few miles out from Dublin. Seven miles 
 of light railway, at a cost of $1,250,000, would 
 connect the mine with its market, and reduce the 
 cost of that coal from forty-three or forty-five 
 shillings to twenty-five shillings. One of the 
 young Irish leaders says, "Any extensive work- 
 ing of Irish coal or copper is contingent on the 
 assent of the vast British mining interest to Irish 
 competition." The creation of machinery and 
 fertilizer must be undertaken on a larger scale. 
 In short, production must be increased by the 
 application of capital. Can that capital be 
 216 
 
IRELAND 
 
 found? Will it be by Irish parliamentary grant, 
 by Irish taxation, or by foreign investment, or 
 will the coopSrators themselves be willing to lay 
 aside a percentage of their profit for the purpose 
 of extending the movement till it has embraced 
 all Ireland? A solution must be found, for a 
 movement either grows or dies. 
 
 The present situation is abnormal. The 
 estimated value of Irish exports to Great Britain 
 for 1916 is over two hundred million dollars' 
 worth. Before the war they averaged about one 
 hundred and forty millions. A clear gain in 
 money of sixty million dollars has flowed in to 
 Irish farmers. Fish, butter, and eggs have at 
 times been held up for lack of shipping, but that 
 is because the shipping has been destroyed on 
 other hauls, which would have been unnecessary 
 if Irish agriculture were developed up to capac- 
 ity. 
 
 Ireland sends live stock and the produce of 
 hve stock to Great Britain. She sends sheep and 
 mutton, bacon, ham, live pigs, poultry, butter, 
 and eggs. Next to the production of live stock, 
 the marketing of butter is the most important 
 industry. The farmer has received increased 
 217 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 prices to account for most of this gain, but the 
 production also has been somewhat increased. 
 Some of this extra money has gone for increased 
 cost of production, feeding stuffs, and fertihzer. 
 The rest of the money has been banked. 
 
 "The last two years are the most phenomenal 
 in Ireland's history," says the department of 
 agriculture, and they tell me that "the farmer 
 has come off in a gold coach" during these war 
 months. Plunkett House, headquarters of the 
 cooperators, tells me that there is undoubtedly 
 more money return, but that the farmer's hve- 
 stock has been sold, and must be replaced, and 
 that his plant has deteriorated, so that he is n't 
 any better off in productive wealth. Such a 
 thing as agreement on any matter in Ireland is 
 not obtainable in the present atmosphere of pas- 
 sion. It is probable that the law of gravitation 
 violates the Sinn Fein principle of self-help, and 
 that the ethics of the gospel are under suspicion 
 in four counties of Ulster. "What too many 
 people in Ireland mistake for thoughts are feel- 
 ings. Passion has become dominant in our pol- 
 itics." But in the end Ireland must be ruled not 
 by rhetoric, but by "first-class thinking on the 
 ai8 
 
IRELAND 
 
 life of the countryman. The genius of rural Hfe 
 has not yet appeared." 
 
 The Irish situation is the heritage of landlord- 
 ism, usury, famine, land legislation, grazing, emi- 
 gration. When these had operated, Ireland was 
 reduced in population, and the good land was let 
 out in vast grazing tracts, and the poorer land 
 was crowded by farmers. These crowded areas 
 are called congested districts. The congested- 
 districts board exists for the purpose of cutting 
 those areas up into holdings, enlarging existing 
 holdings till they become a "paying proposition" 
 instead of uneconomic, making roads, and creat- 
 ing new holdings. This is a long job, and will 
 consume many years before completion. It re- 
 quires both time and money, and there is a short- 
 age of money, as the British Government has shut 
 down on the extension of financial help. 
 
 "Counties like Meath, with the richest land in 
 Ireland, are under grass and virtually destitute 
 of all life save the bullocks which graze in their 
 fields." 
 
 The total cultivated area of Ireland is 2,400,- 
 000 acres. In pasture and grazed mountain 
 land there remain 12,500,000 acres. Live stock 
 219 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 is to crop production as four is to three. There 
 were 500,000 acres ill wheat iii 1851. In 1914 
 there were 36,000, a decrease of 92^4 per cent. 
 The total decrease in tillage has been seventy per 
 cent. Eleven per cent, of Ireland is now arable 
 land, and sixty-four per cent, hay and pasture. 
 Eleven per cent, of France is hay and pasture, 
 and tifty-two per cent, arable land. 
 
 The land acts are permissive, not compulsory, 
 and the landlord can refuse to sell. He does so 
 refuse, and continues to hold the land for graz- 
 ing. Compulsory purchase was proposed in a 
 bill, but the landlords' convention rejected the 
 bill, and the British Government was miwilling 
 to press a contentious measure. 
 
 While I was in Ireland tlie Earl of ]SIeath had 
 his estate agent wTite in reply to a retjuest that 
 he allow his uncultivated land to be parceled out 
 for the production of food: 
 
 His lordship is in sympathy with the general idea 
 that more land should, during the war, be brought under 
 cultivation for the production of food. Lord Meath 
 has not a large quantity of land in Bray, and he would 
 be glad to know if others, who may have more, have 
 been approached by your society and. if not, why this 
 
IRELAND 
 
 has not been done. He considers that the supply of 
 milk in a populous district like Bra}' is a more pressing 
 question than that of any other kind of food, and that 
 any diminution in grazing lands would inevitably raise 
 its price. For these reasons Lord Meath cannot see 
 his way to accede to your request. 
 
 In his case the request had been made that a 
 portion of land be given to meet the national 
 need. But the same refusal is widely met when 
 compensation is offered. By a liberal use of 
 state credit the farmer has got back some of the 
 land which was taken away from his gi-andf ather. 
 He has paid a fair price for purchase, which is 
 from twenty to forty per cent, below his old 
 rents. One farmer, for instance, now pays four- 
 teen pounds a year toward the purchase of his 
 holding where he used to pay eighteen pounds in 
 rent. But the process is slow and partial. So 
 in Ireland to-day there is still an unappeased land 
 hunger. Still the holdings are often too small 
 and too poor. Still half the land is held by land- 
 lords, and agriculture is crippled. The Irish 
 radicals write of the late Home Rule Bill : 
 
 There is no provision for ever transferring land pur- 
 chase in Ireland to the control of the Irish Parliament. 
 221 
 
IXSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 It will be at least eighty years before land purchase 
 is completed. 
 
 There are five million good acres which ought 
 to be brought back under tillage at once. If any 
 of this land could be held by the farmer on a full 
 year's lease, it would come under the teniis of 
 the "agricultural holding" acts, and automatic- 
 ally would be open for tillage. But the land- 
 lord lets it out for grazmg for eleven montlis. and 
 then snaps it back for the last month, so as to 
 evade the provisions of the law. Tliis "eleven 
 months' lease'' is as noisome in Ireland a^ the in- 
 junction in America. As there is an inmiediate 
 market for cattle, the small farmers bid against 
 one another for grazing land. They caimot af- 
 ford to wait for the slower greater market for 
 grain which would be theirs if they boycotted the 
 grazing lands till the owners sold them for tillage. 
 Xothing short of a mandatory state policy will 
 cure tliis priman- cause of Irish poverty. 
 
 Every statement of an economic situation re- 
 quires careful qualification. Ireland has made a 
 steady gain since the ebb-tide of the 1850's. Her 
 deposits and cash balances in joint-stock banks, 
 post-office and trustee savings-banks, were re- 
 
IRELAND 
 
 cently $410,000,000 as against $145,000,000 in 
 1871. She held $23.5,000,000 in government 
 stocks two years ago. The business of the rail- 
 ways nearly doubled in thirty years, though much 
 of this money went into Enghsh hands, and the 
 railway system is imperfect and ununified. In 
 1871 her emigration was 71,000; in 1914, 20,- 
 000. No picture of degeneration fits the facts. 
 But the reconstructive legislation and state 
 grants and credit system have brought Ireland 
 only half-way. A bolder, more drastic program 
 must now be adopted if she is to overcome pov- 
 erty and become the productive country which 
 is her true destiny. Machinery and fertilizer 
 must be purchased on a far larger scale, the land 
 must be opened up, a better system of cropping 
 used, factories for agricultural plant must be es- 
 tabhshed, housing must be bettered. Faith in 
 her future is what Ireland needs from her friends, 
 and money as the expression of that faith. The 
 labor- and trade-unionists of Ireland have faced 
 this situation, and their conference stated: 
 
 We demand that steps be taken immediately to bring 
 under cultivation large areas of the grazing lands — 
 by direct labor on an extensive scale under the Depart- 
 SS3 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ment ; by empowering County Councils to proceed on 
 similar lines; by calling upon all local authorities to 
 utilize every acre of suitable land within their areas 
 now lying idle for spade cultivation, for potatoes and 
 vegetables; by offering advances of capital to local 
 bodies where necessary to finance these schemes ; to 
 make unprofitable by punitive taxation the keeping out 
 of cultivation of excessive proportions of agricultural 
 holdings, and that the Government grant facilities for 
 the manufacture and importation of agricultural ma- 
 chinery and fertilizers and their distribution at actual 
 cost. 
 
 The Irish party's committee on food supply 
 protests against the delays of the past, and urges 
 that the congested-districts board and estates 
 commissioners should be equipped to proceed 
 with the permanent division of grass-lands. It 
 advocates compulsory tillage. This would mean 
 that the Government demands that the holder till 
 a percentage, say from ten to twenty-five per 
 cent, (later to be increased) of his land. The 
 small farmer would thus be required to till six or 
 seven acres instead of four or five. 
 
 His reply will be, "Where can I get the labor? 
 The disease which has attacked our great pop- 
 ulations here and in America is a discontent with 
 224 
 
IRELAND 
 
 rural life." In less than fifty years 300,000 agi'i- 
 cultural laborers have left the Irish fields for 
 American factories. Till the war fifty thousand 
 Irishmen every year went to England and Scot- 
 land for the harvest. (That fell to 13,000 in the 
 first year of the war.) The department of agri- 
 culture reports, "There has been for many years 
 a marked scarcity of agricultural laborers in Ire- 
 land." In 1871 there were 446,000 male agri- 
 cultural laborers and 62,000 female. In 1911 
 there were fewer than 200,000 male, and there 
 were only 4000 females. 
 
 The reason is plain: better wages are obtain- 
 able elsewhere. In 1914 the agricultural wage 
 of Ireland had a cash value of eleven shillings and 
 threepence a week. Why did not the farmer 
 pay more? He was not able to. The average 
 cash return to all classes connected with the farm, 
 farmer-owner, farmer-tenant, and laborer, when 
 added together and averaged, was only twelve 
 shillings and ninepence, so the farmer was pay- 
 ing all he could afford. 
 
 Only higher production, through better land, 
 machinery, and cooperation, can solve the wage 
 of the farm-hand. The laborers will never be 
 225 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 half so numerous as farmers, for Ireland is "a 
 country of small holdings, where the farmer and 
 his family are themselves laborers." The co- 
 operative ownership of expensive machinery will 
 increasingly lead to the communal employment 
 of the laborer as a skilled mechanic by the co- 
 operative community. If the belief of the co- 
 operators comes true, that in half a century the 
 whole business of rural Ireland (and that is 
 eighty per cent, of Ireland) will be done coopera- 
 tively, then we have the solution for the present 
 scarcity of labor. "The agricultural laborers 
 will gradually become skilled mechanics, able to 
 direct threshers, binders, diggers, cultivators, and 
 new implements we have no conception of. They 
 will be members of the society, sharing in its 
 profits in proportion to their wages, even as the 
 farmer will in proportion to his trade. The 
 laborers will form societies for collective farming 
 as in Rumania and Italy." It is possible that in 
 this direction may he the solution not only for the 
 laborer, but for the bringing of Ireland back to 
 tillage, for land purchase is doubtless dead. 
 Neither England nor Ireland will have any 
 money for land purchase after this war. The 
 
IRELAND 
 
 money will go into industry and for the wages of 
 industrial workers. But by letting out the great 
 grazing estates to groups of laborers, the produc- 
 tive power of Ireland will be increased. 
 
 There is no quick way through the tangle. 
 The Irish question can be solved only by the peo- 
 ple themselves. Can they create a good life for 
 their community ? Can they conduct a clean gov- 
 ernment ? Can they release productive power in 
 the nation, so that pauperism and ignorance and 
 dissension will decrease? Can they lift clear of 
 their past, forget injustice and misery, and es- 
 tabhsh a cooperative commonwealth? With the 
 coming of autonomy Ireland will begin to face 
 her real problem. 
 
 227 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 WHAT OF ENGLAND? 
 
 To feel the spirit of a nation at war is one thing 
 and an easy thing. You can not help being 
 caught into the current of their will and purpose. 
 But to convey that spirit to your busy friends 
 three thousand miles away is a much harder thing. 
 I have been going around from man to man in 
 England, trying to get just that phrase and sum- 
 mary which would make the British response 
 clear to our people. Each one of these men, who 
 has been good enough to pause in his war work 
 to help me, has given a flash of the island spirit. 
 
 Lord N^orthcliffe said to me; 
 
 "No one will accuse me of failing to criticize 
 the mistakes of the British army in the early 
 months. But I want you to know that to-day 
 we have the finest fighting-machine in the world. 
 It has taken time to build it, but now we have it. 
 Tell your people that." 
 
 228 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 Viscount Bryce said to me: 
 
 "The British people are unanimous as they 
 have never been before." 
 
 The pohce commissioner of Scotland Yard, in 
 charge of the secret service, said to me: 
 
 "Have you noticed in talking with the pacifists 
 how discouraged they seem? They have no sense 
 of a growing movement. They are disheartened 
 because the great mass of the British people are 
 not supporting them." Then he turned to his 
 telephone and gave instructions to call up Ports- 
 mouth and find out the time of arrival of the 
 hospital-ship. His wounded son was due home 
 from France. 
 
 G. K. Chesterton said to me : 
 
 "Democracy is on the march." His brother is 
 a private in the ranks. 
 
 Lloyd-George talked with me of the welfare 
 work carried on for the ministry of munitions by 
 Seebohm Rowntree, who has turned from his own 
 factories of six thousand workers to care for the 
 health of a million government employees. 
 
 "Here," said Lloyd-George, "is the greatest 
 attempt ever made by a government to surround 
 the lives of the workers with safeguards for their 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 health and well-being. And it was the making 
 of munitions that brought us to it. It was war 
 and shells. It is always true that humanity has 
 to descend into hell in order to rise again the 
 third day. It is only through hell that it can 
 achieve its resurrection." 
 
 But not all these distinguished men together 
 have quite revealed the central flame, and then 
 suddenly it was shown to me by a girl. She is a 
 wage-earner in London, and every day on her 
 way to her office she passes Fishmongers' Hall 
 by London Bridge. This ancient place has been 
 converted into a military hospital. To the house 
 surgeon she wrote this letter: 
 
 Dear Sir, I am taking the liberty to write to you 
 to ask if it is true that often a soldier's wound could 
 be the easier and the better healed were there plenty 
 of skin available to graft on to the wound? I have 
 been told that many wounds are badly healed because 
 the doctors cannot get skin. If this is so, I would con- 
 sider it an honor to be allowed to put myself at your 
 disposal at any time in order that my skin might be 
 taken to graft on to a wound ; I am prepared to ^ve 
 as much as would be practicable to take from me. 
 
 This is no impulsive movement on my part. I am 
 obliged to come to town each day to earn my own liv- 
 230 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 ing, and am therefore debarred from working for the 
 soldiers as other girls of my own age are doing. I have 
 two brothers fighting, and for their sakes I feel I 
 must do something. I am writing to your hospital 
 because I know of nowhere else; if you can find no 
 use for my services I shall be obliged if you will kindly 
 inform me where I could go. 
 
 WHY THEY WILL WIN 
 
 England is at war en masse, and the proof 
 of it is not that she has raised an army. Any 
 country can raise an army if it has to. The proof 
 of it is that she has changed a cherished habit. 
 That means a sph'itual change. It is a lot harder 
 to break up a habit than it is to fight an enemy. 
 The fact that two milUon persons are saving 
 money to give to the Government for carrying on 
 the war is the clearest single proof that the Eng- 
 lish nation is at war. By temperament the Eng- 
 lish are a colonizing, adventurous people. That 
 means they are an open-handed people, to whom 
 the careful ways of thrift are distasteful. Then, 
 too, they are a race of individualists, doing what 
 they hke with their own — a race to whom collec- 
 tive effort is a bore. But they violated their in- 
 stinct in order to win this war. For the English 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 were free spenders, and it revealed more devo- 
 tion in them to raise two hundred milhon dollars 
 in individual subscriptions than it did to raise 
 five million men in recruiting. 
 
 One has to show the English effort in these 
 broken bits and flashes rather than by any one 
 overmastering display. That is because Eng- 
 land is a tangled, self-willed democracy, of a vast 
 variety of purpose. But when England began 
 to alter its life, to sacrifice what was precious and 
 ancient, then it became clear that she had com- 
 mitted herself beyond recall, that she was moving 
 to an end beyond defeat. 
 
 The appeal for war savings was a general ap- 
 peal made to all classes of the country. It put 
 money into the hands of the Government with 
 which to wage war. That money is spent for 
 production by the nation instead of being spent 
 for consumption by the individual person. The 
 terms of the arrangement gave to the "saver" 
 security, an excellent rate of interest, and the op- 
 portunity of withdrawal at any time. This use 
 of money frees labor from "luxury" work to nec- 
 essary work. The man grooves a big gun in- 
 stead of pulling candy. The woman makes 
 232 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 shells instead of fancy waists. This release of 
 labor concentrates the national effort on the work 
 of victory instead of leaving the workers dis- 
 persed among parasitic trades. 
 
 The heart of the war-savings scheme is this: 
 you buy a "war-savings certificate" for fifteen 
 shillings and sixpence. In five years the Gov- 
 ernment will give you a pound for it. Less than 
 four dollars has become five dollars. Of course 
 the worker cannot make an investment of fifteen 
 shillings and sixpence at one time. So he joins 
 an association in his school, factory, store, or 
 club, and subscribes his pennj^ or sixpence each 
 week. These associations are like our fraternal 
 organizations. They appeal to the social sense 
 of the group. There are other forms of war sav- 
 ing, such as exchequer bonds, but this system of 
 certificate is the popular way. It is cooperative 
 investment. 
 
 If the person does not belong to an associa- 
 tion, he receives a war-savings card, with thirty- 
 one spaces on it, each for a sixpenny stamp. 
 He buys the stamps at the post-office as often as 
 he can. When the card is full, he hands it in, 
 and receives a certificate, worth fifteen shilhngs 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 and sixpence, and good for a pound at the end of 
 five years. 
 
 Such speakers as Lennox Gilmour of the na- 
 tional war-savings committee go around the coun- 
 try addressing men and women in factories, and 
 boys and girls in schools. This is one of the 
 stories used by Mr. Gilmour in his campaign : 
 
 "I met in a railway carriage a man who had 
 just returned from the front. He was a mem- 
 ber of the Army Service Corps, and I got into 
 conversation with him. In the course of our talk 
 he said: 
 
 " 'I am one of those chaps that always like to 
 prove what I say. Would you mind looking at 
 my pay-book.' 
 
 "This in support of some assertion he had 
 made. I replied that I should be delighted, and 
 I looked at his pay-book. The last entry was 
 three hundred francs, which he had drawn for his 
 holiday; and immediately in front of that there 
 was an entry, 'War-savings certificates £lO Is. 
 6d.,' which is the price of thirteen war-savings 
 certificates. 
 
 "I said, 'I see you have some of these war-sav- 
 ings certificates.' 
 
 234 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 " 'Yes, and I am going to get some more.' 
 
 " 'How did you get these?' 
 
 " 'Well,' he said, 'we get them in the squad- 
 ron.' 
 
 " 'Did any other chaps get them?' 
 
 " 'Oh, yes, they did.' 
 
 "I said, 'How did your squadron do?' 
 
 " 'Well,' he said, 'my squadron — it was given 
 out on parade that it was the backbone of the 
 whole lot.' 
 
 " 'What,' I asked, 'does that mean?' 
 
 " 'Well,' he said, 'I will tell you. There are 
 five squadrons in our base camp, and mine did 
 the best of the lot.' 
 
 " 'What did it do?' 
 
 " 'There are,' he said, 'a hundi-ed and fifty men 
 in a squadron, and we contributed £2239.' 
 
 " 'What,' I asked, 'did the other four squad- 
 rons do?' 
 
 "He laughed. 'They did £200 among them.' 
 
 " 'Well,' I said, 'there is always an explanation 
 for everything. Why did your squadron do so 
 well, and why did the other squadrons do so 
 poorly?' 
 
 " 'You see,' he replied, 'our major was keen, 
 235 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 and he spoke to eveiy one of us and told us what 
 we ought to do.' 
 
 "I asked, 'And the other majors, what did they 
 dor 
 
 " 'They handed out the leaflets.' " 
 
 That is the secret of the success which has at- 
 tended this evangelistic campaign. It is the per- 
 sonal appeal, friend speaking to friend. And 
 the motive for giving is rendered in the head- 
 lines of the pamphlets and posters; "Save for 
 England." "Save for your country." 
 
 In North Nibley, one of the smallest villages 
 in Gloucestershire, the inhabitants subscribed 
 eighty dollars in a fortnight. 
 
 Wigstan Magna, in Leicestershire, is in the cen- 
 ter of the hosiery and boot-making district. One 
 of the factories has between three hundred and 
 four hundred operatives. That factory pur- 
 chased two hundred certificates in one week. 
 
 Yarmouth has fifty associations and four thou- 
 sand members, and has subscribed ten thousand 
 dollars. This city lies on the east coast, where 
 the Zeppelins have stimulated the civilian con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 It was out from Grimsby where the fishing- 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 trawlers have been lost by mines and submarines. 
 The answer of Grimsby was made by seventy- 
 three war-savings associations. In one week 
 4600 certificates were purchased. 
 
 At an East End factory in London 123 girls 
 joined the savings cnisade in a single week. 
 Only two girls are not members. In three 
 months the girls saved over $250. They did it 
 by chipping in their threepenny and sixpemiy 
 bit each week. 
 
 Norwich paid into the post-office $75,000 in six 
 weeks. 
 
 The boot and shoe operatives of Northampton 
 are subscribing five thousand dollars a week. 
 
 Keithley, in Yorkshire, is the heart of the 
 woolen trade. It makes uniforms for the Rus- 
 sian army. It saves five thousand dollars a week, 
 an average of six shilhngs and eightpence for 
 every inhabitant. 
 
 The domestic servants of Gillingham in Kent 
 have united in a war-savings association. This 
 reminds me of the touching gift of ten shillings 
 which I once received from an English house- 
 maid for ambulance work in Belgium. Let no 
 one doubt the spirit in which this money of hum- 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ble persons is given. It is given because a lit- 
 tle nation was crushed, and because their broth- 
 ers and lovers are fighting to free that little na- 
 tion. No high-blown dreams of empire, no lust 
 for territory, no desire for power and wealth, are 
 in these obscure gifts. They are conscience- 
 money to Belgium. They are the pitiful earn- 
 ings of a democracy passed over to a suffering 
 people. 
 
 In Plymouth, with its docking and shipping 
 trade, eighteen thousand persons began to save 
 in one week. 
 
 At Preston, in Lancashire, $100,000 was 
 turned over to the Government by the workers 
 in the period of four months. 
 
 There is an elementary school for 350 boys 
 near Newcastle. The boys brought in four thou- 
 sand dollars from their famihes in eight weeks, 
 and then kept up the average of five hundi'ed dol- 
 lars a week. 
 
 In Batter sea one of the school-boys brought in 
 the sum of five hundred dollars in pennies col- 
 lected among the three hundred boys and their 
 working families in ten months. 
 
 The thing that irritates us about England is 
 238 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 the same thing that offends us at home. Here 
 is no well-oiled autocracy that runs on a single 
 track to a visible goal. Instead of that clean, 
 smooth, organized, docile affair, it is a democracy, 
 with an immensely rich variety of life sprawling 
 all over the place. The air is full of voices, be- 
 cause eveiy one is allowed to speak. If you 
 don't hke it, remember what it is that you don't 
 like : it is a free people, choosing to make its own 
 mistakes, living its own life, and just now out on 
 the war-path to chase some trespassers off the 
 premises. Doubtless, if the critics were running 
 the performance, they would give a more unified 
 and polished proceeding. But no group of per- 
 sons are running this war. The people are run- 
 ning it. So, instead of losing strength as the 
 pressure increases, they gather force and mo- 
 mentum with each mistake. They teach them- 
 selves by failure. The will of the great Gei-man 
 general staff can be snapped by defeat, because 
 the staff is a handful of men. But the will of 
 45,000,000 people can not be broken, because it 
 is the will of these school-boys and working-girls, 
 of domestic sei*vants and munition-workers, of a 
 democracy whose sense of pity and justice has 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 been touched. The mistake in estimating the 
 Enghsh effort is to measure it at any given time, 
 because it is a continually growing effort. It is 
 like a gathering of waters from mountain streams 
 and the drift of hills and from inexhaustible 
 rains. The confluence keeps widening and deep- 
 ening from a thousand tributaries. The pool 
 can be emptied, and soon it is not only filled again, 
 but is larger than before. 
 
 The English are a "sentimental nation." I 
 quote a distinguished English officer when I say 
 that. Captain Basil Williams. It is true. They 
 are as sentimental as Americans. An appeal to 
 cold reason, to personal aggrandizement, to a 
 rainy day, or to a shadowy future, does not move 
 them in the slightest. But something that con- 
 cerns the welfare of helpless children or of per- 
 sons whom they love releases all that is best in 
 the English race. I know this, because I worked 
 in a Red Cross London office in the early weeks 
 of the war, and I found that the smallest appeal 
 to the English public for help in clothing Bel- 
 gians brought in a large response — a response, in 
 fact, so overwhelming that it stuffed the ofiice 
 240 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 rooms with supplies. Personally I have never 
 dealt with a public that is so swiftly generous. 
 When the full facts of Belgian relief are made 
 public, it will be found that it is the English who 
 have fed them and sheltered them, raised the 
 greater part of the money, widened and adjusted 
 their own home life in order to absorb an army of 
 refugees, and steadily continued to provide funds 
 without spurts and without fatigue. No better 
 proof of this racial sentiment and kindliness can 
 be had than by studying a few of the fifty-four 
 million posters and leaflets of recruiting, and the 
 hundreds of thousand publications for war sav- 
 ing. The appeal is rarely to self-interest. The 
 appeal is to the heart, to the great objects of the 
 war, the ideal of liberty, the cause of freedom. 
 This national saving is not being done by ob- 
 scure, hard-working Enghshmen and English- 
 women to make their own old age cozy. It is 
 being done to free Belgium and strengthen de- 
 mocracy. If the evangelists who have gone 
 about Britain preaching war savings had spoken 
 to a commercial motive, they would have whistled 
 in vain. 
 
 ^4.1 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 dragons' teeth 
 
 England is developing a set of problems at 
 lightning speed that will require a generation to 
 uncoil. I can only indicate them. It would fill 
 another volume even to state them in detail. 
 
 The first attempt to treat comprehensively the 
 new machinery and buildings created by war 
 needs has been made by the annual "Engineering 
 Supplement" of "The Times." Wliat is to be 
 done with this new plant? has been the question 
 asked by manj^, and answered by none. Mr. 
 Hodge, the minister of labor, states that seventy- 
 five million dollars of new capital has been ex- 
 pended in the extension of plant in the iron and 
 steel trade. He estimates that by the end of the 
 war the sum will be one hundred and fifty mil- 
 lions. He says: "I don't care whether it is by 
 tariffs, by prohibition, by bounty, or any other 
 method, the plant in our country must be util- 
 ized." Private plants, numbering four thousand 
 seven hundred, have greatly expanded. There 
 are over ninety-five new national factories. The 
 "Engineering Supplement" quotes one firm as 
 prophesying "a reduction in the proportion of 
 242 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 three machines to one available for future use." 
 A fii'm of marine engineers says that sixty 
 per cent, of the new machines will have to be 
 scrapped, because the tools are over-driven and 
 worn out. But even these estimates leave from 
 twenty-five to forty per cent, of the new ma- 
 chinery available, and this is an enormous ex- 
 pansion in productive capacity. Thus in one 
 year armament firms introduced twenty-five hun- 
 dred new machine tools. The large majority of 
 engineering firms agree that these works, with 
 their new machinery, will be used for the inten- 
 sive manufacture of standardized articles. The 
 assembling of parts at these central plants has es- 
 tablished manufacturing practice in the use of 
 gages, and created the conditions for standard 
 and interchangeable manufacture. As one firm 
 writes : 
 
 "In small tools — twist drills and milling cut- 
 ters — we believe that by standardization and 
 judicious pubhcity we may fill a large portion of 
 the business held formerly by Germany and the 
 United States." 
 
 One hundred thousand gages have been made 
 in the technical institutes in the last eighteen 
 243 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 months. The gage standardizes the engineering 
 industry, and enables it to produce on a vast scale 
 a great variety of manufactured articles. Stand- 
 ardization is essential to low-cost manufacture 
 and large output, and the establishment of stand- 
 ard is dependent on the accuracy of gages, de- 
 fining specified dimensions of absolute magni- 
 tude, and limiting permissible variation. 
 A professional engineer writes: 
 
 Our locomotives differ only in relatively small de- 
 tails, excepting valve-gears. The main sizes of cylin- 
 ders, piston-rods, connecting-rods, side-rods, crank 
 axles differ only very slightly in the same class of en- 
 gines. . . . Hundreds of various forms of 12-in. 
 X 20-in. horizontal engines exist, differing only in a 
 very small degree in the actual details that count in 
 actual vrear and tear and the life of the engine. Could 
 not all these details be agreed and standardized.? If 
 a few more usual types of engines — marine, steam 
 rollers, etc. — were standardized, quite a number of our 
 present munition factories could be engaged in manu- 
 facturing connecting-rods and side-rods only, others 
 the cylinders and pistons, others the valve-gears, etc. ; 
 and in busy areas, without much carting, whole en- 
 gines could thus be assembled in special shops dealing 
 with special engines to the great gain of our home, 
 colonial, and foreign customers. A similar course is 
 244 
 
 J 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 demanded very specially for electrical machinery, fit- 
 tings, and telephones. 
 
 The munition factories could further be used to 
 great advantage in fostering and nursing the British 
 production of agricultural machinery, at present sadly 
 behindhand, and manufacturing it as standard repeti- 
 tion work. They would also be suitable for making 
 improved machine tools, as well as mining tools, such as 
 rock-drills, etc. ; and standard ships would be greatly 
 improved if fitted not only with the standard engines 
 already mentioned, but also standard winches, pumps, 
 steering-gear, refrigerating-apparatus, etc. 
 
 The output in the engineering trade can be 
 increased at least twenty-five per cent., even with 
 the machinery that existed before the war, and 
 with the new machinery that percentage will go 
 considerably higher. 
 
 Inevitably standardization leads to organiza- 
 tion and the creation of combines or trusts. 
 Motor-car makers suggest the use of the great 
 new plants for the purpose of producing cheap 
 cars to compete with those of American make. 
 Already efforts are being made to bring about a 
 combination of British makers. 
 
 But it is not alone in the engineering trades 
 that trusts are likely to be formed. Already 
 245 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 capital is concentrating in other industries. 
 Lord Rhondda purchased a group of Welsh col- 
 lieries, and the "Welsh Outlook" reports: 
 
 Lord Rhondda now controls over 3^^ millions of cap- 
 ital [pounds, not dollars], pays 2^^ millions in wages 
 every year, and is virtually the dictator of the eco- 
 nomic destiny of a quarter of a million miners. Ru- 
 mors are also current that Lord Rhondda is extending 
 his control over the press of Wales. 
 
 To control such vast, irresponsible economic 
 power as his will be the task of Parliament; but 
 here we meet with a new war-created problem. 
 During the war Parliament has largely lost its 
 control over government, which is administered 
 to-day by a temporary group of lawyers, finan- 
 ciers, and imperialists, surrounded by a larger 
 group of permanent expert officials. And this 
 group in turn is enlarged by a small army of vol- 
 unteer social workers. Not only do these hidden 
 experts administer government, but they create 
 new legislation. As a government investigator 
 reports : 
 
 The change in the mode of industrial legislation 
 may be summed up as a tendency to move from the 
 politician towards the expert. 
 246 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 Even before the war men were saying: "The 
 poHtical machine of to-day presupposes that pop- 
 ular opinion shall have no initiative. Officialdom 
 increases at the expense of the remaining social 
 classes." 
 
 This is a tendency in the direction of beau- 
 reaucracy, and the value of it rests in the intel- 
 ligence and character of these inner manipulators 
 and their responsiveness to public need. A par- 
 liamentary committee sits on its bill of recom- 
 mendations, like a hen on its nest, and rises with 
 a cackle. Sometimes the product, when hatched, 
 is as distressing and unexpected as a duck's egg 
 in the poultry farm. I suspect that the recon- 
 struction committee and the franchise committee 
 are going to find that their sober, well-rounded 
 draft of recommendations will develop startling 
 methods of locomotion. The law itself, hatched 
 in the privacy of committee-rooms, sallies out with 
 a special dynamic of its own. 
 
 We have lost all surprise that our correspondence 
 should be pawed over before we see it, our houses in- 
 vaded by competent or incompetent authorities and 
 their representatives, our religion regulated or otherwise 
 catechised. 
 
 247 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 So says one of the "Cambridge Magazine" 
 group, who have retained their sanity in a war 
 which temporarily mihinged H. G. Wells and 
 Arnold Bennett, and hfted Austin Harrison, 
 St. Loe Strachey, Leo Maxse, Gwynne, Horatio 
 Bottomley, Robert Blatchford, and NorthcHffe 
 into leadership of pubhc opinion. To these crea- 
 tors of constructive thought, "out to beat the 
 Boches," such a question as "Who shall guard the 
 guardians?" is academic in " a world of blood and 
 iron, controlled by men who do not take what 
 they would call a Sunday-school view," as the 
 realist editor of the "Spectator" writes. 
 
 But Parliament was at least an honest attempt 
 to give the people a check on the behavior of the 
 men in power. And now this inside clique has 
 taken away Parliament, and no one knows where 
 they have secreted it. When it has been discov- 
 ered and restored, it will have still other problems 
 with which to wrestle. 
 
 How are the three thousand million pounds 
 of national debt to be paid for? Indirect taxa- 
 tion means high prices on food and clothing, a 
 high cost of living. Taxation of income, death 
 duties, conscription of profits, is "class legisla- 
 248 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 tion." The only final way out here i^ of course 
 to add to taxation increased production. A man 
 pays his debts by successful work not alone by 
 manipulating the market, but mainly by provid- 
 ing it with commodities. 
 
 But meanwhile high wages and high prices are 
 leading to a demand for protection. England 
 is talking of coming over on the good old Mc- 
 Kinley American basis. The ancient battle- 
 ground of tariff reform is going to be churned 
 into dust and heat. For a growing group of 
 Tories, reinforced by converts, like the new min- 
 ister of labor, are finding the source of all eco- 
 nomic weakness in free trade. A convenient, one- 
 phrase summary solution of a complex matter is 
 always appreciated by men who don't enjoy the 
 process of organizing thought. This is no sud- 
 den conversion for a portion of the Tories. Dis- 
 raeh held that "the ultimate aim of the Free 
 Trader was to govern England in the interest of 
 the Industrialist," as Butler points out in his able 
 study of "The Tory Tradition." "I wish," said 
 Disraeli, "to see our national prosperity upheld 
 alike by a skilful agriculture and by an extended 
 commerce." 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 That "alike" to be effective would require some 
 of the same magic which Joshua used on the set- 
 ting sun, for England is an industrial coun- 
 try. But Disraeli and many of the later Tory 
 protectionists acted from long-held conviction. 
 Whereas there is a touch of extempore when Mr. 
 Hodge, the new minister of labor, intoxicated by 
 his association with peers of the realm, cries out 
 in Pisgah vision that England is done with free 
 trade. At least it will pay him to study the 
 happy industrial proletariat in Fall River, Law- 
 rence, and our other protected cities before he 
 turns to tariff reform as the sole salvation of a 
 country that requires immense quantities of raw 
 material. 
 
 This is the danger which England faces, that 
 her leaders will run after panaceas of protection, 
 business government, scientific management, in- 
 stead of dealing with what is the heart of each one 
 of her problems — human relationship. 
 
 CHANGE 
 
 At the Labor party conference in Manchester 
 in the first month of 1917 one of the leaders said: 
 
 If the soldier was worth two pounds a week when he 
 250 
 
 i 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 was destroying things, was he not worth two pounds 
 when he was producing? A country which can find 
 milhons of "quids" to feed the cannon's mouth can 
 find millions to feed the worker's mouth. 
 
 The other day I was sitting at luncheon with 
 the mayor of one of the great English cities. He 
 said to me: 
 
 Never again will there be the cry of "No money to 
 spend." A thousand million for war, and you haggle 
 over twenty millions for education? Give us educa- 
 tion. Continue the high wages. Don't knock off the 
 war bonuses. Make them permanent. Pay unskilled 
 labor a minimum of thirty shillings, and later raise it 
 to two pounds. We don't need to worry about the 
 skilled trade-unionists. Let them fight for their three 
 and four pounds. There will be no trouble after the 
 war. Labor will obtain its demands. Wages can't be 
 lowered. The workers won't let them. 
 
 That is one of the new ideas brought into Eng- 
 lish life by the war: there must be a better use 
 of money and a wider distribution of it than in 
 the past. This idea will be applied, for instance, 
 to the care of motherhood and child welfare. At 
 the maternity centers one has now the spectacle 
 of the state keeping the mother and child alive, 
 but under-nourished. If the state is to intervene 
 251 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 at all, it must do so vigorously. Otherwise the 
 cost of intervention, which is paid for by taxa- 
 tion, fails to result in a sturdy race, paying back 
 the subsidy by production. There is a phrase in 
 golf about following through the stroke. It ad- 
 mirably expresses the thoroughness that is needed 
 in social reform. 
 
 That imperial and foreign policy concerns the 
 individual worker, and can make him prosperous 
 or uncomfortable, is another idea which the war 
 has brought to the British mind. Imperial pol- 
 icy, which by its very nature is democratic, is it- 
 self a foreign policy. When you shovel together 
 free nations, which are a belt around the world, 
 you have necessarily established a series of con- 
 tacts with backward races, subject peoples, and 
 imperfect democracies. The domestic policy 
 must be influenced by the foreign policy. As an 
 instance, one of the first matters to be taken up 
 by the British imperial conference will be that 
 of Ireland. The recoil of this on foreign pohcy 
 will be powerful. It will clear the air for an 
 Anglo-American understanding. Great Britain, 
 in accepting the idea of a British commonwealth, 
 252 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 has in reality extended the principle of demo- 
 cratic control to foreign policy. This means a 
 lessening of secret diplomacy. It is a coherent, 
 thoughtful, and determined effort to put into ex- 
 ecution the excellent desires which The Hague 
 Conference stimulated, but did not make effec- 
 tive. One of the duties of a modern nation is 
 to induce its citizens to exercise the responsibili- 
 ties which they in reahty possess, but do not care 
 to acknowledge. It has required a preliminary 
 course of education to accustom the British 
 dominions to the idea that they were concerned 
 with foreign policy. By groups of informal con- 
 ference, by much excellent pamphleteering in 
 "The Round Table," by all sorts of books, articles, 
 and talks from Cromer, Milner, Lionel Curtis, 
 P. H. Kerr, Ray Lankester, and Woolf, the re- 
 sponsibilities of the British state have been em- 
 phasized. The pressure of the war has served 
 to accelerate a tendency of thought that was al- 
 ready in operation. In fact, none of these ideas 
 is really new. All have been familiar to thinkers 
 for a number of years, but there is never any 
 large number of thinkers loose on this planet at 
 253 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 any one moment. So it takes time for thought 
 to shake down among the people, and finally to 
 reach an application in government. 
 
 As these ideas spread, the British public is be- 
 ginning to keep a close tab on its leaders. It in- 
 sists that they be representative, and when they 
 take a side-track, the democracy cuts loose and 
 leaves them lonely. The war has given us three 
 instances of this in Hughes of Australia, John 
 Redmond, and Mrs. Pankhurst. Mr. Hughes 
 was elected premier of Australia to represent a 
 democratic community in terms of social legisla- 
 tion and administration. He sailed to England, 
 became inoculated with the belief that he was a 
 war-lord, advocated at the Paris conference a 
 trade boycott, which would have isolated Eng- 
 land from the markets of the world more effectu- 
 ally than a shoal of submarines, and finally, fed 
 by flattery, swelled to the role of dictator and 
 declared for conscription. His home people 
 voted him down, some of his cabinet resigned, and 
 to-day he is a minority premier. "Stick to your 
 last" is the meaning of the swift trouncing which 
 the Australian democracy gave him. 
 
 John Redmond is head of the Irish National- 
 254 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 ists, but he no longer represents young Ireland. 
 And the reason is that, in a burst of parliamen- 
 tary fervor, he pledged Ireland to the cause of 
 the Allies. That was not for him to do. He 
 was sent to Westminster to push through Home 
 Rule, not to cooperate with Downing Street in 
 foreign policy. The Irish people refused to be 
 picked up in his right hand and set down in the 
 trenches. 
 
 When war broke out Mrs. Pankhurst dropped 
 her militant campaign and went out recruiting. 
 Ever since then she has watched the Balkan de- 
 velopments, pounded Lord Grey, urged a fight 
 to a finish. She not only dropped her militant 
 campaign; she dropped the woman question. 
 She no longer follows social legislation, the 
 woman's wage, hours of over-time. But she was 
 a leader precisely because of the woman question ; 
 so her following has dropped away, and she is no 
 longer ranked by the women reformers as one of 
 the general staff. Thus the organ of the women 
 trade-unionists, "The Woman Worker," writes 
 a "message that might have come" from Mrs. 
 Pankhurst : 
 
 "I desire to inform members of the Federation 
 255 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 that in my view their duty should be to march in 
 as many processions, create as much disturbance, 
 and take as many collections as possible." And 
 there is a more deadly home-thrust than that. 
 Her own daughter, Sylvia Pankhurst, has gone 
 on with the work of social reform for women, and 
 to-day has a strong following. There is another 
 reason why Mrs. Pankhurst has lost her follow- 
 ing, and this is that her following have under- 
 gone a psychological change; but of that I will 
 speak later. What concerns me here is that Mrs. 
 Pankhurst abandoned the woman's movement for 
 the national cause, and that in doing this she lost 
 control of her part of the woman's movement. 
 
 I am not engaged here in debating the ques- 
 tion whether Mr. Hughes was not correct in urg- 
 ing conscription, whether Mr. Redmond was not 
 far-sighted in pledging Ireland, and whether 
 Mrs. Pankhurst was not patriotic in subordinat- 
 ing women workers to soldiers. I am only say- 
 ing that they did not represent their constituency, 
 and in taking the new tack they lost their follow- 
 ing. What the democracy is learning to say to 
 its leaders is, "Represent us or get out." I don't 
 see in these manifestations of the popular wish 
 256 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 any new idea, but I do see a swifter and more 
 sensitive application of the principle of demo- 
 cratic control. Leaders remain leaders only as 
 long as they are channels for the collective will. 
 
 Another change I feel in English life is an 
 emotional change. It is the disappearance of the 
 hysteria that was caused by suppression. I don't 
 refer to the orgiastic elements in the English 
 nature that are revealed at the corner public 
 house and on Bank holiday. These are the peri- 
 odic explosions of the natural man. It was in- 
 evitable that England should have created the 
 Salvation Army and indulged in Mafeking 
 Night. The normal Englishman is a free, noisy 
 creature, who talks by the hour, interrupts pub- 
 lic meetings, and lives as a human being should. 
 Any one who does n't know that has never spent 
 evenings in country inns, and has never traveled 
 in a third-class compartment. The English 
 worker is a sociable person. Nor am I referring 
 to the upper class, which has spread its govern- 
 ors, explorers, and sportsmen over the earth, and 
 whose women ride to hounds, drive ambulances 
 under the guns, and speed up the suffrage cam- 
 paign. 
 
 »6T 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 I am speaking of the English middle class, the 
 forlornest middle class known to me. France 
 and America have nothing like it. The suppres- 
 sion of emotional life in the women — the creation 
 of the pose of "good form," the severely reticent 
 lady, neither heard nor even seen in public — has 
 resulted in a rather wide-spread hysteria in that 
 one stratum of the community, the middle-class 
 layer. These women are desirous to be true to 
 type, to do nothing that is not correct, and the 
 result has been a prim and regulated life, full of 
 negations, with the instinctive impulses and de- 
 sires of a free, creative life left out of the reckon- 
 ing. Nature punishes this suppression with 
 nervous maladies. One London specialist told 
 me he knew of several hundred such cases. 
 
 This hysteria was shown in manifestations 
 of the miHtant suffrage movement. I am not 
 speaking of the leaders. Mrs. Pankhurst is a 
 very charming woman, of determined will and 
 well-balanced mentality, who adopted a program 
 of action because she believed she was forced to 
 it by the demands of the situation. Mrs. "Gen- 
 eral" Drummond is the most delightful humorist, 
 with the exception of Chesterton, whom I have 
 258 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 ever met. She is luminously sane. My wife and 
 I spent three days with her at Havre, and she 
 held us through the evenings till midnight with 
 her reminiscences of carrying a hansom-cab into 
 the House of Commons, floating in a tug down 
 the Thames past Parliament, and addressing the 
 statesmen on the Embankment, who had to sit 
 and listen because they were chained to their 
 afternoon tea. Another time she was in the gal- 
 lery of a crowded public hall and, in trying to go 
 out, became entangled in the pedals of the organ, 
 and sent out wailing notes. Miss Kenney is a 
 modest, earnest young woman of clear, idealistic 
 purpose. This handful of leaders who manipu- 
 lated the Women's Social and Political Union 
 are expressing themselves. But the movement 
 attracted an element in the middle class which is 
 in spiritual bondage, and some of these showed 
 signs of hysteria in their response. The bitter- 
 ness of tone in the books of certain English 
 women writers is another indication of suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 To all such victims of suppressed vitality, lead- 
 ing to anxiety, melancholy, and hysteria, the war 
 has come as a release, for it has given them excit- 
 259 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ing occupation. They have entered industry, 
 commerce, government employment. They have 
 nursed soldiers, cooked at canteens, and become 
 a part of the great communal life flowing past 
 them. 
 
 These minor changes of idea and attitude and 
 emotional response are all a part of the great 
 change which has come over England. Life is 
 no longer a monopoly possession of the upper 
 classes, of the male sex, of the mother country, of 
 the Westminster Parhament, of the captains of 
 industry. Life is not a matter to be postponed 
 to the hereafter and the choir invisible. It is the 
 product here and now of one's will and energy, 
 fed by impulse, and shaped by thought. One- 
 self is the person concerned, and the happiest so- 
 ciety in which to feel at home is a democracy of 
 equals. 
 
 A BATCH OF PAPERS 
 
 Instead of being ponderous and exhaustive, 
 and writing this like a sociological report, I shall 
 tell what I like and dishke about British journal- 
 ism, and we shall get along faster than by the 
 heavy-footed way. I like Chesterton's paper, 
 260 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 "The New Witness," since G. K. C. has taken it 
 over. Others that write his style annoy me, as 
 an echo in the auditorium annoys an audience 
 who want to hear the speaker himself. I like 
 "The New Witness" because Gilbert K. Chester- 
 ton seems to me the best thing England has pro- 
 duced since Dickens. I like the things he be- 
 lieves in, and I hate sociological experts and pro- 
 hibitionists and Uhlan officers, which are the 
 things he hates. I feel in him that a very honest 
 man is speaking, so I am glad of his views even 
 when I differ with him. He is a useful correc- 
 tive on public opinion, too. He dislikes the ser- 
 vile state, by which he means the coming orderly, 
 regimented Utopia, scientifically managed by 
 Sidney Webb. That is the kind of talk we need, 
 because all of us in social work (and who is n't a 
 social worker to-day?) are forever hunting and 
 harrying the poor, itemizing their food-supply, 
 shading off just the proportion of caloric differ- 
 ence between starvation and under-nourishment. 
 And when we catch the line where the poor sat- 
 isfy us that they can pull through, we are going 
 to impale them with a minimum wage. I like 
 his impudence to Northcliffe, because Northcliffe 
 261 
 
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 is a dangerous sort of man in a modern democ- 
 racy. He is dangerous because he does so much 
 good ; but I will get around to him in a moment. 
 As a journalist Chesterton gets only about a 
 quarter of himself into action. But even a quar- 
 ter of Chesterton is good measm'e. He leaves 
 out aU his overtones, the lilting verse and jolly 
 stories and incomparable essays, those flashes of 
 good criticism and exultation. He works very 
 hard at his journalism. That is why he does n't 
 do it so well as his careless things, which give him 
 fun. But for all that there is ho other editorial 
 page in England or the United States written 
 with the snap, wit, and honest humanity of his 
 paragraphs. I hope he won't blunt himself by 
 overwork. It would be an international loss if 
 that sane, jolly mind is bent to routine. Eng- 
 land has need of him. There is something cosmic 
 about English plans of reconstruction, something 
 of the weary load of destiny about their imperial 
 commonwealth. It is a pleasant thing to be able 
 to remind ourselves that the same race that pro- 
 duced Curzon and Milner and Carson, heavy 
 men, with a sense of predestined seriousness, 
 after all produced Chesterton. 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 I have to jump the Irish Sea in order to find 
 anything so much in earnest and gay as the "New 
 Witness" in these months of management by one 
 who tells me that he is "the world's worst editor." 
 I think the independent spirited little Irish week- 
 lies are admirable. They sass the censor and the 
 lord lieutenant and the Castle. I met some of 
 the editors, poor men and honest, editing and 
 writing papers in which they believe. They 
 seemed to me worth all the sleek, timid 
 New York crowd put together. They speak 
 their heart out, then take the galley proof 
 around to the censor, and he slashes out 
 "seditious" paragraphs, and they publish about 
 half their heartful. I have seen these carved-up 
 galleys and the pleading, warning, threatening 
 letters of the censor. These journalists are 
 pretty much eveiything in their shop — editor and 
 contributor and proof-reader and office boy — be- 
 cause their papers are often one-man concerns. 
 A man believes something hard, and being Irish, 
 he has the knack of statement, so he publishes a 
 paper. One of them told us he had a weekly 
 circulation of 10,000; another had 6000. These 
 weeklies have hterary quality. One of them, 
 263 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 "New Ireland," is stuffed full of good things by 
 A. E., James Stephens, Katharine Tynan, and 
 the rest of that gifted group. There is some- 
 thing pathetic about the editors I am speaking 
 of; I met several of them. I don't mean pitiable, 
 because you don't pity men who are better than 
 you are. But there seemed something hopeless 
 about the success of their efforts within any span 
 of time that would concern them at all. I sup- 
 pose it is just an extension of the feeling that we 
 have about anj^ clean, unrewarded effort in this 
 present world of ours where men of the sort of 
 these Irish editors, with fine hopes about human- 
 ity in their heart, go lean and tired to their gi'ave. 
 Some of them are already in prison, and more of 
 them will be there before the Irish question is well 
 settled. 
 
 Coming back to England, one has to have "The 
 Nation." It is much like our own "New Repub- 
 lic." But what is a discovery in "The New Re- 
 public" becomes a formula in "The Nation." 
 "The New Republic" is cock-sure, omniscient, 
 and "I 'm not arguing with you ; I 'm telling 
 you," because its background is scanty, and it has 
 the freshness of a virgin mind. "The Nation" is 
 264 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 all background, and so is a little weary. It has 
 the slightly fatigued mind of one who has lived 
 a hfetime with the noble aspirations of our better- 
 class radicals, and needs a change, but won't take 
 it. I have read "The Nation" since 1908, and I 
 never felt this ennui so much as during these war 
 months. Like many other radicals, it was 
 caught between the Zeppelins and the submarines 
 without a program. It had nothing to say, and 
 said it. Latterly it has had a rebirth. Bertrand 
 Russell published a fascinating book a few 
 months ago, called "Why Men Fight." I have 
 been watching that book seep out through 
 the pores of "The Nation" ever since. "The 
 Nation" makes me tired because its sincerity 
 is stale; but, for all that, it is one of the best 
 weeklies in England, and it comes closer to 
 interpreting the vital thought of England, the 
 currents of tendency, than any paper known to 
 me. Only I wish it were not so languid in tell- 
 ing about vital thought. It is of course well writ- 
 ten, a quality it shares with forty other papers. 
 That gift of a good working style is rather wide- 
 spread. It comes of having a literary tradition 
 and a well-read university crowd. There must 
 265 
 
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 be two or three hundred men in England with a 
 clear and satisfactory technic. 
 
 Speaking of the "New Republic," Leo Maxse 
 of "The National Review" and Massingham of 
 "The Nation" unite in quoting from it. Men 
 like Lord Milner "see" it. Professor Graham 
 Wallas said to me: "Walter Lippmann has a 
 mind with an edge. He may well develop into 
 a great democratic leader." 
 
 I was taught at Yale to regard "The Athe- 
 nasum" as the authoritative paper of the English 
 language in literary criticism, and having built 
 that into my formative years, I can no more shake 
 the belief than I can free myself of the idea that 
 we are the home of the brave and the free. But 
 I shall have to let it go at that, because I often 
 escape from it to the clever and breezy opening 
 paragraphs of "The Saturday Review." They 
 state the news of the week in one hundred word 
 summaries, which are equally charming on the 
 death of a Greek professor and the rotten radi- 
 cahsm of modern thought. I like "The Satur- 
 day Review," "The National Review," and "The 
 Morning Post" for an impotent hate which they 
 have in common. I love to watch what psycho- 
 266 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 analysts tenii a "complex" uncoil itself periodi- 
 cally, and writhe around in the public eye. Each 
 of them has a nest of complexes, and all have the 
 same complexes. They hate Americans, Ger- 
 mans, labor, radicalism, and the Irish with a fine, 
 fresh enthusiasm, which results in lively writing. 
 In this bad modern world they have lost their 
 public, and they see their future trailed out be- 
 hind them like a foamy wake, but they go into 
 dissolution with a zest. The war has partly 
 spoiled their pleasure, because German misdeeds 
 gave them a legitimate and a popular object of 
 attack, and for a time they had to endure a cer- 
 tain measure of public favor, as men who had 
 told you so. But as the Irish question ap- 
 proaches settlement, as labor takes control of a 
 new province every month, and as radicalism 
 honeycombs the British commonwealth, thej'^ are 
 regaining their ancient role of Csissandra. 
 
 To talk of English weekly journalism and 
 omit Horatio Bottomley and his "John Bull" 
 would be as unfortunate as dropping George 
 Cohan and Billy Sunday from a list of leaders 
 of American thought. Very simply Bottomley 
 said recently : 
 
 867 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 I speak as the editor of a journal which enjoys a 
 circulation and wields an influence unique in newspaper 
 history; and as one who, for good or evil, has gained 
 the ear and the confidence of a sufficient section of the 
 British public to make or unmake Ministers. 
 
 Stated with true British restraint, that is a 
 minimum appraisal of the place Bottomley holds 
 in public esteem. In the same issue Lloyd- 
 George learns he is not to be broken at the first 
 kick-off. "So long as he does this — but not a 
 day longer — ^he may rely, for what it may be 
 worth, upon my unqualified and disinterested 
 support." I heard a British colonel say the 
 other day that Bottomley should have been in the 
 cabinet. He writes a picture-post-card style, 
 like that of Arthur Brisbane, which is spotted 
 with battle-cries and catch-phrases such as "a 
 business Government," "Germany's Death-rat- 
 tle." He is really funny in a way that "Punch" 
 would like to be. He has a genuine pity for the 
 lot of the poor, and I think in that, and not in 
 his raw conceit and vulgarity and barrenness of 
 ideas, lies the secret of his hold on a portion of 
 the people. When it comes to the downright 
 spade-work of reconstruction, where bright 
 S68 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 phrases are not a substitute for hard thinking, I 
 foresee a sharp tussle for mastery between the 
 Bottomley type of mind and the real leaders of 
 England. Surely the real leaders are men like 
 Seebohm Rowntree, Zimmern, Lionel Curtis, 
 and Prothero, who put fundamental brain-work 
 on the industrial and imperial problems. Mean- 
 while I read "John Bull," and so does England. 
 There is no wi*eneh in passing from Bottomley 
 to Lord Northcliffe. Both are "practical men," 
 who want things done now. Northcliffe is a big, 
 genial man, carrying a sense of immediate power. 
 He suggested to me a cross between a district 
 leader and a captain of industry. He will do any- 
 thing for you personally, like a Tammany boss. 
 It gives him a sense of his own power, and it ex- 
 presses a genuine human liking in his make-up. 
 He cuts across lots to get into action. He writes 
 well, talks well, and has a hard horse sense 
 that has served England in the present crisis. 
 Whether he will continue to be of value will de- 
 pend on his ability to broaden his vision of the 
 industrial struggle. He has the arrogance of 
 men who make swift decisions, and who are in the 
 position to carry them out. He has a sharpened 
 269 
 
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 sense of reality, but it is a materialistic sense. 
 Whether he will help the new world after the war 
 is a question that is troubling all who have 
 watched his astonishing career and realize his 
 force. There is a danger of England too hastily 
 reshaping its ideals. Because it has been slow 
 and unorganized it is turning to American and 
 Prussian methods. But it will be a loss if it lets 
 in the whole materialistic philosophy of results, 
 success, and efficency. And just here is the 
 damage of a man like Northcliife, because he is 
 a sort of Prussian superman, w^ho is death on 
 slackness, but blind to any meaning that can't be 
 caught inside of three dimensions. There was a 
 restraint in English journalism before his time. 
 I noticed the other day that he pubhshed in his 
 "Daily Mail" a cartoon of Raemaekers, and used 
 an underline which made it seem that Raemaek- 
 ers had drawn his picture in order to throw scorn 
 on Viscount Grey. Actually the caption had 
 been faked in the office to serve the political ends 
 of the paper. That is dirty journahsm, as dirty 
 as America's Yellow Press. I am not trying to 
 offer wise conclusions in this chapter. I am only 
 recording impressions after many years of daily 
 270 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 reading in the English press. So I leave North- 
 cliffe with no formulated opinion. I see valuable 
 service in his hard hitting, but I distrust some- 
 thing in the man which I feel to be ruthless and 
 unmoral. It seems to me un-English, or else I 
 am all wrong about the temperateness and kindli- 
 ness of English character. 
 
 "The Manchester Guardian" is one of the 
 best newspapers in England. To praise its edi- 
 torials, its dramatic reviews, its balance of news, 
 its judicial, and yet spirited, attitude to custom 
 and change, is what President Hadley tersely 
 calls "a work of supererogation." It is as good 
 as an amalgam of "The Springfield Republican," 
 "The Kansas City Star," and "The Dallas 
 News." 
 
 "The Westminster Gazette" has a delightful 
 literary department where they turn English 
 verses into decasyllabic Latin, develop the ca- 
 pabilities of words whose initial letter is z, and 
 write tiny essays on "How to Enter an Omnibus." 
 
 A. G. Gardiner writes political studies and 
 character sketches in his "Daily News" that re- 
 mind an American of Colonel Watterson's best 
 work. 
 
 271 
 
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 I have grown very weary of J. L. Garvin in 
 the Sunday "Observer." He has felt the neces- 
 sity of "putting a punch" into it every week till he 
 writes portentously of "tanks," which should be 
 left for Chesterton, and of the map of Europe, 
 which is the vested interest of Hilaire Belloc. 
 
 The best writers of Great Britain sprinkle 
 themselves about on the editorial pages in a way 
 that makes the breakfast paper a voyage of dis- 
 covery. The "New Statesman," the "New 
 Age," and the "Cambridge Magazine," with its 
 amazing digest of foreign opinion, are quite ir- 
 replaceable because no other periodicals fulfill 
 their function. I used to read the "Spectator," 
 till Strachey's militancy in several fields grew 
 wearisome. 
 
 The individualistic penny weeklies and month- 
 lies are unfailingly bright. It seems strange to 
 me that we have nothing of the sort in America. 
 The suffrage papers; the one-man affairs, like 
 George Lansburj^'s "Herald" and Sorollea's 
 "Everyman"; "The British Weekly," with its ex- 
 cellent literary letter by Robertson NicoU: "The 
 Christian Commonwealth," with its analysis of 
 labor conditions and of advanced Nonconformist 
 272 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 thought — all combine to give the impression of a 
 self-conscious public opinion fed and renewed hj 
 the free play of the individualistic mind. 
 
 Of the heavier reviews, "The Fortnightty," 
 "Nineteenth Century" and "The Contemporary" 
 are valuable for obtaining that sweep of interna- 
 tional affairs of which we in America catch 
 hardly a glimpse in our popular magazines. 
 
 But the best of the reviews is "The Round 
 Table." Men like Lionel Curtis Kerr and 
 A. E. Zimmern are working here at the prin- 
 ciples of reconstruction for industry and the 
 empire. It is solid, close- wrought work, wres- 
 thng at the problems of the modern world with 
 an absence of theory and rhetoric. No other 
 single publication has had the influence of "The 
 Round Table" in directing British public opinion. 
 "The Round Table" helped to prepare the ground 
 for the changes which came through with the war. 
 They and the Fabian group and the Workers' 
 Educational Association and the workers them- 
 selves have between them sprung the most dra- 
 matic revolution in one hundred years, and it is 
 still only in its faint beginnings. 
 
 Somebody is going to tell me that my list is n't 
 273 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 complete, and that I have omitted the most 
 weighty, the most significant paper on the island. 
 But this is not a catalogue, and it is not a guide to 
 self-help. It is merely the record of the likes of 
 one man who reads for pleasure. So let them 
 bring forward their "Chamber's," "Hibbert 
 Journal," "Quarterly Review," and "The Edin- 
 burgh," "Truth," "Cornhill," and "The New 
 Age." 
 
 TREE SPEECH 
 
 One of our most prominent American social 
 workers retm'ned home the other day from a 
 foreign tour. She was quoted as saying that she 
 had found liberty suppressed everywhere. A mo- 
 ment later in the interview it appeared that her 
 experience in England consisted in cutting across 
 the island and jumping aboard her boat at Liver- 
 pool. That lets her out. If she had remained 
 in England she would have found that liberty is a 
 lively possession there just now. I have never 
 before seen the "subject" act with so much 
 initiative and I have never heard him express 
 himself so vigorously. Mr. Bertrand Russell 
 receives an excellent free advertisement from 
 274 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 the War Office for his views, and proceeds 
 to state them in one of the best books writ- 
 ten in recent years, "Why Men Fight." The 
 book is widely advertised and favorably reviewed. 
 In a time of incalculable strain half a dozen 
 conscientious objectors are dealt with unjustly 
 and shamefully while some thousands are dealt 
 with honorably. And conscientious objectors 
 are only two per cent, of the total number 
 of claimants for exemption. These others are 
 in "reserved trades," they are the "sole sup- 
 port" of a family, they have built up an indi- 
 vidual business. And of all these cases, only 
 four per cent, of the decisions have been appealed 
 against. Conscientious objectors would never 
 have been heard from if Parliament had not 
 created their status. There are no conscientious 
 objectors in Germany; there is the shooting- 
 squad. It is only in a free country that liberty 
 can "raise a rough house." England is a free 
 country. There are plenty of criticisms that lie 
 against her for mental sloth, for mistaken foreign 
 policy, for unconscious and deep pride ; but a man 
 is still free to carry out his policy and speak his 
 mind. The perfect proof is this: in the year 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 1915 she had 698 labor strikes. At once the 
 vigilant critic of England will say, "The laboring 
 man is not patriotic." Let me first point out 
 that this is an exactly opposite charge from the 
 charge that he has lost his personal liberty. 
 Secondly, it is untrue. He is patriotic, but he 
 feels no loyalty toward the profit-makers. The 
 striking miners were accused of holding up coal 
 from the navy and endangering the battle-ship 
 fleet. But they showed figures to a friend of 
 mine which proved the exact point to which they 
 could proceed with their strike without lessening 
 the source of supply for the navy. The worker 
 is enough of a man to die for his country or work 
 for it till he drops; but he does not care to be 
 exploited by profiteers under the glib phrases of 
 national service. The labor situation to-day is 
 the proof that England is free. 
 
 But England has no publicity sense. She ad- 
 vertises all her blundeis and crimes, and goes 
 silent when she does well. The failure of Loos is 
 publicly proclaimed. The Admiralty competes 
 with the War Office in giving bad impressions of 
 great things done. England allows freedom of 
 speech in Hyde Park, in "The Herald," "Com- 
 216 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 mon Sense," "The Labor Leader," "The Na- 
 tion," "Forward." She allows it to Ramsay 
 MacDonald, Philip Snowden, Ponsonby, Trevel- 
 yan, Lowes Dickinson, Lansbury, Sylvia Pank- 
 hurst, and a hundred other voices and organs that 
 continue the great tradition of personal liberty. 
 But when she restricts one man from the muni- 
 tions areas she uses a megaphone to tell the world 
 that liberalism is dead. Wherever the War Office 
 has stepped in and encroached on the liberty of 
 the subject and the claims of private property, the 
 civil courts have upheld the rights of the person 
 against military necessity. A series of decisions 
 in the last two years proves this. But all that 
 England speaks of is the Defense of the Realm 
 Act, as if a band of grim officers were yanking 
 struggling civilians into penal servitude. When 
 England has a choice offering that would win 
 praise and sympathy, she puts a veil of silence 
 between the attraction and the neutral public. 
 To any one that understands England this is 
 agreeable, because it is all a part of her muddling 
 greatness. "Hands off her ancient liberties," 
 and the hands are still off. But to an outsider 
 the din of perennial, lively protest seems like the 
 277 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 wail of lost souls, a race sold to slavery. It has 
 given a wrong impression to America, where it 
 is not yet fully realized that the wealth of Eng- 
 land and the industrial work of England are the 
 sources of strength for the Allied cause, and that 
 the Somme offensive is only the gentle prelude 
 to the music that will tune up in Picardy this 
 spring. And yet the Somme offensive sucked up 
 the German forces from both fronts, let Italy 
 and Russia smash ahead, and enabled France to 
 shake the army corps from Verdmi. The big 
 guns and the shells of England's foiu* thousand 
 seven hundred controlled shops are the decisive 
 factors of this war. A set of rather cocky 
 German officers were led recently through the 
 square miles of preparedness that lie back of 
 the English hues. Their expression altered as 
 the massed, detailed abimdance of the blow that 
 gathers there was unfolded before their trained 
 eyes. Home was never Hke this. 
 
 Now, while it is a pity to puzzle us who are 
 Americans, there is no serious harm in it. But 
 the real demerit of putting the worst foot for- 
 ward is that it misleads the enemy into thinking 
 there is n't a big kick coming from the best foot 
 278 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 in the background. I am a peace-loving man, 
 and in the interests of the German peasant and 
 clerk I \\'ish that Germany could have a picture of 
 the English effort which is only in the first arc 
 of its ascending cur^ e. The Gk)vernment would 
 then withdraw its troops on all fronts, cede Al- 
 sace-Lorraine, sign indemnities, and thank their 
 tribal deity for the easy terms of peace. The 
 whole English effort is the spectacle of a democ- 
 racy on the march. It is accompanied by grum- 
 bles and mistakes, and is as haphazard an affair 
 as our first two years of Civil War; but back 
 of the wasted motion is an inexhaustible 
 strength. 
 
 The key of the whole performance is set by the 
 British army and na\y. Xo one has caught the 
 essential note of the British fighting men. 3Ir. 
 Kipling has a harsh and brutal way of rendering 
 the affair. Because he is a man of genius, he 
 creates his effect, he leaves his impression; but his 
 is not an interpretation of the spirit of these men. 
 ^Ir. Xoyes has cast the drama on sea and land 
 in an heroic Elizabethan key, but a modern 
 democracy does not play up to his setting. It 
 goes about things in its own way, tight-lipped in 
 279 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 suffering, and good-humored in bad weather. 
 The War Office ought to turn some one loose 
 among the milhon in Picardy who would really 
 capture the extraordinary ensemble. O. Henry 
 would have been the man for this job. 
 
 There has long been a slang phrase for a man 
 who was going out for an evening of pleasure in 
 the West End of London. When he wished to 
 say that he was planning a jolly supper party and 
 an evening at a music hall, he summed it up by 
 saying he was "going west." The men at the 
 front who tell of the death of a comrade say, "He 
 has gone west." 
 
 The British Tommy throws a lugubrious exag- 
 geration of shrapnel and flies and trench-mud 
 into his songs, fills his chorus with expressions of 
 a desire to go home, and sticks it at the Somme. 
 As G. K. Chesterton said to me : 
 
 "The English people have never found their 
 full expression in religion or poetry. It is in 
 humor where the English nature comes through." 
 
 The popular Tommy attitude toward trench- 
 life is that of "grousing," and no one has inter- 
 preted this so well as one of the men at the front. 
 Captain Bruce Bairnsfather. He gives no mock 
 280 
 
 I 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 heroics about the gloiy of sacrifice. His sketches 
 are a humorously disgusted record of water 
 underfoot, rain overhead, barbed wire, sand-bags, 
 and Bully beef. I doubt if any other nation in 
 the moment of supreme strain would circulate his 
 pamphlets by the hundred thousand as good 
 recruiting material. 
 
 But England knows that if she quenched free 
 speech she ^vould lose the war. She would lose 
 the war because she would be destroying the 
 spirit of her men, which escapes the mud and scum 
 of things by spattering them back with a jest. 
 
 Free speech is a fundamental requirement of 
 English nature. The Englishman must speak 
 his mind openly, register his "kick" against dis- 
 comforts, and be "agin' the Government." 
 With that clearance he settles down to steady 
 work. No one knows what would happen if the 
 nation were thoroughly muzzled. The attempt 
 has never before been made. It has been made 
 only in part in this war. 
 
 THE RIGHT OF ASYLUM 
 
 A couple of critics of these chapters on social 
 change have said that I am too buoyant in render- 
 281 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ing a painful process. The reconstruction is not 
 going to be as easy as all that, they say. Un- 
 skilled labor is going to have the fight of its life. 
 Women face a bitter two or tlii'ee years. The 
 forces of reaction have been strengthened by 
 three years of militarism. The trade-unions 
 have been shot to pieces by the concessions they 
 have made under the munitions acts. The gains 
 which cost them three generations to achieve have 
 all been swept away and will never be restored. 
 A large portion of the press has been nothing but 
 the official organ for doctored news. Many 
 hundreds of men are in jail because "Christianity 
 has become punishable by ten years' penal serv- 
 itude under the Military Service Act" (which is 
 a pungent reference to conscientious objectors). 
 I have given a wrong impression if the reader 
 thinks that the principle of democratic control is 
 being established without a severe fight; but the 
 point is that it is being established. When one 
 has only a short time and limited space at dis- 
 posal, it is hard to render a social change without 
 either writing wordy surface generalizations or 
 else getting messed up with details. Perhaps the 
 simplest way of making clear that it has cost 
 S82 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 suffering to win this freedom, and yet that the 
 victory is being won, is to consider one apphca- 
 tion of democratic control in these years of stress. 
 
 I choose the "right of asylum" to prove my 
 point that England still champions freedom. It 
 is a fair choice, because the right of asylum 
 rocked in the balance and nearly went under. It 
 was violently assailed by the Scotland Yard 
 police and the Government itself, but the Eng- 
 lish people ralhed and saved it. The hounding 
 of Russian political refugees in London, which 
 has gone on under cover of "military necessity," 
 probably injured the English cause more severely 
 in America in the early days than any other 
 official blunder of the war. The news was 
 spread broadcast among our social workers. 
 
 For centuries England has given her hos- 
 pitality to exiles from other lands who had fled 
 from tyranny. To her in time of persecution 
 have come the Huguenots, Louis Kossuth, Maz- 
 zini, Karl Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Kropotkm, 
 French Communards, and now for many years 
 Russian refugees. As one of the peers in the 
 House of Lords said: 
 
 It has been our boast for centuries that this coun- 
 ^83 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 try is a hospitable refuge for those who flee from other 
 lands. At the time of the Massacre of St. Bartholo- 
 mew in 1572 and of the Revocation of the Edict of 
 Nantes in 1685, we were the refuge for the Huguenots. 
 Victor Hugo came to Jersey to escape from the des- 
 potism of Napoleon III. Those who have sought a 
 refuge here have been subject to the common law, 
 answerable for their actions, but not for their opinions. 
 
 Under cover of the war the Scotland Yard 
 police began to harass the Russian refugees in 
 London. They attacked the Russian Seamen's 
 Union. The Russian Seamen's Union exists to 
 fight the conditions under which the Russian 
 sailors work. It exposed "the beating of the 
 men, their confinement in cages, their being put 
 in chains, deprived of food, heavy fines, flogging." 
 It concerned itself with the conditions of the 
 ships and the low wages. By the Russian com- 
 bination law the right to organize was denied to 
 Russian seamen, so their union had to locate its 
 center of activity in a foreign country, and chose 
 Belgium. It was driven out from Antwerp in 
 October of 1914 by the advance of the German 
 army. It crossed to London. On December 
 20, 1915, the pohce of Scotland Yard raided the 
 office of the union, and seized the documents, in- 
 284 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 eluding a list of persons in Russia with whom the 
 union corresponded. At the same time the home 
 of Dimitri Anitchkin, secretary of the union, was 
 raided, and his manuscripts and letters for ten 
 years back were confiscated. So heavy and far- 
 reaching was the hand of authority that when the 
 union appealed to the National Sailors and Fire- 
 men's Union of England, the general secretary, 
 E. Catheiy, wrote: 
 
 You must not forget you are a foreigner in a for- 
 eign country, although you belong to one of our allies ; 
 but we have got to look after the interest of our coun- 
 try at present, and do not want any unpleasantness at 
 the present time. Under the Defense of the Realm Act 
 we can be called before the authorities for doing things 
 we can do with freedom in normal times. 
 
 A little group of English people saw that the 
 ancient right of asylum was about to be abolished. 
 So the}^ made their appeal to the British trade- 
 unions. In "The Railway Review," "The York- 
 shire Factoiy Times," "The Amalgamated So- 
 ciety of Engineers Journal," and "The Cotton 
 Factory Times" they saw to it that articles of 
 protest appeared. 
 
 But the police were determined that free 
 285 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 speech should not prevail. A labor conference 
 was to be held in London on January 6, 1916, 
 and a leaflet had been prepared, setting out the 
 facts of the attack on the Russian refugees, and 
 called an "Open Letter to Trade Unionists." 
 Accordingly, on January 5, the police raided the 
 headquarters of the "Russian Political Prisoners' 
 and Exiles' Rehef Committee," at 96 Lexham 
 Gardens, Kensington, London. They seized 
 one thousand copies of a financial report, con- 
 taining the seditious information that the Wool- 
 wich trades council had given six pounds to the 
 Russian committee, that the National Union of 
 Railwaymen of Bletchley had given fourteen 
 shillings, that the Independent Labor party of 
 Tantobie had contributed eleven shillings and 
 eightpence. Exhilarated by their success, the 
 police proceeded to commandeer the reprints in 
 leaflet form of the articles that had appeared in 
 "The Railway Review," "The Yorkshire Fac- 
 tory Times," and "The Amalgamated Society of 
 Engineers Journal." Nor did they overlook a 
 thousand copies of the "Open Letter to Trade 
 Unionists," which were to have been distributed 
 on the next day. 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 The home secretary, Mr. Herbert Samuel, said 
 to the House of Conmions on July 11, 1916: 
 
 "Russians of military age setthng in this coun- 
 try will, unless they prefer to return for military 
 service in Russia, be required to enlist in the 
 British army. The details of the scheme are now 
 being worked out." 
 
 They were. The police set to work illegally 
 and without due authority and said to the Rus- 
 sian refugees : 
 
 "You have to go back to Russia. Here is your 
 ticket; you are to be at Euston Station on such 
 and such a day." 
 
 Charles Sarno had come from Russia three 
 years previously. An order was served upon 
 him; he was to be deported to Russia. The 
 order was challenged. When it came to argu- 
 ment the representatives of the crown abandoned 
 the case. Immediately on leaving the court, 
 Sarno was again arrested, and told that he 
 was to be put on board a ship bound for Rus- 
 sia. 
 
 It was announced in the House of Lords that 
 no invitation or request whatever had come from 
 the Russian Government for England to take 
 S8T. 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 this action. It was a purely spontaneous and 
 gratuitous act on the pai't of the British Home 
 Office. The home secretary stated it was quite 
 false that he had ever ordered any man to go to 
 Russia, and he said that there would be no de- 
 portations. Finally, Lord Sheffield, on July 27, 
 1916, made a well-reasoned speech to the House 
 of Lords in which he defended the right of 
 asylum, lashed the Government and the police, 
 and etched the eminent Jewish home secretary, 
 Mr. Herbert Samuel, in unforgettable terms. 
 He said : 
 
 "If I were a Jew or had a drop of Jewish blood 
 in my veins, I would sooner cut my hand off than 
 say to one of these men, 'If you do not enlist in 
 the British army, you, being a Polish Jew, shall 
 go back, not where you like, to any part of the 
 world, but to Poland or to Russia.' " 
 
 Earl Russell stood side by side with Lord 
 Sheffield in defying the Government poHcy, and 
 once again, as on more occasions than one in 
 British history, the lords saved the liberty of the 
 individual men from the encroachments of the 
 Government and the indifference of the Com- 
 mons. The English people had no wish, of 
 288 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 course, for this tyranny. They had no knowl- 
 edge of it. Graham Wallas has warned us 
 against the modern conception of the "Psychology 
 of the Crowd." He has warned us against seeing 
 j)opulations as individually thoughtful and tem- 
 perate and collectively blind and ferocious. It 
 is the fallacy of our generation to believe that 
 whole peoples go insane in a wild swirl, and do 
 this thing and wish that thing by imitation and 
 suggestion and sympathy. Of course political 
 movements are in fact carried out "by men con- 
 scious and thoughtful, though necessarily ill in- 
 formed,'* and these movements seem to the slack 
 observer, fed on our popular sociologists, "to be 
 due to the blind and unconscious impulses of 
 masses 'incapable both of reflection and reason- 
 ing.' " It is so with the right of asylum and the 
 suppression of the Russians. The English peo- 
 ple have not gone war-mad. They have not 
 risen up to overthrow the principles of freedom 
 and justice for which they have in the main long 
 contended. 
 
 But under cover of the war, when the attention 
 of millions of the inhabitants was strained on 
 another matter, a little group of militarists, pol- 
 289 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 iticians, and policemen have tried to carry out a 
 reactionary program. It is familiar to all stu- 
 dents of the institution of police that it is the 
 tendency of their practice at times of strain to 
 "take away a man's character by administrative 
 decree on secret police information." It is not 
 that they fail to act honestly on the best of their 
 "information and belief"; it is that the secret and 
 one-sided examination, followed by peremptory 
 action, is not a perfect method for establishing 
 truth. "Spy," "crook," "anarchist," and "per- 
 vert" are words for them that do duty in place of 
 public legal procedure. 
 
 The attempts to harass Russian refugees have 
 been fewer and feebler since Lord Sheffield spoke. 
 In November the British authorities removed 
 four Russians from a Danish ship, but their case 
 was tried in open court. And in a case tried on 
 the same day, January 11 of this year, concern- 
 ing a French political refugee, the lord chief- 
 justice laid down the British law for all such 
 cases, and restored the ancient tradition of the 
 nation. He said: 
 
 "Parliament had not given the home secretary 
 power to make an order which would forcibly 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 remove a man from this country to another 
 country to which he did not wish to go." 
 
 Enghsh justice refused to be muzzled by con- 
 scription, munitions acts, militaiy service acts, 
 and the Defense of the Reahn Act. So ended 
 the second chapter of this record. Chapter one 
 showed certain Enghsh authorities as stupid ps 
 the pohce of Chicago and New York during 
 "anarchist" flurries. Chapter two revealed the 
 English people as alert in the defense of freedom 
 as in the days before the war. The right of 
 asylum had been reaffirmed. 
 
 Then came chapter three, with the entrance 
 of the new British Government. The new Gov- 
 ernment represents the triumph of the executive 
 over the Parliamentary legislative division of 
 authority. Mr. Bonar Law announced on Feb- 
 ruary 27 to the House of Commons that Russians 
 in England must enlist as British soldiers or be 
 deported to Russia. On the same day at the 
 Old- Street Police Court the Magistrate said to 
 David Cohen, a Russian: 
 
 We do not want you here if you are not going to do 
 your duty. If you succeed in proving that you are of 
 291 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Russian nationality, I shall do my best to get you sent 
 back. 
 
 On March 7, I attended a debate in the House 
 of Lords, where Lord Sheffield pointed out that 
 the home of an Englishwoman had been raided 
 while she was held in prison with no charge made 
 against her, and in her absence papers were con- 
 fiscated. These papers were pamphlets in de- 
 fense of the right of asylum. Lord Sheffield 
 then cited the case of a Russian refugee in Lon- 
 don who wished to return to the United States, 
 where he had taken out his first naturalization 
 papers. The letter of the Home Office was pro- 
 duced in evidence, and this letter refused the Rus- 
 sian's request. 
 
 The Secretary of State for War, the Earl of 
 Derby, replied for the Government. He said 
 that one of the seized pamphlets, entitled "The 
 Right of Asjdum," was of such a character as to 
 make it unfit for circulation at this time. Very 
 skilfully he created an "atmosphere" about that 
 pamphlet, so that the listener felt that it was 
 treasonable and seditious. But I possess a copy 
 of that pamphlet, and it is not unfit for circula- 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 tion in a free country. It is an appeal by Lon- 
 don Russians not to be sent back. It is simply 
 that. 
 
 The "noble Earl" went on to refer to one of 
 the societies of Russians as suspicious, and there- 
 fore a fair field for official investigation. lie 
 forgot that he was defending an official policy 
 which would place those suspicious persons in the 
 army. 
 
 The Lord Chancellor spoke next. Lord Fin- 
 lay, the present Lord Chancellor, is always worth 
 hearing, because he is naive. It was he who, in 
 a debate on admitting women as solicitors, said: 
 
 The question is: What is the proper sphere of 
 women? I do not believe that the active practice of a 
 profession is compatible with the proper work of women 
 as mothers and in attending to their families. I regret 
 that there are many women who do not have an oppor- 
 tunity of marriage in this country. Probably in time 
 opportunities will be found for them in other parts of 
 the Empire where they can become the mothers of 
 mighty nations. 
 
 In the present debate on the right of Asylum, 
 he was equally delightful when he said that the 
 293 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Russian political refugees owed a duty to their 
 nation, Russia. 
 
 Lord Sheffield was snowed under by these 
 vigorous reactionaries, and the old man hobbled 
 away on two canes. But for aU that, he had 
 made it clear that an ancient right was being re- 
 moved by executive decree, instead of by con- 
 stitutional methods. If the British people wish 
 to abolish the right of asylum, they should be per- 
 mitted to do so by Act of Parliament. 
 
 No nation, with all its young men in sthe field, 
 will tolerate the presence of non-combatant ahens, 
 filling the jobs vacated by the citizen army. The 
 Mayor of Bethnal Green said recently. 
 
 Men have to sacrifice their little businesses or their 
 small factories to serve at the front, and neighbors of 
 foreign parentage step into their places and reap the 
 reward. 
 
 Two other mayors of East London, represen- 
 tatives of the borough councils, local tribunals, 
 and of the London County Council, supported his 
 statement and passed a resolution calling on 
 Parliament to remedy the evil. The alien must 
 be willing to defend the nation in which he makes 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 his residence or else leave for some other land 
 not under war-pressure. But he should receive 
 the right to select his destination. To force him 
 to return to a country which would imprison him, 
 is as unjust as it is for him to claim protection in 
 a countiy which he is unwilling to defend. 
 
 PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 England would have been one more quiet, 
 comfortable power of the second rank but for its 
 northern and western counties. Its recent his- 
 toiy would have been the history of Holland if 
 it had not been for the storehouse of coal and iron 
 in the industrial provinces. It was out of them, 
 and out of the people bred there, that she has 
 derived her vast strength in meeting the new 
 world created by the industrial revolution that 
 came in one century ago on the invention of 
 machinery. Those northern and western parts 
 of Great Britain have won the fight of democ- 
 rac}^ and established the principle of democratic 
 control. What we used to mean by England 
 was southern England. It was Oxford, Cam- 
 bridge, and London. The genius and the vital- 
 ity of the kingdom were gathered there, and the 
 295 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 radiations went out from those centers to make 
 the impress of what the world knew as EngUsh 
 influence. 
 
 Imperceptibly the change has come. The 
 governing class has ceased to govern. The type 
 of Englishman who was born to rule is left with- 
 out a job. Power and virtue have departed 
 from the old order. The Oxford and Cambridge 
 hierarchy exist in a vacuum. Patriarchal Eng- 
 land, reared in the humanities, impervious to 
 modem ideas, indifferent to alien points of view, 
 unconsciously arrogant, heavily stupid, kindly, 
 cultivated, and honorable, was unfitted to the 
 modern world of quick thinking, swift action, 
 sympathetic cooperation. It is dying in our 
 sight. In the first weeks of war the shell of that 
 little England collapsed ; the organism itself had 
 long since weakened. In its place has arisen a 
 far more formidable, far more democratic state, 
 the British commonwealth. 
 
 As fast as power shifts a psychological change 
 takes place. The English nature and character 
 are visibly altering. A swifter order of men are 
 in control. The men of power show Celtic char- 
 acteristics. Under the touch of the new influ- 
 296 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 ence, which is industrial and democratic, there 
 is a brightening and quickening. The old inartic- 
 ulateness passes. The race grows talkative. It 
 responds to excitement. 
 
 Public opinion, as it reverberates in London, is 
 no longer the public opinion of Great Britain. 
 It is not the public opinion of the Cornwall 
 miners, of the South Wales miners, of the indus- 
 trial centers of Liverpool, Birmingham, Man- 
 chester, and Glasgow. It is not the public 
 opinion of Montreal, and Sydney. London and 
 the south of England do not speak for the com- 
 monwealth. "The Manchester Guardian" un- 
 derstands the sentiment of Glasgow and Mont- 
 real, but the London "Morning Post" does 
 not. 
 
 When Lloyd-George struck out his brilliant 
 suggestion for Ireland — a suggestion which will 
 bring the solution of a question seven hundred 
 years old — he spoke the requiem of the England 
 known to us in memoirs, novels, and letters; the 
 England of our college literary course, of the his- 
 toric tradition, the caste system, the landed gen- 
 try, the noble lady, the faithful sei-vitor, the hack- 
 ney coachman, the genial vicar, and the Oxford 
 297 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 don. He proposed that the matter of Ireland be 
 handed over to the imperial conference, the con- 
 gress of the five democracies. England's time 
 had gone. She could n't solve the ancient wrong, 
 but the new conmionwealth could solve it. Take 
 it away from the tired kingdom, and give it to 
 the young democracy. Government is no longer 
 an affair of historic tradition. It is a very trou- 
 blesome matter of digging out the facts, and ap- 
 plying them to brand-new and rapidly changing 
 conditions. It requires qualities of swift decision 
 and execution. Industrial working-class Eng- 
 land takes over the Government, assumes control 
 of life, and side by side with radical Scotland and 
 Wales and Austraha and Canada creates the new 
 state. With the passing of Little England, the 
 "literarj-" Englislmian whom we have kno^sTi 
 passes, the courtly and simple nobleman, the 
 charming Htterateur, the "scholar and gentle- 
 man," and there comes in his stead a democratic 
 person, open to ideas, wiUing to learn, and ver^^ 
 willing to work out in partnership the problems 
 of democratic control. 
 
 There are clever men who are attempting to 
 capture this newer England and to manipulate 
 298 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 its public opinion. They discern certain of the 
 creative elements in the change, organization, 
 efficiency, business methods, government by ex- 
 perts. Two such men are Horatio Bottomley and 
 Lord Northcliffe. Thi'ough "John Bull," "The 
 Times," "The Daily Mail," and other publications 
 they wield a wide influence. Bottomley and 
 Northcliffe are of the familiar iyipe of American 
 company promoter. They are a mixture of the 
 politician and the financier. They have a tough 
 masculine geniality, a shrewd common sense, and 
 what is called "an understanding of human 
 nature," which means a knack of playing on the 
 coarser impulses and motives of the democracy. 
 Essentially they are bad leaders, because they 
 don't believe in the best qualities of the masses 
 of men whom they are leading. They see that 
 average human nature is easily flattered, is loaded 
 to the gimwale with prejudices, and that it can 
 be manipulated by phrases promising action. 
 Excitement, change, the sense of "something 
 doing," are pleasurable to the average man. A 
 newspaper progi'am which "makes and unmakes" 
 ministers, creates heroes and villains, wrecks and 
 reconstructs, gives a continuous performance of 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 moving pictures to its readers. In the flicker of 
 the fihn ideas and true pohtical policy lose their 
 sovereignty. By making use of the new forces of 
 democracy, such men as the modern popular 
 journalists may have it in their power a little to 
 misdirect them. This failure of sane pubHc 
 opinion to register itself is almost inevitable in a 
 society where the millionaire proprietor is able to 
 conduct a chain of newspapers which reflect his 
 own mind, and which misrepresent his readers in 
 certain matters by giving them what they want 
 in the general news of the world, in pictures, and 
 admirable special articles, and in hammering 
 through a program of reconstruction, much of 
 which is sound and responsive to the needs of the 
 community. 
 
 I am trying to untangle what seems to me the 
 silent and real opinion of the nation from the 
 voices that fill the air. Any one would be sin- 
 gularly inept who pretended to interpret with 
 any finality the public opinion of a people. 
 What I give is merely the product of contacts 
 with a few thousand British. The experience is 
 all necessarily incomplete and superficial. This 
 is offered merely as what I have seen and heard. 
 300 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 It is a collection of little fragments of public 
 opinion. 
 
 The stuff talked in certain London centers is 
 misleading and mischievous and sometimes wil- 
 fully malicious. It is the bitter cry of persons 
 who have lost their influence. There are little 
 groups of elderly men and women in London who 
 inflame themselves with hate of the German 
 people. They speak of them as a nation of 
 beasts, outside the human race. This is very 
 um-epresentative of English public opinion, 
 which has made the clear distinction in its mind 
 between the doped, duped German people and 
 the band of predatory assassins who are in con- 
 trol of them. 
 
 Again, on Ireland, I can quote an English 
 officer, whom I heard say on his return from 
 Dublin: 
 
 "Remove the Nationalist politicians from 
 Westminster. Suppress the Irish newspapers. 
 Then give them conscription. They will yield." 
 
 He and "The Morning Post" represent that 
 
 minute fraction of "die hards" who feel the tide 
 
 floating them down the beach and tiy to dig their 
 
 heels into the sand. The will of the British 
 
 301 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 people is for a settlement of the Irish question. 
 There is no hatred of Ireland among the masses 
 of the community. The desire of the average 
 Englishman is to be let alone and to let other 
 people alone. 
 
 It is always necessary to find out whether a 
 statement of opinion represents the mass con- 
 sciousness or whether it is spoken from personal 
 bitterness and class interest. I can quote Leo 
 Maxse, who writes in his "National Review," 
 "There is nothing in common between the stand- 
 point of the civilized part of Europe and the 
 United States." But I am quoting a shrill and 
 lonely voice. The mass of people in England 
 are as unaware of America as the middle West is 
 unaware of England. Thej^ are not scornful or 
 antagonistic. They are indifferent with the large 
 indifference of ignorance. In the part of the 
 English community who are aware of the United 
 States as the "big show," to quote a Broad Street 
 cotton broker, there is little resentment and much 
 good-will. The "Tommy," the farmer, the shop- 
 keeper, when he meets the individual American, 
 has the tolerance of his kind for all alien folk that 
 come from some other countrj^ than his own. 
 302 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 They all seem a little strange to him, but they are 
 "all right." He includes the American with the 
 Australian and the Welshman. 
 
 Public opinion, then, is not really concerned at 
 all with exterminating German clerks, oppress- 
 ing Irish peasants, annoying American business 
 men. It is not "out" to govern the world or rule 
 "backward races." 
 
 What are its concerns ? 
 
 Its main concern at the moment is to go through 
 w^ith a bad job to the end, to win a victory in order 
 to have a lasting peace. Englishmen hate war, 
 and they were first astonished, then irritated, 
 and finally angry that any nation should let loose 
 a hideous slaughter into a fairly peaceable world. 
 They were slow to believe German methods of 
 fright fulness. In the early months I could get a 
 hearing, but little credence, for the atrocities I 
 had witnessed. A good-natured skepticism was 
 the response. But once thoroughly in a nasty 
 business, they are now determined to see it 
 through. They will hang on. It is hard for 
 them to pry loose when they have taken hold. 
 When their clutch has automatically clicked and 
 got set, there seems to be no device in the machin- 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 ery for setting itself free. And that offers the 
 chance for the imperiahsts, with their "spheres of 
 influence" and teiTitorial claims, to turn what 
 was idealistic in the early purposes of the young 
 men to their own advantage. "Why should n't 
 England take a bit in return for the sacrifice?" 
 One hears this idea occasionally expressed. This 
 is not the will of England. The vast majority 
 went into the war in a spirit of devotion, and they 
 wish to come out of it as clean-handed and clean- 
 minded as they entered. 
 
 There is a powerful peace movement, not 
 representing anything approaching a majority. 
 It is, in fact, a small fraction of the community ; 
 but I call it powerful because it worries the 
 authorities, and because it is growing, though 
 very slowly. The impression which Mr. Trevel- 
 yan has given to America of a wide-spread desire 
 for an immediate peace — a desire muzzled from 
 expression by the authorities — is false ; but there 
 is an increasing receptivity to the idea of peace. 
 
 The next concern of public opinion is with the 
 internal situation. The mind of the man belong- 
 ing to the upper possessing class has become 
 accustomed to change. For a generation he has 
 304 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 felt the foundation growing unsteady. The in- 
 stitutions which seemed to him immutable are 
 visibly modifying — the institutions of property, 
 church, and marriage. He is not in favor of the 
 ever-spreading change, but he has mentally 
 accepted the fact that change is taking place. 
 The old authority has passed to other hands, and 
 he is bewildered by the juggle which has trans- 
 formed upper-class rule into democratic control. 
 Nothing in itself now surprises him, because the 
 whole process is amazing. Without a protest he 
 has seen state socialism installed at Westminster 
 and feminism at the War Office. Patiently he 
 awaits what will happen next and what will come 
 of it all. What has been undermined is "a 
 certain organic conception of society — the con- 
 ception of the hierarchy of authorities which 
 dominated the Middle Ages. The old order has 
 been destroyed by the new ideals of justice and 
 liberty, beginning with religion, passing on to 
 politics," modifying industiy, "and reaching at 
 last the private relations of marriage and the 
 family." These new ideals have penetrated the 
 thought of the community, and have gradually 
 sought fulfilment in the lagging, painful proc- 
 305 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 esses of legislation. The older type of politician 
 was unable to frame such revolutionaiy concepts 
 into acts, so what has happened is the creation of 
 a new order of civil servants. "What is grow- 
 ing, rapidly, and yet almost unobserved by the 
 public, is expert legislation by permanent offi- 
 cials." 
 
 It is small wonder that the elderly, kindly 
 gentleman whom we have taken as representative 
 of his class is dazed by the shifting world of flux 
 where once he stood firmly. He is on a moving- 
 sidewalk, and he is quite sure he is under way, 
 though he himself is not walking. But not only 
 is that gentle conservative puzzled by the ad- 
 vance; the general public have not intellectually 
 realized the change which their own impulse 
 toward freedom has created. Pubhc opinion 
 to-day is constantly in the attitude of a man who 
 has his desires answered before he has stated 
 them. The democratic state is moving faster 
 than the individual citizen, and he is mentally con- 
 fused. The moving finger writes, and public 
 opinion will have to find its place in the appendix 
 to the Book of Acts, recording the establishment 
 of democratic control during the Great War. 
 306 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 WHERE THE LANE TURNS 
 
 A letter has come to me from a friend. He 
 is a charming writer, fellow of a Cambridge 
 college. He objects to my summary dismissal 
 of the older England as recorded in the preceding 
 chapter. He says : 
 
 "If ever there was a typical Oxford man, with 
 an Oxford cast of thought in the direct Oxford 
 tradition, it is H. A. L. Fisher, the new minister 
 of education. The new ministry of labor, being 
 forced to get a permanent head capable of deal- 
 ing with the problems they are up against, does 
 not get a trade-union leader, but an Eton-Balliol 
 scholar and fellow of All Souls. I am afraid, as 
 a narrow-minded pedant, I am convinced that 
 brains are what always tell in the long run, and 
 I don't think commerce or "life" or the newer 
 universities are yet the equal of the old univer- 
 sities in producing and training brain. More- 
 over, Oxford and Cambridge are not "south of 
 England," as you suggest. Their geographical 
 position has nothing to do with theu* nature. 
 They are the oldest and most independent repub- 
 lics in England and totally ex-territorial, like the 
 city of Washington." 
 
 307 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 Of course he is exactly right, and I beheve we 
 are both right. Now is the meeting of the old 
 and new, and even a profound modification of 
 structure will include vestigial traces. Every 
 summary statement concerning so complex a 
 thing as the modern community must wait for 
 verification on psychological records which have 
 not yet been made. "Crowd psychology" is still 
 in the hands of hasty generalizers and pseudo- 
 scientists, who write of the "herd instinct." So 
 it is with this book. It is a personal impression, 
 and it paints in broad colors. A. E. Zimmern of 
 the reconstruction committee, H. N. Spalding of 
 the welfare department of the ministry of muni- 
 tions, and Dr. Fisher, the minister of education, 
 have all cautioned me against over-emphasizing 
 the speed of change in so stable a community as 
 the British nation and against making too logical 
 and intellectualistic an analysis of British char- 
 acter. The Briton is a sociable, humorsome 
 fellow who moves slowly and is not logical in his 
 ways, but proceeds along the lines of his own 
 individualistic psychology in contact with his own 
 peculiar and ancient environment. 
 
 But a reconstruction is under way. A peace- 
 SOS 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 able, slow-moving race has been swept by the 
 winds of doctrine and the forces of change. 
 Great questions are suddenly opened that were 
 regarded as settled or non-existent, or bui'ied in 
 the silence of respectability. Let me show the 
 method of that change in the concrete instance of 
 education. Two systems of education exist 
 to-day in England side by side. There is the 
 long-established system of private education for 
 the upper class by the gi'eat schools of Eton, 
 Harrow^ Rugby, Westminster, and the universi- 
 ties of Oxford and Cambridge. There is public 
 education by local boards and new universities. 
 The two systems are unrelated, and so, from the 
 point of view of a national system of education, 
 they are anomalous. 
 
 But because there is this anomaly, it does not 
 follow that the reconstruction will "hack its way 
 through." The process will be a filtration, and 
 not a surgical operation. Slowly the great 
 universities will be modernized, and steadily the 
 new institutions will be urged to aim at the level 
 of culture which the humanities gave. A "bread- 
 and-butter" education alone will never be the 
 one aim of Enghsh instruction. The arts alone 
 309 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 will never again be in sole command of the field. 
 But a new progi-am will be wrought out of both 
 sets of values. 
 
 From a certain pubHc school twenty-seven out 
 of twenty-eight scholarships to the university 
 were taken in the humanities. It is improbable 
 that twenty-seven out of twenty-eight represents 
 the actual proportion in aptitude of that group 
 for a literary culture as contrasted with a sci- 
 entific culture. The probable proportion would 
 be more like fourteen for the humanities, and 
 fourteen for the science. To redi-ess that balance 
 will be the task of the coming reconstruction, and 
 it will be achieved without upsetting the English 
 temperament and tradition. 
 
 One elementary school differs from another as 
 widely as an elementary school differs from Har- 
 row. To level up elementary schools to standard 
 without invading local autonomy is another dif- 
 ficult task of the reconsti*uction. A few years ago 
 education was decentralized, and the local boards, 
 by refusing government grants, can separate their 
 local institution from the national system. Not 
 by offending these local boards can the better- 
 ment come. The Government, by its financial 
 310 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 gi-ants and by wise suggestion, can, however, 
 influence the local boards to modem methods. 
 Little by little modern educators will sit on those 
 boards, and two men of forward-looking mind 
 can swing a session of "stand-patters." It may 
 be, at some point in the future, that full control 
 of education will pass back to a central authority, 
 and that what is now advisory will become man- 
 datory. But the public are far from ready to 
 accept such a change, and the local boards wiU 
 continue to be the machinery through which the 
 minister of education will operate. 
 
 The period of adolescence of the working- 
 class population will be gradually dealt with. 
 Between fourteen and eighteen years of age there 
 is a vast waste of vocational and cultural po- 
 tentiality in the child. That waste is clearly 
 recognized. The youngster as yet goes out from 
 board school into blind-ally jobs, which leave him 
 as unskilled and ignorant as an adult. Contin- 
 uation schools, a system of part-time work and 
 part-time instruction, a raising of the school age, 
 more pay, and better teachers — these and a dozen 
 other details will all be handled by the method I 
 have outlined, which is never slashing and drastic 
 311 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 reform by an autocratic state. It is largely the 
 extension of an ancient practice to a wider group. 
 It is partly the response of a flexible system to 
 new knowledge. It is a gradual method, "brick 
 on brick," as is the English way. But when the 
 builders have completed their task, the structure 
 will be new in the eyes of the community, and the 
 institution housed there will be as little like the 
 "Eton-Balliol" institution as King George V's 
 commonwealth is like King George IV's Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The old system of education produced a gov- 
 erning class, a group of men of integrity and 
 trained intelligence. They legislated, colonized, 
 hunted, and followed the life of culture with dis- 
 tinction, and they continued to make England 
 the greatest of the nations. As long as the old 
 formulae and the old ethics were sufficient, the 
 inheritors of that tradition were the inevitable 
 masters of government. But suddenly the two 
 aspects of government made an astonishing turn. 
 Control of the environment entered on a new 
 development with the coming of steam-power and 
 machinery. The peasant and yeoman com- 
 munity passed out of existence. The land went 
 312 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 back to grass. Industrial cities and massed pop- 
 ulations came in. And that new control of the 
 enviromnent altered the other aspect of govern- 
 ment — the relationship of man to man. Indus- 
 trial organization created new alinements of 
 partj^, interest, and class. The governing class 
 began to flutter in a world not realized, like the 
 thin-voiced shades about Ulysses. But the mass 
 of the people, to whom the power passed, have 
 not yet found their leaders. 
 
 Two civilizations are coexistent here. One is 
 a very ancient and noble civilization. The other 
 is new and chaotic, caught in the process of 
 becoming. The ancient civilization was sure of 
 itself, possessing a tradition and code of action. 
 The new is too busy to develop a technic of life or 
 manner. It does n't know where it is going, but 
 it is on the way. The effect is that of electric 
 lighting in Warwick Castle or a trolley-car to 
 Stonehenge. Everywhere in Great Britain one 
 feels the modern thrusting through the rich soil 
 and surface cake of what is older than the life of 
 man. "The Popular Magazine" and "The Top 
 Notch" are widely read in Ireland. In the little 
 Hampshire village of Emsworth bright, new 
 313 
 
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 jerry-built bungalows rise close to the huddle of 
 centuries-old fishermen's cottages, and motor- 
 cars flash past thatched roofs under the great 
 spire of Chichester and come to rest in a ren- 
 ovated moss-gi'own inn. Peasants touch their 
 hats as you. pass and call you "sir," and the girl 
 conductor of the omnibus is sometimes as curt 
 and scornful as a Chicago expressman. In the 
 Devon hamlet of Lewdown the farm women with 
 whom we lived continue to make clotted cream as 
 their likes made it when John Ridd climbed to his 
 courting, but eagerly borrow my London paper 
 every evening after the chores are done. The 
 church is still firmly established, but the congre- 
 gation waits for the afternoon service, and the 
 afternoon service is held in the cinema house. 
 The king is a very gallant and modest gentleman, 
 but he does not possess the power of Arthur Hen- 
 derson or the influence of H. W. Massingham. 
 Still stands the House of Lords, but the lords of 
 power are Devonport, Rhondda, and Northcliffe, 
 business lords. The telephone and tram-car 
 stretch their wires through lanes where the 
 cavaliers rode, and there is an excellent tele- 
 graph service in the village in which Baring 
 •314< 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 Gould is writing the legends of his country- 
 side. 
 
 The new-comers are not taking the Kingdom 
 by violence. They do not tear down the old. 
 No, they take the heart out of it, and let it wither 
 like a plant stung by the frost. The wreckers 
 will never march through England armed with 
 condemnation vin-its and blasting-powder. But 
 gradually the light railways spread their threads, 
 while "The Daily Mail" scatters its modernism to 
 millions. It is possible by careful selection to 
 convince oneself that the former things have not 
 passed away. It is true, that they linger, but 
 new forces are in command, and England of the 
 poets is an old-age pensioner in the house of her 
 daughters of the British conmionwealth. They 
 make war in vain who fight against these things. 
 Raw energy is in the saddle, and the galled jade 
 must gallop to new spurs. 
 
 THE NEW WAY 
 
 Liberalism has ceased to be a political theorj'' 
 
 and has become a program of reconstruction, 
 
 planning reform by intensive intellectual effort. 
 
 After the Napoleonic wars a period of deadness 
 
 315 
 
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 set in, and gradually middle-class liberalism, bar- 
 ren of ideas, assmned control. It did not come 
 to gi'ips with its world, because it did not have the 
 proper method. But in recent years the way to 
 study human society has been discovered. A 
 group of university men began to put their 
 thought on the organization of human life. The 
 working-class party sprang up. There has never 
 existed so wide a division between the intjsllectuals 
 and the workers in England as in America. The 
 English workers have never swallowed whole the 
 Marxian analysis. They have preferred step by 
 step reform to the spreading of a theory. 
 
 As the result of much patient piece-meal work, 
 based on "the accumulation and analysis of eco- 
 nomic knowledge," a whole new body of legisla- 
 tion was incorporated into Enghsh life, beginning 
 with the year 1906. That process continues. 
 The principles of this reconstruction are derived 
 from the conception that a community must work 
 hard with its mind in order to organize a good so- 
 ciety. Untrammeled by dogma, the practical 
 Enghsh intelligence, both of the working-class 
 brain and of the intellectuals, has set about re- 
 shaping its institutions of property and state. 
 316 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 The Fabian Society and "The Round Table" 
 group have aided in the work of collecting facts 
 and sharpening the analysis. There have been 
 brilliant scouts Hke Wells and Shaw. But back 
 of them, and providing them with the equipment 
 for their sorties, are the hard workers with a 
 genius for taking pains, like the Webbs, Seebohm 
 Rowntree, and Bruno Lasker. "The develop- 
 ment of more dehcate logical methods and the 
 accumulation of recorded observations are now 
 making deliberate thought about mankind less in- 
 exact and misleading than at any other point in 
 history." 
 
 Lately, many persons have been thinking with 
 the lash on them. How to stop the Zeppelins, 
 make shells, and overcome the damage of war — 
 these questions are being dealt with at high 
 speed. The community is becoming aware of 
 itself; it is devising an imperial economy, which 
 correlates industry to national needs and includes 
 the family budget in its process of thought. The 
 easy generalizations of political exiles and closet- 
 philosophers have been displaced by fact-inves- 
 tigations and analysis from the records. Laissez- 
 faire, the economic man, economic determinism, 
 317 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 and the other substitutes for hard work, no longer 
 content the community which wishes to find itself. 
 Patiently and gropingly, a synthesis for the new 
 society is being formed. 
 
 Almost unobserved, a literature is forming 
 around the social movement. It is a literature 
 where the pressure of thought has been so intense 
 and controlled that it has wrought for itself a 
 special style. I feel sure that if Professor Saints- 
 bury were to extend his anthology of "English 
 Prose Rythms," he would include paragraphs 
 from Bertrand Russell, A. E., Edward Carpen- 
 ter, Lowes Dickinson, Havelock Ellis, and Gra- 
 ham Wallas. They carry a tone and accent, giv- 
 ing pleasure to the inward ear. These men write 
 a clear and precise English, which travels easily 
 and without fatigue, and often rises to beauty on 
 its own momentum of thought. They seem to 
 have hfted the technic of style to a new level; 
 perhaps no higher than that of several earlier 
 periods, but different. They have introduced a 
 fresh cadence into the prose music of the last four 
 centuries. There is an absence of premeditated 
 eloquence, of overstatement, of the wind of words. 
 There has come a realization that the limit of lan- 
 318 
 
 i 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 guage in one direction had been reached with 
 "multitudinous seas" and "purple riot," and that 
 the prose writers who pushed along that track of 
 the poets reached a point of strain in De Quincey 
 and Landor beyond which laughter lurked. The 
 inevitable reaction gave us the clear, cold drear- 
 iness of Herbert Spencer and the suppression 
 and aridity of Arnold. 
 
 But these modern prose writers, interpreting 
 the new social order, have taken a fresh trail. 
 And I do not doubt they have abohshed the 
 purple patch as effectually as they have avoided 
 the anemia of thwarted impulse. Their meaning 
 is more exactl}'- expressed than in the pages of 
 men who used loosely and cheaply "God," 
 "nature," "happiness," and "society." But the 
 pains of a scientific precision have not silenced 
 the music. There is none of the jumbled ter- 
 minology of our troubled "sociologists" and psy- 
 chologists. These men have lifted their scholar- 
 ship into simplicity. It is perhaps only an 
 interesting chance that tw^o of them are math- 
 ematicians, but it is profoundly significant that 
 all of them are students of human society, not in 
 the old literary way of projecting Utopias, but 
 319 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 through the process of hard thinking on the facts 
 of life. 
 
 "In the end it is the psychological question of 
 fact which will have to settle the ethical question 
 of conduct." 
 
 It is no longer enough for us that a passage in 
 a book shall be "well written," as the famous and 
 unintelligent pages of Lecky on prostitution. 
 Writing that concerns itself with society, if it is 
 to win a response from us, must be grounded on 
 observation of the facts. It must bring a sci- 
 entific method to bear on "the vast and constantly 
 growing accumulation of recorded observations." 
 Surely in these choice writers of the reconstruc- 
 tion we have that quality which the democracy, if 
 it is wise, will cherish. We have that natural 
 aristocracy, that sovereignty of the best, which 
 alone is able to set a standard for the mass-peo- 
 ple. 
 
 THE NEW AMERICANISM 
 Around 20,000,000 happy firesides the fathers of 
 America will gather this night with their unbroken 
 family circle, with their children upon their knees and 
 their wives by their side, happy and prosperous. Con- 
 trast this with the fathers, husbands and brothers of 
 320 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 the Old World, dying in the ditches. . . . Who is it 
 that would have our President exchange with the blood- 
 bespattered monarchs of the Old World? . . . He is 
 the world teacher, his class is made up of kings, kaisers, 
 czars, princes, and potentates. — Senator OUie JameSy 
 Permanent Chairman of the Democratic National Con- 
 vention. 
 
 With the causes and the objects of this war we are 
 not concerned. — Woodrow Wilson, President of the 
 United States. 
 
 The superb assurance of Captain Hans Rose, 
 coupled with his inimitable ability, shown "when he 
 brought the U-53 into Newport, Rhode Island, paid 
 and received visits of courtesy, handed to an American 
 newspaper man a letter for Ambassador von Bems- 
 torfF, dived and was away on a mission of destruction 
 within three hours, carries with it a wholesome savor 
 of knightly conduct that goes home to the moral center 
 of every American. — "The Evening Gazette," Cedar 
 Rapids, Iowa. 
 
 I write this article as the result of conver- 
 sations and correspondence with a wide group of 
 Americans and English and French, made up of 
 politicians, economists, historians, psychologists, 
 and literary men. I find in thoughtful men 
 to-day both in America and Europe a challenge 
 of certain tendencies in our national thought. I 
 321 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 believe that challenge to be well grounded. A 
 great mass of talk and letters suddenly came to 
 focus one day in what one man, a distinguished 
 scholar, expressed to me. So in what follows I 
 have taken the lines and phrases of his thought. 
 But what he stated is only the clear expression 
 of what many are saying and feeling. 
 
 We have failed to teach our true American 
 tradition to new-comers, but certain of our 
 newspapers and of our popular voices have been 
 busy in creating a legend of Americanism which 
 contains an element of falsity. We have dis- 
 played a self-complacency in our proclamation 
 of freedom, a readiness to assume that it was our 
 monopoly, and that no other nation understood 
 so fully what it meant or had done such service 
 for it. This has led to a lack of sympathy with 
 other nations that have achieved freedom or are 
 aspiring after it or are helping to strengthen and 
 extend it. This attitude has been reflected in 
 our school histories. The establishment of Amer- 
 ican independence is represented in these school- 
 books, in newspaper writing, in popular speeches, 
 as a protest agamst tjTanny, a breaking-away 
 from Old- World chains. But this is not how 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 scientific historians of the modern school see that 
 event. Despite her gi-ave mistakes then, Eng- 
 land had endowed our States, as she has endowed 
 every settlement of European stock which she 
 has planted, with the institutions of self-govern- 
 ment, from which sprang our desire for a wider 
 freedom. Despite the many mistakes she has 
 made since, she has carried freedom and justice 
 to new populations, and has been an unwearied 
 breeder of free nations. Our popular concep- 
 tion of our Revolution, our self-complacency in 
 our proclamation of freedom as an American 
 monopoly, have kept us out of an organic rela- 
 tion with the whole world of civilization. We 
 have failed in recent years to feel that this world 
 is one, and the cause of freedom a single cause, 
 to whose fortunes no free society can be indif- 
 ferent or neutral. That breach is a tragedy, per- 
 haps one of the greatest tragedies in history. It 
 has been a bad thing for civiHzation, because it 
 has weakened the defense of freedom by alienat- 
 ing its strongest advocates from one another, and 
 persuading one of them to stand aloof from its 
 struggles. It has been a bad thing for America, 
 by leading her to imagine that she is not as other 
 323 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 nations are, and that the working out of the great 
 issues of civilization in Europe had no interest 
 for her. 
 
 This falsity in the popular view of the Euro- 
 pean situation has cut us off from sympathy with 
 other peoples who have loved freedom not less 
 sincerely. We have continually misunderstood 
 England, the tyrant state which America had 
 defied. We have had the cm'ious spectacle of a 
 friendship between the two nations that was al- 
 most whoUy one-sided. England has repeatedly 
 helped and supported us ; we have not really be- 
 heved that England stood, in the main, for free- 
 dom and justice. And what is ti-ue of our atti- 
 tude toward England is true in varj'ing degree 
 of our attitude toward the other "old strugglers" 
 of Em'ope. We have not believed it was our 
 duty to give support to Belgimn, to the French, 
 or to the Itahans in the struggle for the enlarge- 
 ment of hbertj'. 
 
 AMien the autocrats of the Holy Alhance were, 
 as Caiming put it, "aspiring to bind Em'ope in 
 chains," they cmshed the movement toward free- 
 dom in Italy and Spain, and then purposed to 
 crush it also in Spanish America. Camiing, in 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 the name of Great Britain, defied them, recog- 
 nized the independence of the Spanish colonies, 
 and made it plain that the British fleet would re- 
 sist any attempt to send armies to South Amer- 
 ica. He approached our Government with the 
 suggestion that the United States should take 
 their stand by the side of Great Britain. Presi- 
 dent Monroe's message was the result. That 
 was the promise that America was going to make 
 freedom her concern even outside of her own 
 bounds. It was not a proclamation of suzer- 
 ainty over the double continent. ^lonroe's mes- 
 sage and the fear of the British fleet kept Euro- 
 pean armies out of South America. It is the 
 British fleet which has in recent years saved the 
 Monroe Doctrine from challenge. But our pop- 
 ular conception has turned the Monroe Doctrine 
 into an assertion of American self-containedness 
 and indifference to Europe. 
 
 Again, in the Spanish-American War we made 
 the cause of freedom outside our bounds our own 
 cause. But having done this, we came to regard 
 it as only an American question. There was 
 nothing which the Spaniards did in Cuba com- 
 parable with what the Germans have done in Bel- 
 3^5 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 gium. The sinking of the Maine was no less 
 capable of explanation and excuse than the sink- 
 ing of the Lusitama. There was no tie of ob- 
 ligation to Cuba more primal than our national 
 signature to The Hague conventions. The Bel- 
 gian outrages were as much om* concern as the 
 Cuban outrages. 
 
 Loyalty to an ideal becomes vulgarized and 
 tarnished when it is interpreted in a self-regard- 
 ing way. It is not freedom that our people have 
 been recently worshiping, but only the brand of 
 it called American freedom, which we have per- 
 suaded ourselves is something peculiar and dif- 
 ferent in kind from other brands. By our news- 
 paper and popular conception of Americanism 
 we have not taught our new-comers the American 
 tradition of Franklin, Monroe, Lincoln, and John 
 Hay. We have taught them to despise other 
 lands, to regard all the peoples of the Old World 
 as alike reactionary and illiberal. We have 
 failed to impart an understanding of the labors 
 for the expansion of liberty which have been un- 
 dertaken by other peoples. Many of our people 
 have come to believe that since American freedom 
 is something peculiar or esoteric, it has few or no 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 responsibilities in the larger world, and may 
 rightly become self -regarding. In the present 
 war it appears as little more than the opportu- 
 nity of enlarging material prosperity. The ob- 
 ligation of sacrifice, the maintenance of other 
 than our own rights, seem the wild words of 
 idealists like Putnam and Morton Prince, and 
 the quixotic acts of college boys like the mem- 
 bers of the Norton Ambulance. An ideal of 
 freedom that is restricted and purely self-regard- 
 ing, however eloquent the phrases that clothe it, 
 is an uninspiring ideal. It is not astonishing 
 that many of our citizens, under the influence of 
 this ideal, have concentrated their attention on 
 making money from the agonies of Europe. It 
 is not astonishing that some elements among them 
 have found greater inspiration in the exacting 
 demands of the ideals of other nations. Even 
 the German ideal demands heroic sacrifice. A 
 belief in liberty so self-regarding as ours cozens 
 itself that Hberty is served even by accepting the 
 Lusitania crime, passing lightly over the Belgian, 
 Lorraine, and Ai'menian horrors, and submitting 
 to the outrages of U-53. 
 
 Our recent immigrants are led to believe that 
 327 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 in coming to America they are coming to the only 
 real home of liberty, that they have no responsi- 
 bility for the championing of justice elsewhere, 
 and that they have no concern with the dog- 
 fights of the "effete monarchies" and enemies of 
 liberty left in Europe. Some of these new-com- 
 ers are ready to adopt that view because they 
 come from lands where tyranny is still in com- 
 mand. Justice and freedom are not made to ap- 
 pear to them one supreme cause wherever they 
 are on trial, worthy of sacrifice ; but they appear 
 as achievements of our own, peculiar to us, re- 
 warded with material advantages. With them 
 our historic tradition is not an inheritance. 
 With many of them it is not even an acquisition. 
 The terms of the life which created our tradition 
 were not terms of ease and aloofness. The life 
 was a struggle with pioneer primitive conditions, 
 against forces of nature, hostile bands of Indians, 
 foreign troops, and traitorous men among us. 
 But our recent immigrants have come to us to 
 escape from severe conditions, and their cry is, in 
 the words of Mary Ant in, "What has America 
 given us?" Corruption in politics and business, 
 328 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 cosmopolitanism in feeling, luxmy, waste, com- 
 mercialism — all these are increasingly the prod- 
 ucts of the recent years. Instead of being the 
 struggling arena for a great experiment in de- 
 mocracy, we are becoming the grab-bag for all 
 that is predatory in human nature. With the 
 change in blood has come a change in national 
 character. We are shaking off the old beliefs, 
 the tradition of sacrifice and disciphne and re- 
 sponsibility. 
 
 In a smaller matter than the present World 
 War we could comfort ourselves with the fail- 
 ures of other nations. We have high precedent 
 for our abstention from crisis. But this is a mo- 
 ment when France and England are well served 
 by their tradition of freedom and justice, and 
 when our modern Americanism lends itself to an 
 easy distortion. It is a moment when one is 
 proud to be a Frenchman or an Englishman, and 
 when we, for all our prosperity, do not feel very 
 proud to be American. There have been mo- 
 ments in the past when the prides would have 
 been reversed; but this is not one of them, and 
 this is the greatest moment of history. 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 NATIONALITY 
 
 In a Frenchman nationality can be set aflame 
 by a touch. He has consciously thought about 
 it. This is because he and his fellows as a na- 
 tion have been invaded again and again, and as 
 a nation have marched out across Europe. Al- 
 most every half-century France has gone for- 
 ward to the frontier, following or facing some im- 
 perialist, to bleed its life away. So a French- 
 man kindles at thought of his nation, and 
 that thought is a love for the soil of his patrie, 
 for the house where he was born, and for the 
 sunlight and the equality of his beautiful coun- 
 try. 
 
 The nationality of a German is a touchy affair. 
 It was only a few years ago that his country was 
 a handful of petty states. Now suddenly a big, 
 powerful, deific engine, the state, has somehow 
 gathered him in with the weak kingdoms, and he 
 is half afraid that the concern will slip away in 
 the night, and leave him again with his dreams 
 and his music, and his empire broken back into 
 small bits. He is still in the pain of a swift 
 process. 
 
 630 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 The myth of nationaHty is a profound and nec- 
 essary truth, as well-grounded as any that gov- 
 erns human nature. It is blind and brutal and 
 righteous. It moves to aggression, or lives peace- 
 ably at home. It builds big guns or is pastoral. 
 It is merely the collective expression of human 
 nature in the particular group which circum- 
 stance and natural liking have created. It was 
 formed as much bj^ chance as the family — acci- 
 dent, propinquity^ commercial considerations. 
 Once formed, it is as natural as the family. 
 Tagore says that "a new age is imminent, when 
 the ideal of nationalism will be discarded." 
 
 But a greater than Tagore has said: 
 
 What muddles the moderns about the institution of 
 the family is what muddles them also about National- 
 ism: it is this double aspect of unity and multiplicity. 
 The principle of one house, one vote, seems to them a 
 crumbling dream. So some of them cannot believe in 
 the corporate mystery of patriotism, though it sets 
 the world on fire before their very eyes. They ask 
 what a nation is ; and can only be shown dissolving 
 views and visions. They see a mob tossing in a market- 
 place; and then a king sitting alone upon a throne of 
 marble; and then only innumerable interiors, like cells 
 of a bee-hive, with each man eating his own breakfast 
 331 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 and minding his own business; and then, again, only 
 smoke and sky, and a painted rag upon a pole that 
 drives out upon the driving wind. And all these are 
 one thing. 
 
 That nationality does, as a matter of fact, pen- 
 etrate to deeper soui'ces of instinctive life than 
 other forms of association, such as religion and 
 socialism, is proved by the alinements of the 
 present war, where comrade fights comrade, and 
 Catholic fights Catholic. Zimmern gives the 
 reason : 
 
 Why should our citizenship take precedence of our 
 trade unionism or our business obligations? Aristotle 
 replies, and in spite of recent critics I think the reply 
 still holds good: because, but for the existence of the 
 State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of 
 these associations could have been formed or be main- 
 tained. 
 
 Nationality lies very deeply buried in the sub- 
 consciousness of an Englishman. It required a 
 world war to dig it out. Empire talk never ex- 
 isted with the English till it came to the surface 
 with Burke, and received from him a certain 
 shaping and impetus. It dozed again till Dis- 
 332 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 raeli gave it a shove, and it sped along rather 
 briskly in the latter days of Victoria and her Sec- 
 ond Jubilee. But it never took strong hold of 
 the general imagination, and there have been few 
 jingo hysterias breaking about the idea of em- 
 pire. There is of course an inner group of men, 
 highly aware of empire as an affair of the state, 
 and a much wider group of upper-class families 
 whose sons find their career in being governors, 
 magistrates, and minor officials. The Anglo- 
 Indian, for instance, is a rather well-defined 
 type. The young men have to go somewhere. 
 They can't go into trade. They are well ed- 
 ucated, men of honor, and, often enough, with 
 a touch of vitality and adventure. Accordingly 
 many of them trek off to the ends of the earth 
 and enter public service in a crown colony. Such 
 men were Cromer, Milner, and Curzon. 
 
 A few of them go farther yet, and push the 
 imperial map into the jungle, or plant the flag in 
 a floe. Selous was a true Englishman of this 
 sort. So was Scott. The same breed of men 
 are the sailors, and they have kept his Majesty's 
 navy up to specifications for three hundred 
 years. That is nationality for them, streaking 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 out over polar ice, splashing through swamps, 
 and rolling through the seven seas. 
 
 But these men are a tiny fraction of the com- 
 munity, — "men of Biddeford in Devon," — and 
 their idea of England as a good place to see once 
 a year or once in three years is n't the national- 
 ity of the mass. The nationality of the mass of 
 people lies deep, and in quiet days they hardly 
 know they have it. There is a lot of silent pride 
 in the navy and sea-power, and the "Britannia 
 rule the waves" line probably comes as near to 
 saying something as a popular song usually does. 
 But of a dramatization of the "Island-Queen" 
 there is none in the popular mind. The uncon- 
 scious pride is enormous. You feel it in the ab- 
 ject loneliness of an Enghshman off British soil. 
 I have had very intimate English friends in New 
 York, and there was always a kind of "lost" 
 quality about their personality. They were 
 loyal to the place that gave them bread, but they 
 waited for the return with a long and touching 
 patience. It was my fortune to see them re- 
 turned, and catch the sigh of relief which the first 
 years of the home-coming called out. Every 
 simple little thing seemed good to these men, and 
 834 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 they would point out to me the wide commons of 
 Wimbledon and the small, friendly locomotives 
 of the suburban railway. An Enghshman has to 
 suffer before he knows he has a country. 
 
 It is suffering which the war has brought, the 
 sense that something precious and intimate is im- 
 periled. The Englishman likes the customs of 
 his country and his own way of carrying on. 
 Very slowly he learned that something was going 
 to intrude and destroy that private wilfulness, 
 that right of the individual man not only to his 
 life, which is a little thing, but to his own peculiar 
 way of living it, which is an important thing. 
 His sense of possession of individual liberty is 
 stronger than his property sense. Gradually the 
 impression came upon him that there was a hub- 
 bub across the channel, and that the noise was 
 growing louder, that if he did n't do something 
 there would be no end to it. His peace and quiet 
 would be gone, and he would have to live by some 
 one else's rules. As a young Englishwoman 
 said to me: "We don't want strangers to step 
 in and impose on us their manner of life. We 
 don't want to be speeded up." 
 
 But still we have failed to reach the basis of 
 335 
 
IXSTDK rilK BRITISH ISI.KS 
 
 the instinctive nationality in an Englislmian. I 
 think it lies in the feelings grvnipeii aroiuid liis 
 locality aiid his set of friends, the values that are 
 closely familiar. One hears a man irxnn Ber- 
 nardsville, Xew Jersey, Ixiast alxnit Niagara 
 Falls aiid the Rocky Moimtains as if they were 
 landscape f eatings of his back yard ; bnt an Eng- 
 hshmau« if he talks at all. will speak of the fields 
 he has himteil aorv^ss, and the pleasant tiurn of tlie 
 hills that are in sight from his windows. 
 
 I was glad to get it on go<-xi authority that I 
 was right alv^ut this kx\il patriotism. Captain 
 Basil Williams has made a careful study of the 
 organization of the Britisli army. It is the fmic- 
 tion of his department to do so. He told me the 
 nature of the ap^>eal by whicli the millions of men 
 were recniiteii. It was n't a \-ague, noisy crusade 
 of adTertising posters and general patriotism. 
 It was directly aimed at where the men hveii luid 
 their feeling of comradeship. The regiments 
 were recruiteil by comities. (A few regiments 
 came from more than one coimt)."^ The unit 
 of recruiting is the battalion of one thousand 
 men. In the original standing army, and in the 
 new annies, the basis of the system is the regi- 
 336 
 
 I 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 mental local idea. Devonsliire means something 
 to a Lewdown man that Columhia County, New 
 York, does not mean to a Hudson man. The 
 Devon man and his people have shot rabbits and 
 ruled the sea from that village in that county 
 for several centuries. 
 
 When the war began and large numbers of 
 recruits poured in, the old regimental system was 
 maintained, and every new battalion was affil- 
 iated to some old regiment. The first new units 
 were the special reserves, a battalion or two for 
 each regiment, corresponding to the old militia. 
 Then there came battalions of territorials, cor- 
 responding to the old volunteers. These terri- 
 torials would be chosen from the smaller country 
 districts. Then followed the service battalions. 
 
 It was difficult at first to obtain equipment 
 and housing. So municipalities organized bat- 
 talions in their own locality, and handed them 
 over when the army was ready for them. Men 
 said they would like to go with their neighbors 
 and pals. Clerks, sportsmen, foot-ball players, 
 men with the same interest in life, chummed to- 
 gether. War was a strange, new job, leaving 
 the individual man lonely, and he wished to face 
 337 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 it with friends. These "pal" battalions were 
 still attached to the original regiment. 
 
 In both the service and pals battalions Kitch- 
 ener wished reserves. So each battahon added 
 to its one thousand men five hundred more men, 
 making a reserve battalion. Thus there resulted 
 a reserve battalion of service battalions, and a 
 reserve battalion of pals battalions. 
 
 There is no unit of numbers for a regiment, 
 which can have two thousand men or twenty thou- 
 sand. One regiment has twenty-six battalions, 
 but the expanding numbers are glued together 
 by the comradeship of long association in the 
 pursuits of peace and by the sense of locality. 
 
 The first two armies, Kl and K2, were new 
 service battalions from every regiment of the 
 British army. The old army was thus dupli- 
 cated by the first two new armies. The third 
 new army, K3, was raised where recruiting was 
 best, largely in the northern and western por- 
 tions. K4 and K5 were made up of pals battal- 
 ions. Of course all the other arms of service, 
 medical staff, engineers, artillery, were raised 
 locally, and were represented in these units. 
 And this appeal to local patriotism has been the 
 328 
 
SOCIAL STUDIES 
 
 method of increasing an army of five hundred 
 thousand to five million. 
 
 Every regiment has ancient rights and priv- 
 ileges and points of local pride. The Honour- 
 able Artillery Company has the right to march 
 through London with fixed bayonets, and the 
 men exercise the right. At the entrance of the 
 city they halt, unbuckle the bayonet, and thrust 
 it into place. This ancestral quality to an army 
 unit gives an esprit de corps that the men inherit, 
 and a tradition which touches them to quickened 
 service. It is a survival of the old linked bat- 
 talion system, which provided that there should 
 be two regular battalions, one normally abroad, 
 and one in England. Overseas service and 
 peace had combined to create the system. It 
 gave an expeditionary force to guard India and 
 South Africa. The old feehng was entirely 
 regimental. Lately there has been an extension 
 of the scale of feeling corresponding to the vast 
 area of the war itself, and the division has become 
 more important than ever before, and develops 
 a self -consciousness of its own. This extension 
 of feeling and organization keeps step with the 
 new organized state, which is replacing the 
 339 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 tiny village republics of local self-government. 
 But local pride is still the tap-root of English 
 nationality, and I shall not forget the inhabitants 
 of Stratford as they gathered around the public 
 notices that recorded the performances of the 
 "Warwicksliires." In the early days of the war 
 the German chanted "Deutschland," but the 
 Tommy sang of Leicester Square. Just now 
 "Blighty" is the word. Soon it will be some 
 other phrase, but always it will tell of a little 
 place, a city street or a country lane. 
 
 340 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LLOYD-GEORGE 
 
 I HAVE recently come from a long talk with 
 Mr. L/loyd-George. What he convinced me of 
 was that he understands and cares for our coun- 
 try. Frankly, I had doubted this. I was left 
 subdued by his militant interview on "Hands 
 Off," which was harsh and necessary, but which 
 did not bind Downing Street, London, to First 
 Avenue, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. For two years I 
 had wished that an English statesman would lift 
 clear of his business with the enemy and give a 
 word for neutral public opinion. Lloyd-George 
 talked and listened for an hour and three quar- 
 ters on the one subject of the middle West of 
 America. He understands the people. He 
 knows that the public policy of the nation is de- 
 termined there. He knows that our democratic 
 experiment is being decided by the prairie States. 
 He quoted a remark of Henry Ford not with 
 amusement or scorn, but as significant. By that 
 341 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 he revealed that he knows more about the real 
 America than half the editors of Eastern news- 
 papers. 
 
 He understands America with the same sym- 
 pathy which Lincoln showed for the Lancashire 
 cotton operatives in his famous letter to them. 
 Lloyd-George has the same desire for a frank 
 presentation of facts that Henry Ward Beecher 
 revealed in his appeals to the British public in the 
 industrial cities. What he wishes is that our 
 people should hold the same sympathy with the 
 struggle of the European democracies that the 
 working-classes of England learned to feel for 
 our Civil War struggle, after Lincoln and 
 Beecher had made clear to them that we were 
 fighting for human hberty. Mr. Lloyd-George 
 does not regard the war as a dog-fight or as a 
 sporting proposition. He sees it as an incalcu- 
 lable tragedy. With his Celtic imagination he 
 lives in a profound sense of the pity and the waste 
 of it. He has as httle hate and bitterness as the 
 soldiers of England and France with whom I 
 have lived at the front. 
 
 He has a habit of informal breakfast at a sunny 
 little flat about ten minutes away from Downing 
 
LLOYD-GEORGE 
 
 Street. Here two or three of his friends meet 
 him. He comes in well rested, and decides points 
 of pohcy and indulges in reminiscence, amusing 
 and poetic. And all his talk has a lightness of 
 touch. The guests of this morning were Mr. 
 Davies, the war secretary; Seebohm Rowntree, 
 the manufacturer and social worker, whose books 
 on the study of poverty are as well known in 
 America as in England; and H. N. Spalding. 
 Mr. Rowntree and Mr. Spalding are conducting 
 the department of welfare work in the ministry 
 of munitions. 
 
 "Are you giving them welfare?" he asked Mr. 
 Rowntree. "Here," he said, turning to me, "is 
 the greatest attempt ever made by a government 
 to surround the lives of the workers with safe- 
 guards for their safety and health and well- 
 being." 
 
 "What Americans and English need more than 
 any one thing else is a smoking-room acquaint- 
 ance, where they exchange their views informally 
 and get to know the man." 
 
 It is this smoking-room intimacy that Mr. 
 Lloyd-George gives to all whom he meets. He 
 is not afraid of being himself. He is as daring 
 343 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 in his comments on men and things as Mr. Roose- 
 velt, as charming as the late William James. He 
 is used to being loved. The lines about the eyes 
 reveal a man who works his purpose by geniality 
 in a flow of fun and charm and sympathy. The 
 political battles of twenty years have left less im- 
 pression on his spirit than the victories he has 
 won as peace-maker and harmonizer. He re- 
 ferred to two editors who have recently been at- 
 tacking him. He said : 
 
 "I don't mind their criticizing me. I can take 
 blows and I can give them. But they are mak- 
 ing it hard for us to get together after the war. 
 We don't want differences when we come to the 
 work of reconstruction." 
 
 He ends a talk by being more completely the 
 master of your thought than you are yourself. 
 He states it clearly and beautifully, and reduces 
 it to a program of action. 
 
 "To understand your people or any people," 
 he said, "it is necessary for one to pass inside the 
 temple." 
 
 He practises what Sainte-Beuve preached, 
 that to know a religion you must be a worshiper 
 inside the church. So week by week Sainte- 
 
LLOYD-GEORGE 
 
 Beuve became a mystic and a pagan and an 
 epicurean as he served up the soul of the writer 
 whom he was interpreting. This is the high gift 
 which Lloyd-George possesses. He can step up 
 to the very altar of a man's most secret belief. 
 This is the gift which has made him the one 
 Briton who is perfectly understood in France. 
 He spoke only a couple of sentences inside the 
 citadel of Verdun, but they revealed to France 
 that he knew what that symbol meant to them. 
 For in his best moments he becomes something 
 other than the grim fighter, and the adi'oit pol- 
 itician who uses all the tricks of the game. Sud- 
 denly for his hearers, and unexpectedly to him- 
 self, he lifts by an exquisite imagination to the 
 place of insight, and becomes the voice of ob- 
 scure people, and understands men he has never 
 met. If he talks with a slangy person, he dis- 
 charges himself in vivid, staccato phrases. The 
 nature and direction of his rebound are deter- 
 mined by the substance that he encounters. He 
 was born to react. He has a mind that kindles, 
 and a style that rises verj^ lightly and gracefully 
 into poetic beauty. There has been no such pas- 
 sage of prose produced by the war as that para- 
 345 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 graph of his on 'little nations" at the beginning 
 of the fight. 
 
 A breezy young officer of the flying service 
 once told me the shameful secret of Lloyd- 
 George. It was that the war minister went 
 around obtaining advice from experts, that 
 he really didn't know all about it by him- 
 self. ■ 
 
 Earlier in the war a prominent banker told me 
 that the then chancellor of the exchequer was 
 not the financial authority which the multitude 
 thought him, that he held consultations with lead- 
 ing bankers, that, in fact, the chancellor had con- 
 sulted with his own firm. 
 
 Lloyd-George is the leader of a democracy be- 
 cause he chums with experts, and swings to the 
 currents of the collective will. His personality 
 contains the virtues and the perils of the democ- 
 racy itself. For it, too, may some day establish 
 a bureaucracy of experts that could be the 
 tightest little oligarchy of history, and it, too, 
 may yet swing to tides that are ebbing. It is 
 not often that one sees a community incarnating 
 itself in a single man. But the British democracy 
 has its incarnation in Lloyd-George, responsive 
 346 
 
LLOYD-GEORGE 
 
 to vast subconscious forces, and turning to 
 specialists for aid in crises. 
 
 He faces the most difficult years of his life, 
 and he knows it. A man of his temperament can 
 conduct a great war. All that was needed was 
 the inspirational quality to rouse his people, the 
 energy to set them at work, the creative imagina- 
 tion to see the war in its extent, its duration, its 
 requirements. None of these tests has over- 
 taxed his powers, for they all lay inside the area 
 of his competence. But when peace comes, 
 there is no longer one straight road to a clear 
 goal. All the forces of reaction will coalesce. 
 All the bad counselors will make a cloud of wit- 
 ness about him. All the paths to immediate 
 power will lie in "playing safe." If he remains 
 true to himself, he will be cursed with a vehem- 
 ence which will make his early years seem a sweet 
 season of delight. There will be no easy vic- 
 tories. All will be turmoil and bitterness, for 
 we are at the beginning of the greatest fight of 
 the ages — the fight of the democracies inside 
 themselves. We had our little Lloyd-George in 
 America, a well known former district-attorney 
 of New York. He had the same transcendent 
 34'7 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 charm. But the wrong crowd got him, not by 
 ilhcit means. They won him on his social side, 
 the quahty in the man that likes people and 
 wishes to be liked. And he lost his sense of direc- 
 tion. He forgot the long, hard fight he was 
 making to give the people better government. 
 
 The coming years of Lloyd-George will be de- 
 termined by the kind of persons who surround 
 him, and touch that sensitive, quivering mind to 
 action. If he holds fast to his good Welsh 
 friends and to men hke Dr. Clifford, the sturdy 
 old radical warrior of nonconformity, he will go 
 simply all his days, and continue to express the 
 living element of his people. But if he leans to- 
 ward the men of power, and listens to those 
 voices, who will tell him of the kingdoms of this 
 world, and who will promise him the leadership 
 of a reactionary militaristic Tory party, he will 
 lose his own soul. For the genius of the man 
 is his human sympathy. He was meant to be a 
 pathfinder for feet too tired to win their own 
 way into the open. He was meant to think him- 
 self inside the mind of other men and other races. 
 
 The future rests with him as with no other 
 single man among the Western peoples. He 
 348 
 
LLOYD-GEORGE 
 
 will face a world no longer sharply defined into 
 enemies, allies, and neutrals, but a world where 
 unguessed tendencies are forming, and new forces 
 of emancipation are fighting for recognition. 
 We have this to go on for hope : Lloyd-George 
 is a democrat by temperament and he under- 
 stands America. 
 
 349 
 
VALE 
 
 I HAVE sought in this book to show the passing 
 of England, — Little England, Old England, — 
 the crumbling of its caste system, and the emer- 
 gence of the England of John Bull and Crom- 
 well's soldiers from inarticulateness into power. 
 And a yet greater thing has come — the advent 
 of the new British commonwealth. Democratic 
 control is being established. Labor is taking 
 over the management of society. The women 
 have gone out to win their world, and they face 
 a bitter struggle. The book further records the 
 wonderful rebirth of nationality in Ireland. It 
 shows the machinery of joint boards, labor ex- 
 changes, workshop councils, imperial conference 
 and franchise extension, by which the transfor- 
 mation will be worked. It tells of the terms of 
 the new status for the masses; minimum wage, 
 limitation of hours, choice of work, control inside 
 the industry. Every change was long prepared 
 for, and built out of age-old materials, and every 
 change is made by compromise. But the change 
 carries a long way, because the momentum is 
 350 
 
VALE 
 
 continuous and along a straight line. After all, 
 there is nothing so revolutionary as a great 
 tradition, and the most daring reconstructors are 
 often men of Tory blood. 
 
 So I have tried to show that this change is not 
 a hasty chance revolution, but the natural growth 
 of the English tradition. The little vessel that 
 contained that tradition has been broken, but 
 the germinal principle has been scattered rather 
 widely around the world. I think that the book 
 has coherence, because the theme is the principle 
 of democratic control. It is this principle which 
 is shattering the caste system, reconstructing 
 industry, emancipating women, stirring Ireland, 
 seething through the colonies, making England 
 an industrial democracy, and transforming the 
 far-flung empire into the British commonwealth. 
 
 I think I have made plain that the program of 
 reconstruction is far from victorious attainment. 
 The woman's movement bristles with imanswered 
 questions. Labor has failed to develop its ex- 
 perts and leaders, and when it does, there remains 
 the intricate problem of democratic control, with 
 a set of experts sitting at the inner wheels. Free- 
 dom is a hard taskmaster. And deeper yet is the 
 351 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 problem of what excellence shall be made of the 
 life that is free. 
 
 I am painfully aware of failure in giving my 
 account. I have had to use only three years of 
 observation and five months of writing on what 
 ought to be the work of a lifetime. It was my 
 wish to keep the record free from praise or blame, 
 and to let it tell of principles and tendencies in a 
 community of great variety. But to my own 
 knowledge I have often failed to capture what is 
 characteristic. There is something perdurable 
 and continuing about British character. No 
 outer violence can shake the citadel of the individ- 
 ual soul. The Briton is not only willing to die 
 in what is plainly a great matter, such as the 
 freeing of Belgium, he is wilhng to be laughed 
 at and to be put into prison for his private pet 
 behef. He interrupts public meetings and de- 
 poses leaders if the speaker or the representative 
 outpaces the plain man's view of what is common 
 sense. There is no British type. There are 
 many types, and then, in between the composite, 
 a multitude of "infinitely repellent particles." 
 That individualism, which was in the race in 
 Chaucer's time, and again found record in Ben 
 352 
 
VALE 
 
 Jonson*s "The Man of Humour," has never died, 
 and no "collective will" or state control will ever 
 rob the British democracy of the salt and tang of 
 its variety, the loud protest of its protestants and 
 the dissidence of its dissent. So I have rendered 
 official stupidities with Ireland and the Russian 
 refugees. But the final trutli does n't rest there. 
 I remember a talk I had with the mayor of the 
 largest sea-coast resort, and how he told me of 
 returning a German lad to his home-country after 
 the war broke out. There is a kindliness in the 
 race. Many times I have been irritated by some- 
 thing pig-headed and unconsciously arrogant in 
 the people, the quality which Havelock Ellis 
 describes when he says, "It is the temper of a 
 vigorous, independent, opinionated, free-spoken, 
 yet sometimes suspicious people among whom 
 every individual feels in himself the impulse to 
 rule." It springs from the tradition of a govern- 
 ing class, and I once heard one of the most famous 
 men in Europe tell how a certain English noble- 
 man always made him feel: "You belong to a 
 race which we once ruled. Really, we ought to 
 be ruling you now." Then there comes to me the 
 intimate talk I recently had with a librarian. 
 353 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 "For five generations my family has been in 
 the pubhc service," he said, "and I could not be 
 happy elsewhere. I receive five hundred pounds 
 a year. Recently, a business house offered me 
 nine hundred pounds, with the promise of promo- 
 tion. But I could not be happy in other work. 
 We do not want mone}^ primarily, so long as 
 there is security, and enough for a decent living, 
 and a pension, perhaps, at the end of it all. 
 What can money offer compared with public 
 service?" 
 
 That is the secret of what is best in English 
 life: the finest men in pubhc service, a level of 
 conduct, clean administration and government. 
 The democracy must never lower that standard. 
 
 For the opportunity of meeting the moving 
 spirits of the reconstruction, the leaders of labor, 
 welfare work, the woman's movement, cabinet 
 ministers, writers, officials, I owe grateful thanks 
 to H. N. Spalding, Seebohm Rowntree, and 
 Geoffrey Butler. They were tireless in effecting 
 new connections for me, unaware that they them- 
 selves were among the most valuable of the group 
 whom I met. And from the many talks I have 
 354 
 
VALE 
 
 seemed to verify what I have long believed — that 
 the British people are a great democratic force 
 in the world. I believe that in accomplished 
 reform they are a generation ahead of the United 
 States, and that they see more clearly than we the 
 immense responsibilities which the principle of 
 democratic control creates. 
 
 I am convinced that our own future is bound 
 up with that of England, that together with Eng- 
 land and France we can face the world with 
 security, and gradually and painfully make the 
 democratic principle prevail. I am convinced 
 that, divided, both England and America will be 
 fatally weakened, and that the future will be 
 poorer because of the split. What is needed is 
 interpretation of each country to the other, lead- 
 ing to intellectual understanding, and finally to 
 good-will. For that common understanding I 
 consider it of importance that England shall con- 
 quer a certain arrogance, a certain unwillingness 
 to accept us as grown-up, and that she shall clear 
 the Irish situation. For that common under- 
 standing I consider it of equal importance that 
 America should cease her policy of aloofness, and 
 355 
 
INSIDE THE BRITISH ISLES 
 
 overcome the self-complacency which believes that 
 our country alone is the land of freedom and 
 justice and the champion of democracy. Then, 
 together, in humility, we can achieve greatness, 
 and extend the principle of democratic control. 
 
 366 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 IMPERIAL PARLIAMENT 
 
 In an outline of the new imperial commonwealth to which 
 Lord Milner has given his approval the functions of the im- 
 perial parliament are suggested: 
 
 The first of these is the support and maintenance of the navy 
 and naval establishments and fortifications throughout the empire. 
 The second is the control of the expeditionary army and the main- 
 tenance of a skeleton military establishment for the empire by which 
 the national-service militias that must certainly follow this war 
 could be gunned, mobilized, and directed in an imperial crisis. 
 The third is the imperial control of the food-supply and of the 
 imperial resources of raw material. The fourth is imperial transit, 
 posts, money, standards, ports, and seaways. The fifth is the com- 
 mon imperial trade policy. The sixth is the supreme direction of 
 education, not with any power of prohibition, but with unlimited 
 powers of endowment, to maintain the common language and the 
 supply of higher education universally throughout the empire. 
 The seventh is the maintenance of the supreme court of the empire. 
 The eighth is the control of foreign policy and the continuation 
 of the imperial trusteeship over the non-represented dependencies. 
 
 THE LABOR COLLEGE 
 
 The modern British radical is a man in command of the 
 figures in his industry. His wage demand is not a blank 
 check drawn against the full productive power of industry. 
 It is an exact statement of the amount of cash which the 
 employer has just put into his own pocket. This type of 
 worker is perfectly willing to hold a conference on the basis 
 of a show-down of facts. This mental clarity is not true 
 357 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 of the mass of labor, but it is true of the advanced groups. 
 Education has been at work and has given them an intel- 
 lectual basis for their desires. Those desires, expressed in 
 the form of demands, are less noisy and more deadly than 
 the old class-conscious battle-cries. There is an atmosphere 
 of smokeless powder to the syndicalist movement in the 
 hands of the miners, railwaymen, and engineers. 
 
 An admirable study of this intellectual ferment in the 
 South Wales coal-fields has been recently made by a spe- 
 cial correspondent of "The Times." He shows how the 
 miners, when they tackle Lord Rhondda and the other 
 barons of the collieries, figure out costs from statistics, and 
 challenge their management to a joint audit. In describ- 
 ing the careful preparation which these men have received, 
 he says: 
 
 What is it that makes South Wales the industrial storm-center 
 of Great Britain and why is it a fruitful ground for food agita- 
 tion and peace propaganda? The answer is simple. Subject a 
 fiery and educated people to a soulless, dehumanized, commercial 
 machine for the extraction of gold out of labor, and you will 
 inevitably breed a seething discontent which must somewhere find 
 its outlet. 
 
 Their fieriness is suflSciently known, but the Celtic temperament 
 alone does not explain their violence of action. To it is added a 
 degree of education which would astonish some of their absentee 
 employers. There are scores of men working in the Welsh pits who 
 could pass an examination in Ibsen or Shaw or Swinburne, or 
 could bold their own in an argument on economics or politics with 
 the average member of Parliament. They owe their training, not 
 to the state or to the municipalities, but to the educational 
 facilities provided by the Independent Labor Party and other 
 organizations. In the current number of the "Merthyr Pioneer,'' 
 which may be regarded as the organ of the Independent Labor 
 Party movement in South Wales, appears a column and a half 
 article, one of a series, on industrial history, dealing with the 
 earliest written records of British history from the point of view 
 358 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 of the worker, and at the end of the article is a reference to the 
 works which bear on the subject. For years past free evening 
 classes in economics, industrial history, and similar subjects have 
 been held in I. L. P. branch-rooms in the various mining centers, 
 and many of the younger members have taken full advantage of 
 them. 
 
 There is another educational movement which has its center in 
 Rhondda, and which is carried on mainly by past students of the 
 Central Labor College. This institution, it may be remembered, 
 was established as the result of dissatisfaction with the cur- 
 riculum of Ruskin College, Oxford. From Oxford it was trans- 
 ferred to Earl's Court, London, and thence it has spread the doc- 
 trine of class war far and wide. Recently it came under the 
 joint control of the South Wales Miners' Federation and the 
 National Union of Railwaymen, and special efforts are now being 
 made to extend its work throughout this district, chiefly by lec- 
 tures in the workmen's institutes and cooperative societies' rooms. 
 
 A third educational agency is an organization called the Plebs 
 League, which aims at the education of the workers by means of 
 classes in sociology, industrial history, Marxian economics, and so 
 on. Not only do hundreds of young miners absorb this teaching, 
 but many of them are sent by their lodges to the Central Labor 
 College, London, and come back to preach what they have learned 
 — mainly as a gospel of open hostility to the employers and con- 
 stant agitation for the complete extraction of their profits. 
 
 The Central Labor College, described above, is an insti- 
 tution in the west of London, one of the heads of which 
 has been Mrs. Bridges Adams. Mrs. Adams is an interna- 
 tional Socialist, who has made a lifelong study of education. 
 She and others founded Bebel House in London, which 
 was to be one of the headquarters of the international so- 
 cialist movement. Then came the war, and Bebel House 
 was used by the refugee Russians as a headquarters. The 
 police raided it during one of their stupid official campaigns 
 against Russian political refugees. Mrs. Adams has waged 
 a continuous and at last a successful fight against the Eng- 
 lish official betrayal of the right of asylum. I give a full 
 359 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 account of the matter in the chapter entitled "The Right of 
 Asylum." The point is of interest here as showing how 
 various expressions of radicalism interlock. The woman 
 who has helped the miners of South Wales to fashion the 
 weapons of their powerful syndicalist movement is the per- 
 son who has defended an ancient English liberty. 
 
 Mrs. Adams believes that little trust can be put in labor 
 leaders. They grow official, tame and compromising, and 
 lose responsiveness to the aspirations of the mass of the 
 people. She believes that only by diffused intelligence 
 will the labor movement prosper, and not through individual 
 men becoming under secretaries, pension minister, and min- 
 ister of labor. And this distrust of labor leaders she ex- 
 tends to university movements for "the education of the 
 workers." She fears that they will make the social move- 
 ment "upper class," and the education itself a desiccated, 
 carefully edited non-explosive brand. So Mrs. Adams and 
 others have conducted the Central Labor College as an in- 
 stitution growing out of the people themselves rather than 
 something given them from above. Step by step with the 
 growth of her institution and other democratic agencies of 
 education the Welsh miners have raised their standard of 
 living and strengthened their position in the community, 
 till to-day they are a force so formidable that the Gov- 
 ernment capitulated on their latest threat to strike, and 
 enforced a wage increase. They are probably the most 
 radical labor group in Great Britain. 
 
 LAND 
 
 The Duke of Sutherland has decided to sell his Shrop- 
 shire seat, Lilleshall, an estate of 7500 acres. 
 In a letter to the tenants the Duke writes: 
 I have hoped against hope that I might not be forced to part 
 
 360 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 with what remains of the Lilleshall Estate, but the burden of taxa- 
 tion, which I think is heaviest on a landlord whose patrimony con- 
 sists mainly of large landed properties, and particularly the very 
 heavy death duties consequent on the death of my father, have 
 compelled me to take this step. The prospect of a severance 
 from the property and old association, which have become so dear 
 to me, is a bitter one. 
 
 The war has delayed much good reform which was 
 briskly on its way. A long campaign to bring man and 
 land together was about to end in remedial legislation. 
 Now these reforms have been postponed till peace comes. 
 But legislation will be introduced after the close of the war 
 to bring labor back to the land, and to bring the land back 
 from grass. The famous "New Doomsday" inquiry showed 
 that slightly more than 2000 persons owned half the agri- 
 cultural land of the country. 
 
 While that investigation was being made the agricultural labor- 
 ers were struggling to combine for higher wages, and their union 
 was shortly afterwards crushed by farmers, clergy and landowners. 
 As yet little has been done to efface the deep impress made alike 
 upon the land system and the workers on the land by two hundred 
 years of rule by the British landed aristocracy. 
 
 Ninety per cent, of the agricultural land of England 
 and Wales is worked by tenants and not by owners. The 
 net agricultural output of England and Wales is about 
 $650,000,000 a year. The land is under-cultivated. 
 
 The Government appointed The Land Inquiry Committee 
 to find out why. Their report was brought in only a few 
 months before the war. The changes they advocate were 
 thus postponed. 
 
 The Committee found that one reason of under-cultiva- 
 tion is the insecurity of tenure of the farmer. The grow- 
 ing frequency of sales of agricultural estates, with notices 
 to quit, or a higher rent, has led to this insecurity of the 
 361 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 small holder. This insecurity of tenure prevents the tenant 
 from making improvements. He deserves compensation for 
 increased fertility due to continuous good farming. In- 
 stead, he often is shackled with a higher rent for his own 
 improvements, and under the present system of taxation 
 these improvements are rated and therefore penalized. 
 
 Another reason is labor. Bad farming and low wages 
 together have driven many of the best men to the towns. 
 Those who remain as laborers are underpaid. 
 
 A large amount of land is withheld from its best use for 
 the purpose of sport, and a considerable amount more is 
 under-cultivated and in some cases under-rented owing to 
 game preservation. This land, instead of providing food 
 for the people, provides sport and delicacies for the few. 
 Between 1881 and 1901, the number of game-keepers in- 
 creased from 12,633 to 16,677, while during the same pe- 
 riod there was a large decline in the rural population. 
 There are instances of agricultural land, formerly rated at 
 20 shillings or more an acre, turned into plantation, and 
 then rated at one shilling an acre, including the sporting 
 right. In such cases the law has put a premium upon mis- 
 using the land. Reforms are necessary in taxation and 
 rating of this land used for sport. 
 
 Other reasons for under-cultivation follow: Land lies 
 waste. The farmer can not obtain adequate capital nor 
 facile credit. Better transit by light railways, waterways, 
 etc., is needed. Cooperation is still imperfectly practised. 
 Scientific education is required. Much of the land must be 
 split into small holdings. Too much land is in pasture in- 
 stead of tillage. Even in dairy farming, "more cows could 
 be maintained, and, if they are properly managed, more 
 profit obtained, on an arable farm than on a grass farm." 
 The "Nation" has reduced the total area in England and 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Wales under crops and grass to the scale of 48 acres, and, 
 according to the latest agricultural returns, shown its divi- 
 sion. Twenty-nine acres are in permanent grass, five acres 
 clover and rotation grasses, 14 acres arable. 
 
 The Government Committee came to this revolutionary 
 conclusion : 
 
 The ownership of land is of the nature of a monopoly, and the 
 legal power which a landowner has over his tenant, tempered 
 though It be in many cases by goodwill and kindly personal rela- 
 tionship, is detrimental to the best national interests. . . . England 
 has become, more than any other European nation, a country of 
 farms of over 50 acres as opposed to Small Holdings. Nearly 
 7,000,000 acres are in the hands of large farmers who hold more 
 than 300 acres, while only 4,000,000 are in holdings between 5 and 
 30, and only 285,000 acres are in holdings between 1 and 5 acres. 
 
 Small holdings are one of the remedies. English expe- 
 rience shows conclusively, according to these Government 
 investigators, that small holders would rather rent than pur- 
 chase. Their report is unfavorable to state-aided pur- 
 chase. They found that the desire to purchase is not for 
 any abstract joy of ownership, but almost universally for 
 the factor of obtaining security of tenure. An inquiry was 
 made among farmers. Eighty per cent, stated that they 
 wished security of tenure, only 7I/0 per cent said that their 
 real object was the satisfaction of ownership. So the rem- 
 edy proposed is to create security of tenure, rather than 
 peasant proprietorship. It should be said that there is a 
 wide difference of public opinion on this point of small 
 rented holding versus peasant proprietorship. The Com- 
 mittee sees that one of the fundamentals in the matter is 
 that the man with only a small capital needs a good return 
 on his money. Land as an investment pays back only about 
 3 per cent. This is too small a return for the farmer. He 
 
 363 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 will do better to rent his holding, and invest his money in 
 seed, fertilizer and machinery. Land is more costly than 
 its agricultural value warrants because there is a demand 
 for it for social and sporting purjjoses. 
 
 The Committee urges that Land Courts shall be es- 
 tablished in England and Wales with powers to grant se- 
 curity of tenure subject to good farming, to fix fair rents, 
 to decide questions of compensations, and to fix the price 
 payable upon compulsory acquisition of land by public bod- 
 ies. The existence of this Land Court will hasten the ac- 
 quisition of land by public bodies for small holdings. 
 
 Ordinary agricultural laborers in England make an aver- 
 age around $4'.20 a week. There is little opposition to the 
 proposal that a legal minimum wage shall be established for 
 them by a wage tribunal. This wage must be such as will 
 enable the laborer to live in a state of physical efficiency 
 and to pay a commercial rent for his cottage. 
 
 For his bad condition is partly due to bad housing. The 
 number of cottages for the working class in the rural dis- 
 tricts of England and Wales is about 1,200,000. One hun- 
 dred and twenty thousand new cottages are needed, espe- 
 cially cottages with three bedrooms. By " bad housing in 
 rural districts thousands of children and adults are dying 
 or being permanently injured in health every year. ... It 
 should be made a definite statutory duty of every Rural 
 District Council to provide a cottage for every person 
 permanently employed in a rural district." 
 
 By thus increasing the independence of the laborer, he 
 will be in a position to take advantage of the existent Small 
 Holdings and Allotments Act. This, combined with better 
 machinery, through Parish Councils and Government of- 
 ficials, will secure the use of a small piece of land for every 
 dweller in the countryside. In that way the ladder is built 
 
 364. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 by which he rises from a landless underpaid wage-slave to 
 a free householder with access to the land. 
 
 It is further advocated that the Crown Land Commis- 
 sioners purchase large areas of land in different parts of 
 the country for the purpose of extending their policy of 
 creating small holdings. 
 
 Who is to pay for the minimum wage of labor and the 
 reduced rent of small holdings .'' The landlord^ not the 
 farmer. The legislation for a minimum wage is to provide 
 that the farmer who pays it and who is able to prove that 
 the rise in wages has put upon him an increased burden 
 shall have the right to apply to the Land Court for a re- 
 adjustment of his rent. And that rent, in any case, is to 
 be a fair rent and not a competitive rent. 
 
 "A competitive rent is the sum which one farmer, com- 
 peting with other farmers, will pay for land rather than go 
 without it. A fair rent is the surplus which in a normal 
 season will remain over from the produce of the land if 
 worked by a farmer of average ability, after providing for 
 all necessary outgoings, including a fair wage to the laborer, 
 and after allowing to the farmer a reasonable remunera- 
 tion." 
 
 In these ways, bad housing, over-crowding, malnutrition, 
 tuberculosis will be done away with in the life of the la- 
 borer, and the land itself freed for community service. In 
 the reform, two points of view will be kept in mind — "The 
 social point of view, which looks on the health and housing 
 of the laborer and the poorer villager; the economic point 
 of view which treats agriculture as an industry that must 
 be run at a profit." 
 
 It is historically just that the landowner shall stand a 
 portion of the burden of reform. Dr. Gilbert Slater has 
 outlined the process by which the self-respecting English 
 
 365 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 peasantry were forced off the land. By rack rents (an 
 economic rent based on rising values^ as distinguished from 
 the customary rent), by a system of fines, the landlords 
 appropriated to themselves the whole of the new profits 
 of changed conditions through world commerce. The ten- 
 ants resigned their holdings into the hands of the landlord. 
 The arable land was turned into sheep farms, evictions were 
 widely made, and a thriving village would be replaced by 
 "ruined cottages, and rough grass nibbled by flocks, running, 
 we are told, in some cases to as many as 24,000 sheep, 
 tended by a few shepherds and their dogs. This was the 
 great enclosure movement of the sixteenth century." 
 
 Enclosure was not the turning of waste lands into culti- 
 vated fields, but the conversion of arable fields into desolate 
 sheep walks. 
 
 "Early in the eighteenth century began the series of 
 private acts of enclosure, of which 4000 in all, covering 
 7,000,000 acres, were passed before the General Enclosure 
 Act of 1845. During the same period it is probable that 
 about the same area was enclosed without application to 
 Parliament. ... In a proportion of cases, the principal 
 landowner effected enclosure by first of all making him- 
 self the sole proprietor." 
 
 Enclosure meant throwing open fields together and build- 
 ing a hedge around the total. In this way the small owners 
 were got rid of. "The majority of the small tenant farm- 
 ers had to choose between emigrating elsewhere, or becom- 
 ing landless laborers. . . . Henceforward there was a gulf 
 between the laborer and the farmer." 
 
 EMPIRE RESOURCES 
 
 I have to limit myself to a sentence for programs of re- 
 construction, each of which would require a volume for ade- 
 S66 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 quate summary. The linking up of the resources of the 
 empire is a vast scheme, with a committee already at work 
 upon it. The empire resources development committee has 
 been formed to open up new sources of revenue by develop- 
 ing the empire through state aid to private enterprise. 
 Selected resources, assets ripe for development. Land, 
 palm-oil products, fisheries are among its immediate agenda. 
 Land will be sold or leased, and will also be used as an 
 instrument of production, for stock-raising, and the estab- 
 lishment of plantations. Water-supplies, railways, har- 
 bors, grain-elevators, and factories are all envisaged in the 
 scheme. The development board is to be constituted of cap- 
 tains of industry. Among the men backing the plan are 
 Rudyard Kipling, Sir Horace Plunkett, Dunraven, Grey, 
 Selborne Desborough, and Sir Starr Jameson. 
 
 It is impossible for the empire to pay off its enormous 
 war debt under the existing system of taxation. Demo- 
 cratic finance has to strike out new ideas, and this is one 
 of them: to make use of the "finest undeveloped estate 
 which has ever been known in the history of the world," 
 and to develop these latent resources of the empire by a 
 centralized semi-state board, making use of the services of 
 experts. This organization will thus be a commercial 
 pioneer, supplying capital and knowledge, control and or- 
 ganization, to the scattered pockets and pools and paying 
 veins of the ungarnered wealth of a quarter of the earth. 
 
 Alfred Bigland, who has had forty years of experience 
 in the importation of raw materials, says of the plan: 
 
 Some time ago the Minister of Munitions asked me to take 
 charge of all oils that contained glycerine and he pointed out the 
 Government controlled the whole of the whale fishing in the 
 Antarctic Ocean. By giving licenses to the men to fish in these 
 waters on condition that the oil was retained for this country we 
 have received during the war 660,000 barrels of this oil. It was 
 
 367 
 
APPEXDIX 
 
 a revelation that vre had such a supply, and while the Germans 
 were paying, for little lots, £300 a ton for such oil, we are buying 
 it for the Government at £3S a ton. 
 
 In the Pacific Ocean, bordering on British Columbia; in the 
 moutli of the St. Lawrence; and the waters around Newfound- 
 land and Labrador, apart from our own home waters — under an 
 Empire monopoly (though we must have the consent of tlie 
 dominions in tliis matter), we could become the purveyors of fish 
 in all forms, almost to the whole world. Already Newfoundland 
 was sending on an average 300,000 tons of cod to the Mediter- 
 ranean and neutral countries. There was practically no limit to 
 the quantity, and the Grand Trunk Pacific had already offered 
 refrigerating plant to bring fish from Prince Rupert Island to 
 Liverpool at a penny a ton, whicli would be reduced to three 
 fartiiings or a halfpenny on big Government contracts being en- 
 tered into. This development could take place immediately. The 
 necessary shipbuilding and equipment must take time, but after 
 the war — if the Government allowed it — the whole of the vessels 
 now used in the North Sea for mine sweeping and other purposes 
 would fonii the nucleus of an Empire fishing fleet. The quantity 
 of fish consumed in tliis country was 600,000 tons a year, which 
 was equal to one-fortieth of the total food consumed per head 
 of the population, and the scheme might increase the fish supply 
 to at least four times that quantity. 
 
 It will take ten years to develop the ideas the committee wish 
 to carry out. it must be apparent to every one that no private 
 individual could accomplish such a great work in the way that 
 an Empire Council could do. There was the objection that it 
 would be Socialistic for the State to carry on such a business; but 
 the committee would begin where vested interests were the least 
 in force — except as regarded the fishermen engaged in the business 
 — and that was in the bed of the ocean. All on board the fishing 
 vessels, from the captain to the lowest man. should participate in 
 the proceeds of the catches. If the State secured a penny a 
 pound, which was £9 6s. a ton, it would he quite possible to make 
 a gross profit in 10 years of £36,000,000, out of which the sinking 
 fund for the development charges must be met It would be for 
 the State to regulate the prices in every town in the country; 
 and the State should have the control of the home fisheries as 
 well. 
 
 368 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Sir William Lever has stated that an expenditure of ten 
 thousand dollars in bringing two hundred acres of cocoa- 
 nut-palms to maturity may be estimated to give an income 
 of ten thousand dollars an acre in about ten years. So it 
 will be an immense source of income for the state to de- 
 velop the vast imperial holdings of palm-lands, which prob- 
 ably amount to several million acres. 
 
 WHO DOES THE WORK? 
 
 The question has been often asked. How has it been pos- 
 sible to take out four million men and still carry on the 
 productive industries of Great Britain.'' 
 
 The clearest shortest answer to this has been given by 
 Sir Leo Chiozza Money: 
 
 (1) The men remaining have, as a whole, produced more than 
 in peace. 
 
 (2) There has been a better organization of production in some 
 trades, notably the engineering trades. 
 
 (3) Large amounts of new capital have been applied by the 
 Government to many important industries. 
 
 (4) There has been a removal of restrictions upon output. 
 
 (5) Many women have taken up productive work for the first 
 time. 
 
 (6) There has been a great contraction of the vast amount of 
 male labor normally employed upon non-productive and uneconomic 
 work; in some cases the unnecessary work has disappeared alto- 
 gether; in others it has been taken up and is now performed by 
 women or girls. 
 
 He goes on to say: 
 
 Before the war a very large proportion of our male workers 
 were engaged in non-productive work. All our mines, quarries, 
 mills, factories, and workshops employed only 414 million men. 
 But our male population aged eighteen years and upwards num- 
 bered thirteen millions. Therefore it was true that OF OUR 
 MALE POPULATION AGED EIGHTEEN YEAPtS AND 
 
 369 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 OVER ONLY ABOUT ONE IN THREE WAS ENGAGED 
 DIRECTLY IN PRODUCING INDUSTRIAL WEALTH. 
 
 What were all the rest doing? Distribution, education. Govern- 
 ment service, commerce, etc., are all important, but can it be 
 possible that two out of three males — to say nothing of females 
 — were needed to carry them on, as compared with only one in 
 three devoted to producing things ? Most certainly the devotion of 
 so large a proportion of males to non-productive tasks was not only 
 unnecessary, but a sign and a portent of industrial decadence. 
 
 The taliing of men from non-productive employments has en- 
 abled women very easily to make substitution in many cases. 
 A woman works the lift which before the war was worked by an 
 able-bodied man, doing work which no able-bodied man should ever 
 do. The laundry van, which before the war was driven by an 
 able-bodied man, is now driven by a girl. You go to the bank and 
 see capable young women dealing with the books and papers which 
 yesterday were supposed to demand the services of stalwart young 
 men. 
 
 At the insurance offices, which before the war employed a great 
 army of young men, girls find no difficulty in accomplishing the 
 work. At the offices of the National Health Insurance Com- 
 missioners the work is being done by girls quite as well as by 
 the battalion or so of men who recently were thought to be needed 
 for it. In tens of thousands of commercial. Government, and 
 local government offices female labor is doing what the other year 
 was thought to be men's work. 
 
 The idea, therefore, that because a man was a petty clerk, or 
 a shop assistant, or a lift-man, or a driver, or a door-opener, 
 or a tout, or a commission agent, or something of that sort, before 
 the war, he must necessarily go back to his old job, while the 
 woman who has taken his job is to return to her old work, is 
 entirely mistaken. 
 
 Organize our power supply; reform our railway system; set to 
 work on a decent canal system; determine production in the 
 metal trades and the chemical trades; enlarge our wheat area 
 definitely and compulsorily. Do these things, and there will be 
 such a call for labor in connection with them, and in connection 
 with other useful employments arising from them, that in peace as 
 in war, we shall find that the difficulty is not to find jobs for the 
 men, but to find men for the jobs. 
 
 370 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 THE CHURCH 
 
 The City Temple, the leading Noncomformist church 
 of England, believing that "the brotherhood of the 
 ti'enches" might be extended to the Christian church, invited 
 Dean Henson of Durham Cathedral, belonging to the 
 Church of England, to preach in the City Temple pulpit. 
 The dean consented. On January 31, 1917, "The Times" 
 reports : 
 
 The York branch of the Yorkshire District Union of the English 
 Church Union yesterday discussed the Dean of Durham's intention 
 to preach in the City Temple. The Rev. P. J. Shaw, rector of All 
 Saints', North-street, York, moved a resolution deploring the 
 intention of Dean Henson, which he described as a flagrant viola- 
 tion of Church order and discipline. The motion was carried. 
 
 COMPULSORY DEMOCRACY 
 
 Mr. Balfour has stated the present concentration of 
 effort in clear terras : 
 
 All we can do for the war is to produce men to fight, men and 
 women to work at warlike munitions, men and women to work at 
 those commodities that we can export and with which we can buy 
 abroad other munitions of war. If you divert by your expenditure 
 national energies into wrong channels, by so much you are divert- 
 ing resources on which we depend for finishing the war and end- 
 ing it with a successful peace. 
 
 Let us transpose that into its equivalent for normal life. 
 
 All we can do for the welfare of the community is to produce 
 happy and healthy persons to live a creative life, men and women 
 to work at productive industries, men and women to work at those 
 commodities that we can export and with which we can buy abroad 
 other products for the creation of a life of reasonable satisfaction. 
 If, by your expenditure on personal luxury or by your investment 
 of capital on non-productive trades, you divert national energies 
 into wrong channels, by so much you are diverting resources on 
 
 371 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 which we depend for establishing a high standard of living for 
 the community, and so finishing the labor war and ending it with 
 a successful peace. 
 
 The principle of organization and concentration, backed 
 by compulsion, in the interests of the community has for 
 the first time in English history been widely applied. 
 Once applied, it becomes permanent, and is subject to ex- 
 tension. The compulsion has been used to force men to go 
 and die. It has been used to make them work at certain 
 jobs at a fixed rate of pay and to give up other jobs. But 
 it has not been used, except in "controlled" firms and in a 
 limited way, to take control of profits, and it has not been 
 used to force capital to invest in one enterprise and not in 
 another. A man's life is not his own, his power of work 
 is not his own; but his money, if he is wealthy, is his own. 
 He can invest it in making absinthe; he can lend it to 
 an exploiter of African labor; he can create an anti-so- 
 cial industry with it. One needs only to state it for its 
 absurdity to be seen. Capital will be increasingly governed 
 as labor is already governed. When political democracy 
 was formed, it was inevitable that industrial democracy 
 would result, however tardily. So it is with any partial ap- 
 plication of a principle. Once it begins to operate, it grad- 
 ually extends itself over the full area of its function. The 
 principle of compulsion, applied to the life and labor of men, 
 will a little later reach property, that last sacred strong- 
 hold of privilege. 
 
 These changes are more searching than the direct changes 
 by death and wastage of the war, but it is the war that has 
 hastened them. "The success of this revolution was chiefly 
 due to the wisdom of those who alloA^ed it to develop grad- 
 ually and almost imperceptibly from existing institutions." 
 
 372 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 COOPERATION, SOCIALISM, SYNDICALISM 
 
 Private capitalism, in its old terms of unchecked proiit- 
 eering and laissez-faire exploitation, has already been 
 scrapped as a method of organizing industry. Individual- 
 ism, with its instinct for property, will of course survive in 
 many forms. Thus in agriculture we are to-day seeing a 
 powerful movement toward the private ownership of prop- 
 erty, and that property, instead of being held in a few 
 hands, will be widely distributed. The restoration of peas- 
 ant-land proprietorship in Ireland is an instance. The 
 movement toward tenant holdings in England and Wales 
 is another instance. 
 
 But industrial England is looking to other solutions than 
 individualism for the mass of her workers, and has already 
 put those solutions into partial operation. One of those 
 solutions is democratic control of industry by the workers. 
 That means precisely that associations of producers (trade- 
 unions and guilds) will exercise control over the conditions 
 of their work. I have outlined this solution in the chapter 
 on "The Discovery." It is the solution by syndicalism. 
 
 The other solution is the control of industry by associa- 
 tions of consumers. Those associations are voluntary, as 
 in cooperation, and compulsory, as in state and municipal 
 ownership. This is the solution by cooperation and social- 
 ism. There is no difference in principle between coopera- 
 tion and socialism, but there is a sharply marked differ- 
 ence in the area of application. 
 
 Every solution, whether by association of producers or by 
 association of consumers, needs the check and balance of 
 the other. The syndicalist will exploit the consumer by high 
 prices and over-emphasis on the social value of his own 
 particular trade. The cooperator and state socialist will 
 
 373 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 exploit the worker in order to get products at a low price, 
 and state socialism builds a powerful bureaucracy of expert 
 officials, who form an oligarchy inside the democracy. The 
 ineradicable instinct for property will temper both move- 
 ments, and Parliament will remain one of the direct ex- 
 pressions of the people's wish between these contending 
 forces, and will continue to act as a corrective of modern 
 government, which is government by cabinet and committee, 
 leaning increasingly toward state socialism. In short, no 
 one movement or tendency fully expresses democracy, 
 which must use each in carefully controlled degree. The 
 method of that control is the problem of the future. The 
 cabinet and the bureaucracy have meanwhile grown strong, 
 and Parliament has weakened. In the future no one tend- 
 ency inside the social movement is likely to be the Aaron's 
 rod and swallow up the contending tendencies, though so- 
 cialists, syndicalists, and cooperators make the same whole- 
 hearted claims for their pet solution that advocates of big 
 business, free trade, and empire development make. Out 
 of all these powerful "pushes" will come a resultant, a 
 collision into harmony, which will be the new order, the 
 reconstructed community, the organized state under demo- 
 cratic control. 
 
 A figure will make this clear. In the warfare in France 
 and Flanders there is a series of separate spaces that can 
 be made untenable for the enemy. There are the differing 
 zones of shrapnel and of infantry fire and a space between 
 them, and that space belongs to the machine-gun. There 
 is a similar division of effective function in the attack on 
 the capitalistic system. There is an area that the municipal 
 and governmental control of industry does not reach, and a 
 portion (not the whole) of that area is reached by the co- 
 operative movement. There is a further area reached by 
 
 374 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 syndicalism. In the near future at least there will be left 
 much "dead ground" of which private enterprise will still 
 alone have the range. 
 
 Thus in the most careful study ever made of the co- 
 operative movement, the report of the committee of the 
 Fabian Research Department, the possible extent of the an- 
 nual trade of the movement is put at "something like four 
 to five hundred millions sterling, being only one-fifth of 
 the total national production." Also, cooperation "offers 
 in itself nothing in the nature of a complete solution of the 
 problem of the status of the workers." 
 
 And so with the limitations of public ownership. Some 
 of the coming trouble will be a fight of syndicalism against 
 state socialism. The state, as manager of industry and 
 employer of labor, operating through its bureaucracy of 
 experts, will issue orders to its employees. They will 
 claim the right to strike. Will they then be "called to the 
 colors," as was done in the French syndicalist strike.^ 
 Will the troops be ordered out against them, as is done in 
 Colorado, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.^ Is the right to 
 strike to be taken from government employees? If so, 
 the socialistic state will become an oligarchy of expert of- 
 ficials possessing a tyrannical power. It will cease to be 
 under democratic control. For the socialistic state is not 
 the consummation of democracy ; it is only one expression of 
 democracy. And syndicalism is another expression. To 
 no one expression can the full power be safely handed 
 over. 
 
 What has cooperation in Great Britain done after sev- 
 enty years of experience? It has established and has run- 
 ning at the present time fifteen distributive stores, with 
 three million members, controlling sales to the value of 
 four hundred million dollars a year, and producing goods 
 
 375 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 to the value of seventy million dollars a year. The re- 
 search committee summarizes the service of cooperation. It 
 has ail'orded in manufacturing and in wholesale and retail 
 trading an alternative of working-class origin to the capi- 
 talist system. Manual workers have proved themselves 
 capable of administering it under democratic control. It 
 has steadily grown for seventy years. It has kept down 
 retail prices, distributed millions of dollars as dividend on 
 purchases, money that would have gone to the capitalist 
 class. By cooperation the manual workers are receiving a 
 training in the administration of self-governing industrial 
 republics. Cooperation within its own area has done away 
 with that specialized brain power known as directive con- 
 trol, which consists in cunning for the defeat of rivals, 
 under cutting, nibbling at wages, adulteration, cornering 
 the market, promotion, stock-exchange gambling. A ten- 
 dency in cooperation, as in socialism, is to put administra- 
 tion into the hands of salaried officials. Thus the English 
 Cooperative Wholesale Society has twenty-one thousand 
 paid employees, directed by a salaried committe of thirty- 
 two members. 
 
 The business of cooperation is not likely to go far be- 
 yond the articles consumed by that portion of the wage- 
 earning class enjoying fairly regular employment and 
 wages, together with the "black-coated proletariat" — clerks, 
 petty officials, and the like. The submerged tenth are un- 
 able to avail themselves of cooperation, and the one-eighth 
 or one-tenth of the population known as the middle and 
 upper classes do not care to avail themselves of it. But it 
 is those other classes, from unskilled laborer to minor pro- 
 fessionals, with incomes from $250 to $2000 a year, who 
 are increasing in numbers and importance, and who are 
 entering into control of the new social order. Cooperation 
 
 376 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 as an association of consumers will probably not touch the 
 greater part of agriculture, the greater part of manufac- 
 ture for foreign consumption, the industries providing ma- 
 terial and plant for other industries, and those industries, 
 like the post-office and the railway system, in which the 
 day-by-day consumers do not constitute a suitable unit 
 of administration, or in which administration by the com- 
 pulsory machinery of national or municipal government 
 is required. Accordingly, four-fifths of national produc- 
 tion will remain outside the reach of cooperative organi- 
 zation. Cooperation is not an alternative to the capitalist 
 system for a majority of manual workers. It is an alterna- 
 tive for a minority. 
 
 What has socialism done.'' The summary' was given by 
 the Fabian Research Committee in the late spring of 1915. 
 Government has already become socialistic. It has out- 
 grown its police power alone and has become an administra- 
 tion of public services — housekeeping on a national scale. 
 How are we to know the difference between governmental 
 and capitalist enterprise? The test of whether adminis- 
 tration in a given department and area is socialistic is 
 whether any excess of receipts over cost of working goes 
 not to the profit of the administrators or of any private 
 owner or shareholders, but to public purposes. Down to 
 a century ago government concerned itself with provision 
 for religious rites, external defense, police, the adminis- 
 tration of justice, and the maintenance of prisons, poor 
 relief, regulation, inspection, audit, and taxation. Since 
 then government has entered many fields. 
 
 It has entered the domain of communication and trans- 
 port, transmitting communications, conveying persons, and 
 transporting commodities. This industry employs at 
 least one-tenth of all the working population, and absorbs 
 
 mi 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 an expenditure of a thousand million dollars a year. This 
 largest of all industries in its three functions is passing in- 
 creasingly throughout the civilized world into governmental 
 organization. Thus the inland conveyance of letters by 
 private enterprise is to-day left to countries like Abyssinia, 
 Afghanistan, and Arabia. 
 
 The construction and maintenance of roads is virtually 
 nowhere a service of private capitalism. The United 
 Kingdom is now spending yearly nearly one hundred mil- 
 lion dollars on thoroughfares, with approximately 100,000 
 men constantly employed. 
 
 Local authorities in Great Britain in 1913 were operat- 
 ing 171 tramways as against one in 1881. In 1913 the 
 municipal capital in tramways was $275,000,000. 
 
 In waterways, embanking, lighting, watching, ports, the 
 docks and quays are nearly everywhere provided and 
 maintained by government. The capital outlay in Great 
 Britain is over five hundred million dollars. 
 
 Of the total railway mileage of the world, just about 
 half is owned and worked entirely by government enter- 
 prise. The railways of Great Britain have been in the 
 hands of private capital, but during the war the Government 
 has controlled them, and there is a powerful movement to- 
 ward nationalizing them. This movement resulted a few 
 weeks ago in nationalizing the railways of Ireland. 
 
 In public health and sanitary work we see in local-govern- 
 ment water undertakings of Great Britain twenty thousand 
 men employed, and a thousand million dollars administered 
 in premises, plant, and machinery. 
 
 The removal of house refuse, city drainage, and street 
 sweeping are increasingly governmental services. 
 
 Public baths, public laundries, and swimming-pools repre- 
 
 378 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 sent a municipal investment in Great Britain of twenty-five 
 million dollars. 
 
 State medical service is steadily spreading: doctoring for 
 the destitute, governmental insurance systems, public med- 
 ical service in universities, hospitals, asylums, schools, pris- 
 ons, health departments, workhouses, army, navy, police, 
 post-office. Nurses, chemists, and doctors are rapidly be- 
 coming the officers of the community. Where already per- 
 haps one hundred thousand of them are in public institu- 
 tions and government departments the rest will shortly be. 
 
 In land improvement, there are already over three hun- 
 dred local commissioners of sewers, spending about two and 
 a half million dollars a year. Several million dollars a 
 year are spent in India in new irrigation canals, in improv- 
 ing the network of water-channels, in banking river chan- 
 nels. At this moment Ireland requires an expenditure of 
 a few million dollars to drain her bogs, set her river-levels, 
 and establish an irrigation system. 
 
 Public education, recreation, parks, libraries, music, 
 dances, piers, museums, art galleries, government books and 
 other printed matter, are all employing men and women 
 and absorbing capital. The printing bill of the British 
 Government alone is over five million dollars a year. 
 
 Banking facilities are passing under governmental con- 
 trol. Metallic coinage and the issue of paper money are 
 state services. Bfitish post-office savings-bank deposits and 
 trustee savings-bank deposits amount to twelve hundred 
 and fifty million dollars. The British Government lends 
 money to land-owners, local authorities, public-utility socie- 
 ties for agricultural improvements, drainage, and housing, 
 and to the householder wishing to purchase his own home. 
 In the purchase and sale of securities for customers the post- 
 379 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 master-general of Great Britain does a business of millions 
 a year. In 1915 the British Government took under its 
 control the investment of capital. In 1914< the Bank of 
 England, as the agent of the British Government, pur- 
 chased over five hundred million dollars of bills of ex- 
 change. 
 
 In light, heat, and power the same tendency toward state 
 and municipal ownership is at work. Over three hundred 
 gas undertakings in Great Britain are municipal, and the 
 capital is two hundred and twenty-five million dollars. The 
 Widnes town council claimed four years ago that at from 
 sixteen to twenty-four cents per thousand cubic feet it was 
 supplying gas, with a profit, cheaper than any other gas 
 plant, governmental or capitalist, in the world. Nearly 
 three hundred cities and towns in Great Britain are now 
 supplied with light, heat, and power by the municipal elec- 
 trical department, representing an investment of two hun- 
 dred and fifty million dollars, annual gross receipts of over 
 twenty millions, and employing about twenty thousand per- 
 sons. 
 
 Government has gone in for housing, building farm- 
 laborers' cottages in Ireland, municipal lodging-houses in 
 Great Britain, tenement blocks in London and Liverpool, 
 and developing suburbs. As I show in the report of the 
 Land Inquiry committee, there is beginning a vast ex- 
 tension of governmental rural cottage building, which will 
 provide 120,000 new dwellings, or ten per cent, of the pres- 
 ent number. 
 
 One-sixth of British India is forest reserve, a tract of 
 240,000 square miles, administered by the Government of 
 India for the public benefit, producing a net revenue of teu 
 million dollars a year. English municipalities are begin- 
 ning to afforest their water-catchment areas. 
 
 380 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The largest farmer in the United Kingdom is the Irish 
 Government, where the congested districts board has 33,000 
 rent-paying tenants and an average of a quarter of a mil- 
 lion acres under its administration for stock and sale of 
 produce. 
 
 The mines in the United Kingdom have been under pri- 
 vate ownership. But the Government recently took over 
 the coal mines in South Wales, and this is probably the 
 first step in the nationalization of most of the fields. Ire- 
 land's prosperity will leap up if her coal-deposits are freed. 
 
 There are many government enterprises in manufactur- 
 ing industry, producing the articles required for public use, 
 instead of purchasing them to the profit of private concerns. 
 The municipality, with its tramway service, erects its own 
 works and car-sheds, generates its electricity, builds and 
 repairs its cars, prints its tickets. In England the post- 
 office gets the bulk of its mail-sacks made by the prison de- 
 partment. 
 
 At this writing the British Government is considering tak- 
 ing over the manufacture and sale of liquor, which will 
 make it one of the greatest shopkeepers in the world. 
 
 In the face of this summary of the research committee, 
 it is theoretic to debate about the principle of socialism 
 versus private capitalism. The tendency toward public 
 ownership is under full swing, and no phrases can stop it. 
 The committee quotes what a secretary for the colonies, 
 Lewis Harcourt, said: 
 
 In these days, the Colonial Office has more the attributes of an 
 immense trading and administrative concern than those of earlier 
 days, when it was a mere machine of Government. I am a coal 
 and tin miner in Nigeria, a gold miner in Guiana. I seek timber 
 in one colony, oil and nuts in another, cocoa in a third — copra 
 and copal, sisal and hemp, cotton, coffee, tobacco are common ob- 
 jects of my daily care. . . . My days and nights are spent in the 
 
 381 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 study of medicine, in the details of railway construction, with a 
 desire that the smallest sum of money may lay the largest number 
 of miles of track in the fewest possible days. 
 
 Six years ago the census showed in government employ in 
 England and Wales 788,550 persons, 299,599 in state de- 
 partments and 588,951 under local authorities. It is rea- 
 sonable to estimate that in the United Kingdom over one 
 million are now in public employment, one-sixth of all 
 gainfully employed persons. The Socialist or Labor parties 
 can not fully claim this government action as the result of 
 their propaganda. The bulk of this socialist enterprise has 
 been initiated and carried out by persons of the aristocratic 
 or propertied classes, by business men and experts, and 
 middle-class residents. Men like Joseph Chamberlain 
 were not "out" to introduce the cooperative commonwealth, 
 though unconsciously they have hastened its coming. The 
 reasons that have directly led to this spread of socialism 
 show that the consideration in the creators of the policy 
 was the interest of the community as a whole and the in- 
 terest of the citizens as consumers. The test of the policy 
 is not by theory, but by practice and experience. 
 
 In four great fields both socialism and cooperation are 
 as yet largely leaving the field to private capital. Those 
 fields are: the special service of the idle rich, much of in- 
 ternational trade and its finance, the unorganized portion 
 of the shipping industry, and a large part of agriculture 
 and fishing. And yet even in agriculture the coming leg- 
 islation is leaning heavily toward what is virtually state con- 
 trol; and in fishing the Empire Resources Development com- 
 mittee are putting through a program which is socialistic. 
 
 State and municipal ownership and management now 
 administer in the United Kingdom seventy-five hundred 
 million dollars of capital. The capital thus administered 
 
 382 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 and the volume of business thus done is probably a hundred 
 times as great as that of cooperation, and is increasing with 
 giant strides. This state and municipal socialism is most 
 successful in communication and transport, land improve- 
 ment, sanitation, and public health service, education and 
 recreation, extraction of coal and other minerals, banking 
 and insurance, manufacture and distribution of certain 
 commodities, and the construction and preparation of arti- 
 cles required in the public service. 
 
 The enterprises of cooperation and of state and municipal 
 socialism hardly ever compete with one another because 
 their spheres are distinct. The Cooperative Society pro- 
 duces and distributes mainly ordinary household supplies. 
 Socialism has devoted itself to commodities and services un- 
 suited to cooperation. This division of function will un- 
 doubtedly long continue. 
 
 The more a government engages in industrial functions as 
 contrasted with functions merely of police and national 
 defense, the more essentially democratic does its administra- 
 tion tend to become. But as yet, parallel with what we 
 have seen in cooperation, the humbler grades of employees 
 in state and municipal service have as little influence on the 
 management of their department and are as much governed 
 from above as if they were in capitalist employment. 
 
 On the other hand, in comparison with joint-stock cap- 
 italism, government management of industry means ulti- 
 mately a large number of independent employers and an 
 increase in local control. And this because in practice there 
 is a rapid growth of municipal enterprises, with a multipli- 
 cation of separate employers. Whereas in capitalist enter- 
 prise there is the supremacy of the national trust and 
 combine, such as Lord Rhondda's in South Wales, over pri- 
 vate industry, thus lessening the number of employers. 
 
 383 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The extension of state and municipal management is rap- 
 idly proceeding, and its potential area of control is almost 
 illimitable. In these next years if those industries and 
 services already governmentally administered in one place 
 or another are generally brought under public administra- 
 tion, the aggregate volume of state and municipal socialism 
 will be increased probably five- or six-fold. Such an in- 
 crease, without adding a single fresh industry or service to 
 those already successfully nationalized or municipalized 
 in one country or another, will probably bring into the 
 service of national and local government an actual majority 
 of the adult population. With cooperation developing along 
 its own lines, the combination of socialism and cooperation 
 will mean that probably three-fourths of all the world's in- 
 dustrial capital will be under collective or non-capitalistic 
 administration. 
 
 Certain activities will long remain outside this extension 
 of collective enterprise: certain branches of agriculture, 
 art, invention, new markets, new individual enterprises. 
 The future organization of industry and the state will there- 
 fore include more than one form of control. There is need 
 to secure for persons employed in cooperation, in govern- 
 ment enterprise, and in private enterprise some real control 
 over their own working lives. With that method of control 
 I have dealt in the cliapter on "The Discovery." There is 
 need, also, to secure for the users and consumers of par- 
 ticular products and services some real power of influencing 
 their production otherwise than by Parliament and the 
 town council. 
 
 Such are the conclusions of the research committee, which 
 I have reproduced largely in their own words. Out of it 
 all emerges the outline of the coming England, of social- 
 ism, cooperation, syndicalism, big business, private property. 
 384; 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 WORKSHOP COUNCILS 
 
 "Cards Freres" in Ghent, Belgium, had instituted a works 
 committee before the war came. Questions of hours, piece 
 rates, and discipline were dealt with. The disputes ceased, 
 production increased, and higher wages were paid. 
 
 WORKERS' CONTROL 
 
 The Garton Foundation, of which Mr. Balfour, the Vis- 
 count Esher and Sir Richard Garton are the trustees, has 
 made a careful investigation of industrial conditions: 
 
 Many of the men who return from the trenches to the great 
 munition and shipbuilding centers are, within a few weeks of their 
 return, among those who exhibit most actively their discontent with 
 present conditions. Among those who have fought in Flanders 
 or who have been employed in making shells at home, there are 
 many who look forward to a great social upheaval following the 
 war. It is the testimony of responsible observers on the spot that 
 some of our greatest industrial centers are even now in a state of 
 incipient revolt. To a very large number of the men now in the 
 ranks, the fight against Germany is a fight against "Prussianism," 
 and tlie spirit of Prussianism represents to them only an extreme 
 example of that to which they object in the industrial and social 
 institutions of their own country. They regard the present strug- 
 gle as closely connected with the campaign against capitalist and 
 class-domination at home. 
 
 Unfortunately some of the results of the war itself, such as the 
 Munitions Act and the Compulsion Acts, have intensified this 
 identification of external and internal "enemies." We are not 
 discussing the necessity of these measures. The point is that the 
 working of these Acts and the Tribunals created under them has 
 given rise to an amount of deep and widespread resentment which 
 is the more dangerous because it is largely inarticulate. It is 
 particularly dangerous because it tends to discredit in general 
 working class opinion that section of Labor which looks to the 
 improvement of industrial conditions by negotiation or by legisla- 
 tive action, and to strengthen the hands of the party which 
 preaches doctrines of wrecking and appropriation. 
 885 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The war has not put an end to industrial unrest. Every one 
 of the old causes of dispute remains, and others of a more 
 serious nature have been added in the course of the war. The 
 very moderation and unselfishness shown by the responsible lead- 
 ers of Organized Labor are looked upon by important sections 
 of their following as a betrayal of the cause and by some employers 
 as a tactical opportunity. 
 
 The employers know nothing of the effect of a new 
 process on the nervous system of the worker. They know 
 nothing of the fatigue from overwork or monotony. They 
 make no study of a standard of living. They go blindly 
 ahead, as if men and machinery, alike, were tools to be 
 manipulated. That an aim of industry should be a good 
 life for the worker is an idea which would sound strangely 
 in the ears. The workers understand nothing of overhead 
 charges, depreciation of plant, the risks of capital. They 
 know nothing of the policy connected with buying and 
 selling. 
 
 Consider the analysis Sir Hugh Bell has recently made 
 of his own costs, as given in the "Round Table" for Sep- 
 tember, 1916: 
 
 His firm makes steel, the raw materials for which are produced 
 from his own coal and iron mines and limestone quarries. In 
 every ton of steel made 70 to 73 per cent, of the cost goes as the 
 wages of labor. There remains 35 to 30 per cent, for all other 
 outgoings, including profit. The turnover on a steel business in 
 this country about equals the capital invested. If this profit 
 amounts to 10 per cent., of which 3 per cent, at least must go 
 back into the business to maintain the works, he thinks himself 
 lucky, and the 7 per cent, left must cover interest on his capital 
 as well as the profits for his enterprise and risk. The remaining 
 15 to 20 per cent, goes to cover rates and taxes, railway freights 
 and so forth, part of which again goes to labor. 
 
 Out of what fund, as Sir Hugh Bell asks, is he to pay a 10 per 
 cent, increase in wages? If he paid 10 per cent, more, he would 
 have no profit at all and could not continue the business. The 
 increase in wages, then, can only come from within, by greatc 
 
 386 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 efficiency in management or greater production per man. There 
 are, no doubt, many businesses which have some monopoly value, 
 where capital secures a greater return; there are others where 
 the return is less and the business is decaying. But except when 
 abnormal conditions arise, as with shijjping now, or when a 
 monopoly or a patent exists, the picture given by Sir Hugh Bell 
 is more or less applicable to industry in general. 
 
 No paper resolution, no legislation, and no economic the- 
 ory can alter the facts of the industrial situation. But an 
 adjustment and a gain can be made by a new release of 
 productive energy on the part of the management and the 
 men, by consultation between labor and capital, and by- 
 hard intellectual effort put on each detail of both the in- 
 dustrial process and the industrial relationship. 
 
 Labor is going to demand higher wages. To obtain them, 
 labor must produce more goods, and the employer must 
 improve his methods, instal new machinery, and consult the 
 worker. Some employers will meet the situation with su- 
 perlatively good management — a management that will wel- 
 come the worker to a share in control, and will increase pro- 
 duction and wages without financial loss. Some employers 
 will make decreased profits, some will go to the wall, and 
 some will fight the new conditions. If wisdom prevails on 
 both sides, a new constitution of industry will be achieved. 
 
 AUDITING WAGES AND PROFITS 
 
 The whole wage question will become increasingly a mat- 
 ter for expert accountants. This will mean a joint audit of 
 costs, presented by management and men, and determined 
 by the state. In the South Wales coal-field the figures as 
 presented by the federation executive, after the cost of 
 standard labor and stores and other costs of production have 
 been deducted, show: 
 
 387 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Period Wages Profits 
 
 From April, 1910, to June, 1915 67.00 (percent.) 9.67 
 
 " July, 1915, to June, 1916 61.79 " " 16.35 
 
 Quarter ended June 30, 1916 56.46 " " 24.05 
 
 The owners reply that the rise in the cost of production 
 has kept even with the rise in selling price. They instance 
 the prices of pit wood^ rails, and colliery stores, in addition 
 to a succession of wage increases. 
 
 Obviously this is not a question for frenzied rhetoric, 
 but for expert analysis. One wonders if, as we approach 
 the minimum wage in legislation, we are approaching the 
 maximum return permitted to capital. To make this clear: 
 will the state lay down a minimum Avage of thirty-six shil- 
 lings for the worker, and a prohibition for capital of any- 
 thing over ten per cent. } 
 
 THE TIE VOTE 
 
 The present proposals for workers' control through work- 
 shop councils lea^'e the final vote on a tie with the man- 
 agement. The workers, sitting as council members with 
 the managers of the industry, will become partners instead 
 of wage hands in the business. They will be "junior part- 
 ners" at first. The extent of their control will be deter- 
 mined by their ability and their self-conscious power as a 
 class. 
 
 HOUSING 
 
 In the city of Stanley, England, " overcrowding is found 
 to exist in 50 per cent, of the houses. It can hardly be 
 doubted that the existence of overcrowding on so serious 
 a scale is one of the chief factors which gives rise to such 
 a high infantile mortality as is found in Stanley, namely 
 169 per one thousand births." So says the authoritative 
 388 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 investigation "Livelihood and Povert}^ — A Study of Work- 
 ing Class Households in Northampton, Warrington, Stan- 
 ley and Reading" (1915). 
 And it goes on to report: 
 
 One-half of the households below the poverty line at Warring- 
 ton and Reading, nearly one-half at York, and one-third at North- 
 ampton, were living in poverty because the wages of the head of 
 the household were so low that he could not support a family of 
 three children or less. A great part of the poverty revealed by 
 our inquiries is not intermittent but permanent, not accidental or 
 due to exceptional misfortune, but a regular feature of the in- 
 dustries of the towns concerned. Of all the causes of primary 
 poverty which have been brought to our notice, low wages are 
 by far the most important. To raise the wages of the worst paid 
 workers is the most pressing social task with which the country 
 is confronted to-day. 
 
 In Northampton nearly 13 per cent, and in Reading 15 per cent, 
 earn less than 20 shillings. In four out of five of the towns, more 
 than one quarter, and in two out of five towns, more than one-third 
 of the adult male workers were earning less than 24 shillings per 
 week. 
 
 Sixty years ago, the population of England and Wales 
 was evenly divided between town and country dwellers. 
 Now four out of ever}' five persons are living in the towns, 
 and only one out of five in the country. Turning to rural 
 conditions, as described in the investigation "How the La- 
 borer Lives," we find: 
 
 Seventy per cent, of the agricultural workers in England and 
 Wales are paid laborers, having no direct financial interest in the 
 success or otherwise of the work in which they are engaged, and 
 only 30 per cent, farmers, small holders, or members of their 
 families. This is a serious fact, for probably in no other Eu- 
 ropean country is there so high a proportion of agricultural work- 
 ers who are "divorced from the soil." In 1907 the weekly earnings 
 of ordinary agricultural laborers in England averaged 17 shillings 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 6 pence. It may be taken as an established fact that a family 
 of five persons whose total income does not exceed ^0 shillings b" 
 pence, and whose rent is two shillings, is living below the "pov- 
 erty line." If we now turn to the actual wages of ordinary ag- 
 ricultural laborers we find that with five exceptions, the average 
 earnings in every county of England and Wales are below it. 
 The real wages of agricultural laborers have actually diminished 
 since 1900. 
 
 Let the reader try for a moment to realize what this means. 
 It means that from the point of view of judicious expenditure, 
 the be all and end all of life should be physical efficiency. It 
 means that people have no right to keep in touch with the great 
 world outside the village by so much as taking in a weekly news- 
 paper. It means that a wise mother, when she is tempted to buy 
 her children a pennyworth of cheap oranges, will devote the penny 
 to flour instead. It means that the temptation to take the shortest 
 railway journey should be strongly resisted. It seems that toys 
 and dolls and picture books, even of the cheapest quality, should 
 never be purchased; that birthdays should be practically indis- 
 tinguishable from other days. It means that every natural long- 
 ing for pleasure or variety should be ignored or set aside. It 
 means, in short, a life without color, space, or atmosphere, that 
 stifles and hems in the laborer's soul as in too many cases his 
 cottage does his body. 
 
 The motto of one of the villagers is given: "We don't 
 live, we linger." And yet, with these appalling conditions 
 of primary poverty in city and country, it is true that "there 
 has been an enormous improvement in the conditions of the 
 industrial population in Britain during the last sixty or 
 seventy years. There is a residuum of the population liv- 
 ing on the margin of subsistence, whose lot could not have 
 been much worse in 1 830 than it is now. It is possible that 
 the size of this residuum is as large, or even larger, now 
 than seventy years ago, but it bears a smaller proportion 
 to the total population." 
 
 390 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 LIGHT RAILWAYS 
 
 Belgium has £2.8 miles of light railway to every 100 
 square miles of territory. Great Britain has .37 of 1 mile 
 to every 100 square miles. That is, Belgium has 38 and 
 one-half times as many miles of light railwaj'^ in proportion 
 to her total area as Great Britain. This means not only 
 more agriculturists, but it means that more industrial 
 workers can and do live on the land, instead of in the slums 
 of cities. Twenty-three per cent, of the occupied persons 
 in Belgium are engaged in agriculture, but 56 per cent, of 
 the whole population live in rural and only 44 per cent, in 
 urban communes. "Everywhere in traveling through Bel- 
 gium one hears of tracts of land opened up to profitable 
 agriculture or commerce by means of the light railways." 
 The extraordinary development of agriculture is to no small 
 extent due to these facilities for the transport of produce 
 in bulk and in small quantities. A thorough study of this 
 system of light railways has been made by Seebohm Rown- 
 tree in "Land and Labor — Lessons from Belgium." He 
 summarizes a detailed consideration as follows: 
 
 In comparison with her size, Belgium has the most extensive 
 system of main and light railways and canals in the world. Al- 
 most all her main railways are national property, and she is 
 financing her light railways so cleverly that they will become pub- 
 lic property at the end of a certain number of years, without any 
 appreciable cost to the public purse. She has frankly recognized 
 that light railways cannot do more than just pay their way, and 
 will never show so high a return upon capital as to induce capital- 
 ists to choose them in preference to other industrial investments. 
 If economically managed, however, they can be run practically 
 without loss, and they are of inestimable value in opening up 
 country districts and developing agriculture. Indeed, it may be 
 said that small holdings cannot be made fully successful without 
 
 391 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 such means of cheap and rapid transport as light railways afford. 
 Canals, which are almost all national property in Belgium, are 
 looked upon as high roads, and the State is satisfied if the very low 
 charges made for their use cover, or almost cover, the cost of 
 upkeep. The very low rates charged for the transport of goods 
 both on railways and canals are a great benefit to industry as 
 well as agriculture, and the extraordinary cheapness of the work- 
 men's tickets upon the railways has economic effects of a far- 
 reaching character — among others it facilitates decentralization 
 of population and industries, and thus largely destroys the 
 monopoly of landowners in towns. 
 
 CHURCH ATTENDANCE 
 
 In the midweek of November^ 1916, this advertisement 
 appeared in the "Guardian": 
 
 The LIVING of Catherston Leweston, near Charmouth, Dorset, 
 is VACANT. The adult inhabitants of the parish are 22, the 
 full value of the living £75; value last year £67 17s. Healthy, 
 southern locality, near the sea. No rectory-house. 
 
 A few years ago, the "Daily News" made a census of 
 London churches. At that time the number of City 
 Churches connected with the Established Church was 45. 
 The attendances at all these churches on Sunday morning 
 was 4,634. At St. Alban's, there were 13 persons present, 
 of whom six were children. St. Mildred's had 14. In the 
 morning, St. Alphege had 37, of whom 21 were children. 
 In the evening, 37 came, but one child was unable to come, 
 and an additional woman attended, and saved the average. 
 Of the total 45 churches, eight had attendances of over 
 100 in the morning. 
 
 In one Noncomformist Congregational Church, the City 
 Temple, there were 3,463 persons in the congregation, as 
 compared to 4,634 persons in all the 45 churches of the 
 Established Church. It is doubtful if the community will 
 permanently carry that burden of expense for a venerable 
 state institution. 
 
 392 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 MONEY OR EDUCATION 
 
 The labor exchanges are constantly thrown against hu- 
 man problems. One of their executives told me of being 
 forced to decide whether to send a lad fourteen years old, 
 in poverty, into a fairly well-paid job, which will prove 
 after a couple of years only a "blind alley," or to put him 
 into a trade which will give him a low wage, but train him 
 for a life-job. It is easy to decide on a "general principle," 
 but what is the answer when one studies the living condi- 
 tions of the boy and his family? 
 
 WOMEN IN INDUSTRY 
 
 Women in industry have opened many questions. Are 
 they, for instance, willing to undergo a long industrial 
 training from which they will be graduated skilled workers ? 
 One investigator states that in dressmaking materials they 
 are ignorant of texture and fabric, " though these would 
 seem to form a subject matter peculiarly fitted to their 
 tastes. It is men who occupy the higher positions in this de- 
 partment because they have cared to fit themselves by a 
 course of study." 
 
 Miss Proud in her book on "Welfare Work" reports: 
 
 There is a tendency for women to feed the machines which 
 men control ; that is to say, women's work is apt to become mechan- 
 ical and low-priced, therefore uninspiring and ineflficient. . . . 
 Women are inferiors in the industrial world because they have 
 not decided (except individually) that they desire to be other- 
 wise, or at least that they desire to pay in training the price of 
 eflBciency, 
 
 If they remain untrained, they remain unskilled, and can 
 not receive the wages of skilled labor. Are they to form a 
 great new proletarian mass of unskilled labor, with low 
 393 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 wages, while men workers direct them and receive a higher 
 wage? Will such a division, growing ever sharper, answer 
 the woman's craving for equality, which is one of the main 
 impulses of the woman's movement ? Will a system of wage 
 slavery, with men eternalh'- in the position of boss, fore- 
 man, and superintendent, seem a fuller life than the home? 
 
 Factory inspectors and employers state that the girl up 
 to the age of twenty-five often has her mind only half on 
 her work and the other half on her prospects of marriage. 
 The evening is to her the most valuable part of the day, 
 because she then becomes a social being. In a large and 
 exceptionally healthful factory the women left at about 
 twenty-five years of age. 
 
 "Their evenings," said the manager, "have ceased to be 
 matters of first-rate importance to them, and they do not 
 mind entering domestic service." 
 
 Miss Proud summarizes this sort of report, of which 
 there were many: 
 
 The suggestion is that women, as a rule, do not give themselves 
 unreservedly to their work until they no longer anticipate giving 
 themselves in their offspring. 
 
 Psychological facts like these leave us with few of the 
 old-time catch phrases such as "Equal pay for equal work." 
 
 WOMEN AND POPULATION 
 
 Adelyne More in her excellent pamphlet "Fecundity ver- 
 sus Civilization" has collected extracts from a wide read- 
 ing of recent discussions on Birth Control. She quotes from 
 Fran Stritt, president of the Woman Suffrage Union of 
 Germany, who occupies a position in the German suffrage 
 movement similar to that held by Mrs. Fawcett in Eng- 
 land. Frau Stritt writes: 
 
 394 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 This question (the responsibility of women for their lives as 
 mothers) involves for all those vfho have learned to think tilings to 
 their conclusion the real innermost core of the woman question. 
 Thus in a certain sense the population question is to be regarded 
 as the VI' Oman question, 
 
 and Frau Stritt quotes from Dr. Rutgers: 
 
 Through physiological knowledge the woman has again come 
 to be the mistress of her own body and of her own fate. 
 
 I am seeking to record tendencies^ not to offer special 
 pleas for theories in this profoundly important matter of 
 population, the solution of which will determine economic 
 basis, social structure, and foreign policy. It is probably 
 the most significant single step the race has ever taken in 
 the control of environment. And it will be with this as 
 with other extensions of that control. It will alter human 
 relationships. Children — "that is the indispensable condi- 
 tion both for military and industrial success," says Nau- 
 mann: food for powder and food for factories. The fact 
 that such advocacy still exists must be faced by those who 
 would blithely cut down the number of the western democ- 
 racies. 
 
 Adelyne More sees the two problems. 
 
 (1) Birth-control must be practised in the slum. Until the 
 lower class restricts, our civilization is being replenished by the 
 feeble-minded and the diseased. 
 
 (2) The militaristic nations must practise birth-control or tliey 
 will over-run the democracies. 
 
 She quotes from Alfred Naquet: 
 
 If the individuals who compose the nation wish to progress, to 
 develop, to live; if, in order to attain this truly human ideal, they 
 depart from the instinctive habits of the non-human animal; if they 
 limit their oifspring in order to raise themselves in dignity, in 
 wealth, in intellectual power; to overcome the perils in which 
 
 395 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 organic nature abounds, and to investigate the secrets of nature 
 — then their country will be vanquished, invaded, spoiled of its 
 wealth, and their children ruined and reduced to partial slavery. 
 
 Sir John Halliday Croom, Professor of Midwifery in the 
 University of Edinburgh, writes: 
 
 The falling birth-rate is due to many complex causes, but a great 
 many of the voluntarily sterile marriages are due to the fear and 
 dread which women have of child-bearing. This, so far as my 
 personal experience is concerned, is a growing dread, and I feel 
 sure is one of the many causes giving rise to the falling birth- 
 rate. Now, if a knowledge of Twilight Sleep were to become 
 generally known amongst women, it would do a great deal to 
 abrogate the first curse, and so relieve their minds of an over- 
 powering dread. 
 
 Sidney Webb wrote, a few years ago: 
 
 Twenty-five per cent, of our parents is producing 50 per cent, 
 of the next generation. . . . The ultimate future of these islands 
 may be to the Chinese! 
 
 This year Dean Inge notes the tendency towards what 
 I may call industrial celibacy, w^hich he summarizes : 
 
 In all trades where the women work for wages the birth-rate 
 has fallen sharply. 
 
 This restriction would tend to separate women into 
 classes, of which we have an instance in the Athenian City- 
 State, where there was a class of sterile intellectual alien 
 women, in sharp distinction to the mothers of the race. 
 We read in "The Greek Commonwealth" : 
 
 Women tended to become crystallized into two separate types 
 — the household matron under the tutelage of a husband or some 
 other male protector, and the independent professional woman, 
 who had indeed her "guardian" as Athenian law demanded, but 
 kept him for occasional use, as we keep our solicitors. 
 
 396 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 These professional women were wool-workers and mar- 
 ket-women or retailers. 
 
 But the chief and most conspicuous profession open to an alien- 
 born woman in a Greek city was to be what was known as a 
 "companion." It was "companions," not marriageable girls, whom 
 the young Athenian encountered in mixed gatherings, in attendance, 
 perhajis, on some of the most refined and distinguished men of the 
 day; for it was by contributing to the success of these parties, 
 from which the native-born woman was rigidly excluded, that 
 they earned their livelihood. "M^e have companions for the sake 
 of pleasure," says Demosthenes, making a clear distinction in 
 which there is no hint of overlapping, "and wives to bear us law- 
 ful oflFspring and be faithful guardians of our houses." 
 
 Though Athens had no Shakespeare to help us to understand 
 thera they must often have felt as lonely and as sad at heart as 
 the poor Fool. If they had been allowed the support of their 
 secluded sisters who could only watch them wistfully from their 
 windows, as they mingled with the men in the streets and in the 
 market-place, they might have set the intercourse of the sexes, 
 for the first time in history, on an intelligent basis, and saved 
 the memory of Athens from a reproach of which it is not possible 
 to clear her. 
 
 The suggestion of a woman's sex strike is dealt with by 
 Aristophanes in his Lysistrata. "Athens witnessed the rise 
 of a movement for the emancipation of woman." Euripides 
 expressed the "war-cry" of suiFering woman, and their re- 
 volt from the "hard hating voices." But their bitterness 
 did not avail, because organizing social thought had not 
 arrived at the solution. To-day the effort is renewed to 
 give expression to the various and complex dispositions 
 of millions of individual women. War and the strife 
 of labor and capital are surface ripples compared with 
 the immense instinctive forces let loose by this effort. 
 Governments and trade-unions will be broken if they op- 
 pose it. 
 
 397 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 CLOTHES 
 
 At the meeting of shareholders of the Fore Street Ware- 
 house Company a net profit for the year 1916 of $315,000 
 was announced. In 1914 the profit was $140;,000. The 
 chairman, in explaining the prosperity of this wholesale 
 drapery company, said that "there were many women who 
 for one reason or another had now more money to spend on 
 surplus requirements than they had had at any previous 
 time, and whose first and natural desire was to replenish 
 their wardrobes." 
 
 The fact that drapery houses generally experienced a 
 profitable year in 1916 is shown by the reports of the 
 firms. Messrs. J. F. & H. Roberts, a Manchester house, 
 record a net profit of £42,220 or £24,000 more than three 
 years previously. Messrs. Hunter, Barr & Co. of Glasgow 
 announce an improvement of fifty per cent, on 1913, the 
 net profit for last year being £32,488. In the case of 
 Messrs. John Howell & Co. the figure for last year was 
 £42,158 against £10,580 in 1913. This is the highest 
 result in the forty-six years' history of this company, and 
 is nine times better than four years ago. Messrs. Pawsons 
 & Leafs record an advance from £7,639 to £35,853 in the 
 three years. Messrs. Foster, Porter & Co. of Wood Street 
 also announce profits nearly three-and-a-half times those 
 for the last year of peace, though in this case additional 
 capital has been called up during the interval. The profit 
 for 1916 was £49,188. Messrs. Alliston & Co. have turned 
 a loss of £6,406 in 1913 into a profit of £11,156 last year. 
 
 Balancing this increased expenditure, we have many 
 thousands of cases, of which Mrs. Pember Reeves has col- 
 lected examples such as the following: 
 
 398 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Mrs. P. whose husband is a railway man, used to get 27 shillings 
 before the war, and now has 33 shillings. She has a new baby, 
 which brings the number of her children up to five. Her rent for 
 three rooms was 7 shillings; it is now 8 shillings for four rooms. 
 She always paid a shilling a week each to a clothing and a boot 
 club, and this she continues to do. Her "gramophone" ("the 
 women are all buying a piano or gramophone") appears to be 
 that she now buys twelves loaves a week instead of seven, and 
 pays four shillings instead of 1 shilling 5i/^ pence for it. Her coal 
 costs her lOy^ pence more, her meat 2 shillings more, her tea 5 
 pence, her potatoes 6 pence, and the rest of her expenditure is 
 about 1 shilling 10 pence higher than it was before the war. She 
 is getting six shillings more, but the items just quoted show that on 
 them alone she is spending over eight shillings more than she used 
 to do. She, therefore, has ceased to buy fish, bacon, eggs, cocoa, 
 jam, and cow's milk altogether, and buys less quantities of pot- 
 herbs, margarine, and sugar. 
 
 TRADE UNIONS AND VOTES FOR WOMEN 
 
 If the recommendations of the Speaker's Franchise Con- 
 ference are carried into effect^ the male electorate will 
 number nearly 11 million out of a manhood of 121/2 mil- 
 lion. But the Speaker's Conference has dodged the woman 
 suffrage question, and, instead of a unanimous finding, they 
 have passed on the onus of giving women the vote to Par- 
 liament. They have given only a majority vote to the 
 "principle, and present a "proposal" which will give the 
 suffrage to six million women out of l-i million. In short, 
 they have "side-stepped," and left "Lloyd George's muni- 
 tion girls" who "saved the nation" to win the vote if they 
 can. The Woman's Movement in Great Britain will con- 
 tinue to be in part political, not because it does not value 
 the human implications of woman's position in the modern 
 world, but because it believes the franchise is necessary in 
 order to achieve those higher values. The insistence on 
 "Votes for Women" has v,'rongly seemed to some continen- 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 tal critics as the superficial catch-phrase of women who had 
 not plumbed the meaning of feminism. 
 
 Industrially, working women face the same situation as 
 politically. The fight for a decent standard of living is 
 only in its beginning. There are only 74,000 factories and 
 workshops out of 277,000 in the United Kingdom under 
 regulations or Special Rules. At Barking, a firm, engaged 
 in the manufacture of India rubber goods, was employing 
 600 women. Soon after the outbreak of war, the firm 
 announced that workers in the Warping shed would be em- 
 ployed if they signed this agreement: "We, the under- 
 signed, agree to work without a. Trade Union." The man- 
 ager said: "I will liave no woman in the firm who belongs 
 to a Trade Union." Eighty of the women belonging to the 
 Warping Department refused to sign the paper. The ma- 
 jority of them found work elsewhere. 
 
 Certain trade unions have opened their membership to 
 women — the Dockers' Union in the Transport Workers' 
 Federation, some of the unions in the Federation of Fur- 
 nishing Trades, the National Union of Railway men, and 
 the Railway Clerks' Association. But the engineering 
 trade — where the largest movement of women into men's 
 work has taken place — has not made up its mind, and has 
 improvised a Speaker's Conference compromise in which 
 women are enrolled in the National Federation of Women 
 Workers, by arrangement with the Amalgamated Society of 
 Engineers. About 40,000 women have been so organized 
 out of 500,000 women munition makers. The working 
 woman's place is either the sweat shop or trade-union. 
 As J. J. Mallon, who has long mediated in wage and status 
 disputes, says: 
 
 The line of separation between skilled and unskilled workmen is 
 shown by the war to rest on little more than a convention, and 
 
 400 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 the craftsmen realize that if the laborer is not admitted to com- 
 radeship all their privileges are insecure. 
 
 And that line of separation is equally a convention be- 
 tween men and women. 
 
 "The Woman Worker," the organ of the woman's trade 
 union movement, states: 
 
 The women who are doing very well are those who have had 
 the help, not merely of their own organizations, but of the great 
 men's unions. The Govenunent protection of wages has been 
 given, not in proportion to the needs of the workers, or to their 
 usefulness, but solely in proportion to the strength of the de- 
 mand. 
 
 And it instances Newcastle, where there are 6,000 women 
 trade-union members, and the award given in the case of 
 Messrs. Armstrong Whitworth's is superior to others, the 
 time rate being fixed at 5 pence an hour, with special rates 
 for gagers, examiners, and danger zone workers. 
 
 So, in the next five years, women must win over Govern- 
 ment, the men's trade unions, and the employers. 
 
 IRISH RAILWAYS 
 Irish railways were investigated a few years ago by the 
 British Government. Their commissioners found that the 
 Irish railway problem is the restriction of agriculture, in- 
 dustry and trade in Ireland, because internal and export 
 transit rates are on a higher scale than the rates charged 
 for conveyance of commodities which compete with Irish 
 products in Irish and British markets. The decadence of 
 Irish industries has been accelerated by the establishment 
 of low through rates from British manufacturers to Irish 
 villages, rates which have been much lower in scale than 
 the local rates from Irish cities to Irish villages. The 
 British-controlled Irish railways favored the British manu- 
 401 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 facturer at the expense of the local Irish manufacturer. 
 The woolen trade and the textile and pottery industries 
 have withered. 
 
 But not only have through import rates into Ireland for 
 many years been relatively lower than the Irish internal 
 rates, but also through rates from abroad to British ports 
 and interior centers have been on a lower scale than the 
 export rates from Ireland. As the result of this, not only 
 has Irish commercial industry been strangled, but Irish 
 agriculture has been crippled. Even Ireland's one best 
 agricultural industry, livestock, expanded only about 16 
 per cent, in twenty years, and the cattle trade employs 
 comparatively little labor. In eggs, Russia has been com- 
 peting successfully against Ireland. On November 14, 
 1916, T. W. Russell, vice-president of the Department of 
 Agriculture, stated publicly that by far the largest pro- 
 portion of the damage done in transit to exported eggs took 
 place after the eggs had left Ireland. 
 
 Winter dairying would be stimulated by proper railway 
 facilities. If coals came to Newcastle from Cologne there 
 would be prompt action. But Danish butter came into 
 Limerick, one of the principal centers of the Irish butter 
 trade. Irish butter is not to be had throughout the year in 
 quantity enough for home consumption, though climate and 
 agricultural conditions of Ireland are more favorable for 
 winter dairying than those of Denmark. Better methods of 
 production and a reduction of railway rates, encouraging 
 farmers to go in for winter dairying, are both needed. 
 
 The classification of Irish goods, each with its own rate, 
 is confusing. The secretary of the Cooperative Movement 
 stated to the Railway Commission that "the influence exer- 
 cised over Irish railways by English companies is a bad 
 influence, a growing influence, and likely to grow further." 
 4.02 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The Managing Director of the City of Dublin Steam 
 Packet Company asserted that the London and North 
 Western Railway Company practically controls the Irish 
 railways, and that a company like his own, when competing 
 with that railway company across the Channel, is virtually 
 powerless, as whatever rates it agrees to, his company has 
 to agree to the same. 
 
 Just as Ireland has been importing food when she could 
 produce it, so she has been making large imports in coal 
 when she has extensive coal fields. Here, as in agriculture, 
 railway facilities are needed. The required additional cap- 
 ital for opening certain of them up will be forthcoming when 
 the requisite railway communication is provided. This is 
 true of the Castlecomer and the Arigna coal fields. Four 
 miles of railway will release the Arigna mines. 
 
 Of the field at Coalisland, E. St. John Lyburn, economic 
 geologist and mineral expert to the Department, said : 
 
 The prospector would require $35,000 or $50,000 for trial holes, 
 and the field can be developed for $1,500,000 or $3,000,000. There 
 is no other country but this where the trial would not have been 
 made before now. There are about 60 million tons of coal, and 
 that can be multiplied by ten or one hundred, as the deposits 
 are revealed by the scaling of the trial holes. 
 
 In this one instance, it is capital rather than railway 
 facilities that are required. But at Wolf Hill, and for most 
 of Ireland, the primary need is railway facility. Capital 
 will follow opportunity. The condition of low rates and 
 special facilities in railway transport is a traffic large in 
 volume, regular in transmission, and presented to the car- 
 riers in a form convenient to handle. This means regu- 
 larity of supply, a volume of consignments, good packing 
 of produce, cooperation among producers. The low Con- 
 tinental rates, which have helped to capture the British 
 403 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 markets, and injure Ireland^, are also due in many instances 
 to the cheapening of transport by Government subsidy and 
 to state ownership of lines. 
 
 While I was in Ireland, the Irish railways were taken 
 over by the British Government. No policy has yet been 
 announced. A broad state policy in tillage, fertilizer, 
 seeds, machinery and a unified and extended railway system 
 will bring prosperity to Ireland. If that Government sub- 
 sidy carries with it the power over Irish taxation, the Irish 
 people will probably reject the policy. In that event, Ire- 
 land herself will have to find the money for raising her 
 major industry, agriculture, to a new level. In either case, 
 the time has come for a momentous decision, on which rests 
 the welfare of the next fifty j'^ears. 
 
 IRISH AGRICULTURE 
 
 A country, whose basic industry is agriculture, has to 
 import its food. A country, made up of farmers and under- 
 populated, has too few farms, and those farms too small 
 and poor. Such is the heritage left to Ireland by "British 
 statesmanship" like that of Sir Robert Peel. The economic 
 basis of Ireland is agriculture, but in 1915 it was forced to 
 import bacon and hams at a cost of $15,500,000, butter 
 $2,300,000, oats $750,000, wheat $20,000,000, wheat flour 
 $18,500,000. 
 
 T. W. Russell, vice-president of the Department of Agri- 
 culture, says: 
 
 Without doubt we might have produced every shilling's worth 
 of this and much more ourselves. The Government at the present 
 time is bringing food from every quarter of the globe. It is 
 doing this at immense cost and at no little risk. And all the 
 while there are several millions of acres in Ireland which might 
 be tilled with profit to the farmer and immense advantage to 
 the State. 
 
 404 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 The Department of Agriculture states that there is every 
 likelihood that next season the supply of superphosphate 
 will not equal the demand. This will prevent the manuring 
 of grass lands. Some thousands of tons of sulphate of cop- 
 per was exported, not for military purposes. "It was taken 
 from Irish agriculture," says the "Freeman's Journal," "at 
 a time of its sorest need and sold to protect agriculture in 
 other countries. Hence there was only a limited supply 
 of spraying material in this country to stem the ravages of 
 the blight." 
 
 It was sold to France and Italy for spraying grapes. 
 
 This action left Irish agriculturalists with practically no sul- 
 phate for the spraying of potatoes. That is the cause of the 
 failure of more than one-fourth of the Irish potato crop this 
 year. 
 
 Mr. Runciman, speaking of the United Kingdom, said: 
 
 Plowing is behindhand not only because many horses have been 
 put out of action, but because steam carriage is lying idle in con- 
 sequence of mechanics having been so freely x'ecruited from some 
 of the big agricultural implement makers. 
 
 Irish agriculture has been crippled at the very crisis when 
 food is necessary for Great Britain to win the war. Sup- 
 plies of seed, fertilizer, imported food-stufFs, and agricul- 
 tural and dairy machinery, are shortened when they ought 
 to be greatly extended. 
 
 An important study of Irish agriculture has recently been 
 made by an expert whom I know, who signs himself "Agri- 
 cola." I am not at liberty to publish his name. One of 
 the high officials of the British Government in Ireland 
 recommended these articles to me as giving a just picture 
 of conditions. I summarize the conclusions in what fol- 
 lows. 
 
 Irish agriculture is backward because three-fifths of the 
 405 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 land is held by one-sixth of the landholders under terms 
 restricting or prohibiting tillage. Four-fifths of all the 
 crops are used on the farms for seed or for food to live 
 stock, and only one-fifth is sold either as human food, as 
 food for non-agricultural live stock, or as raw material for 
 industry, such as flax and barley. From that one-fifth must 
 also be deducted the one-seventh which farmers and their 
 families use. So farming product is one-seventh crops and 
 six-sevenths live stock and produce for live stock. There 
 is room then for extension of the crop area of Ireland, 
 which would both benefit the live stock production and in- 
 crease corn food for the population. Care must be taken 
 in increasing tillage not to let cows run dry for want of 
 sufficient food. But care can be taken to safeguard live 
 stock and yet to release the acreage of Ireland for tillage. 
 Over sixty-four per cent, of the land of Ireland is in 
 grass or crops. 
 
 At every stage in his history the Irish agriculturalist has been 
 struggling against laws and ordinances that sought to force grazing 
 instead of tillage. These Orders and enactments are on record 
 since the days of Cromwell and the Stuarts. 
 
 But the tillage instinct of the Irish farmer has continued 
 strong against alien legislation. 
 
 In the middle of the last century, Peel attacked tillage in 
 Ireland, and the wholesale evictions that cleared thousands of 
 acres were the beginning of the grazing ranches that are the cause 
 of contention in our own day. 
 
 Four hundred and sixty-seven thousand three hundred 
 and thirty-five acres of wheat were lost to the plow. 
 
 The British Food Controller would do well to note that the 
 loss of this food in this crisis in his country's history is due to 
 what was then loudly acclaimed as "wise British statesmanship." 
 The decrease in the area of all corn crops since Sir Robert Peel's 
 
 406 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Plantation Scheme was started is nearly two million acres. There 
 is a loss of 60 per cent, of corn, of 26 per cent, of green crops, 
 and of 65 per cent, of flax. 
 
 In 1916, the area of pasture and grazed mountain in- 
 creased by 86,585 acres to total of 12,437,709 acres. The 
 tillage increased only 42,236 acres to a total of 2,400,356 
 acres. So the same bad tendency toward pasture over 
 tillage is still under way. England in refusing to let Ire- 
 land sow has now failed to reap the harvests that would 
 have reduced submarines to toys. 
 
 The absence of drainage and of irrigation is a further 
 hindrance to Irish farming. The lowering of riverbeds, 
 like the Barrow and the Shannon, is suggested. A century 
 ago, a Royal Commission of the British Government recom- 
 mended a drainage scheme for the 477,784 acres of turf 
 bog in Ireland. Other commissions since then have rein- 
 forced the demand, but the bogs still exist and even in 
 recent years have risen on their imderwater and traveled 
 over the adjacent country, in one instance for a distance 
 of ten miles and a depth of 40 feet. A bog injures the 
 land around by excessive moisture to an extent of perhaps 
 50 per cent, of its own area. The bogs of Ireland cover 
 4 and one-third per cent, of the surface of the land. Eight 
 and one-half per cent, of Connacht is bog, and nineteen per 
 cent, of King's County. There is bog in every Irish county. 
 If these bogs were drained, much land would be freed, ir- 
 rigation would be possible, and the immense supplies of 
 peat could be used locally, converted into charcoal, for the 
 production of power. 
 
 TRUSTS 
 
 Lord Milner writes: 
 
 The future belongs to big-scale business or to such smaller 
 
 40T 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 businesses as can learn to work together and to pool their re- 
 sources for certain objects — the full use of scientific research 
 being only one of them — which individually they are not strong 
 enough to attain. 
 
 But large-scale production alone does not solve the labor 
 difficulty. Our mining combines in the West and Perm- 
 sylvania, our steel combine in the East, our interstate-rail- 
 way combines have not softened the labor conflict. Two 
 points of view are common in discussing big combines. 
 One is to fight them as tyrannical and to try to break them 
 up into competing units; the other is to swallow them 
 whole. Neither satisfies. Is the large unit necessarily the 
 most efficient? Is there no limit to its size? If in the 
 given case, it is the most efficient, what shall be the method 
 of democratic control? These are questions more fertile 
 than ethical questions of the "good trusts," and theoretical 
 questions as to whether Mr. Rockefeller is the middleman 
 between individualism and socialism. A powerful group of 
 men are urging the syndication of industry in England. 
 They approve of "the large scale" for business. Doubtless, 
 they will be successful. But when they have achieved it, 
 they will be faced by the same problems that America now 
 wrestles with. 
 
 THE DECAY OF PARLIAMENT 
 
 Sidney Low in "The Fortnightly Review" says that Par- 
 liament has ceased to be a government-making organ, and 
 that government in the future will continue to be carried on 
 by great administrative commissions appointed by the cab- 
 inet, directly responsible to it, and removed from the direct 
 control of Parliament. 
 
 The democratic machinery of the nineteenth century has 
 broken doAvn. A new machinery is being slowly con- 
 408 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 structed. Under the old regime elected representatives of 
 the people became the law-making body, the legislature; 
 and a committee of the legislature was selected to be the 
 cabinet, or executive. But in recent years there has grown 
 up a body of a thousand departmental administrators, out- 
 side Parliament, housed in government departments. This 
 bureaucracy is a set of permanent expert officials who not 
 only actually administer the law as created by Parliament, 
 but initiate new legislation, which is carried into effect over 
 the head of Parliament, because it is drafted into bills by 
 these experts, handed to the cabinet by them, and made into 
 acts by the power of the cabinet exercised on Parliament. 
 So Parliament has tended to become a ratifying voice in- 
 stead of a law-making body. 
 
 'The cabinet, also, has changed. The various departmen- 
 tal heads, who used to siu around as "cabinet ministers" and 
 confer, have been forced back into their function as ad- 
 ministrators of departments. A small body of men, just 
 now five in number, form the directorate of goveriunent. 
 The change from twenty-three executives to five gives cen- 
 tralization of power and exactly located responsibility. 
 The few can get results, and they can be held to account, 
 where the many dodged both action and "strict accountabil- 
 ity." The change is similar to that which has taken place 
 in several hundred American city governments. Under the 
 old ward system, we used to elect twenty or thirty men to 
 "run" a city. Now we elect a commission government of 
 five men, with full power and responsibility, who select 
 their departmental administrative staffs. 
 
 The five who rule Great Britain are called the War Coun- 
 cil. When peace comes, it is probable that the old ex- 
 tended cabinet will^ temporarily revive and resume its ac- 
 tivities as a debating society, with diffused, unlocated re- 
 
 409 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 sponsibility and weakened executive power. But that 
 machinery is outworn and is sure to be scrapped. It was 
 constructed on the theory that the state is made up of citi- 
 zens who can conduct their corporate life through repre- 
 sentatives. That theory is an over-simplification of gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 To sum up present tendencies, the executive is rapidly 
 defining itself and constructing its machinery. It is tend- 
 ing toward tlie organized states directed by a few powerful 
 executives, surrounded by administrative departments. It 
 has outpaced the legislature, which is drifting impotent 
 on the tide of state socialism, devised by expert officials 
 and enacted by the handful of five men in control of gov- 
 ernment. This new legislation was demanded by the com- 
 munity not through its Parliamentary representatives, but 
 by the new channels of trade-unions and government de- 
 partments (military, naval, munitions, board of trade, home 
 office, and local government board). 
 
 But not only has the legislature been outpaced. Demo- 
 cratic control over these executives and experts has failed 
 to keep step with the rapid growth in their power. The 
 community has not yet devised checks upon them. Repre- 
 sentatives in Parliament, elected from geographical locali- 
 ties, are now seen to be only one of the needed effective 
 controls. The citizen is not only and essentially a resident 
 in an area called Battersea who elects a Battersea man to 
 safeguard Battersea interests. The citizen is also a pro- 
 ducer and a consumer, and he wishes those functions safe- 
 guarded in government. The citizen as consumer is gradu- 
 ally establishing cooperation and local and national owner- 
 ship. As a producer he strengthens whatever trade-union 
 he belongs to (whether as doctor, business man, barrister, 
 teacher, railwayman, or locomotive engineer) and is slowly, 
 
 410 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 but increasingly, establishing local, district, and national 
 parliaments in his profession and industry. Through work- 
 shop council, joint district board, and national conciliation 
 committees he is asserting a control on government. Al- 
 ready it is unquestioned that the demands of such a union 
 as the miners are more eflfective in creating new legislation 
 than the demands of members of Parliament. To coor- 
 dinate these parallel and conflicting claims will be the com- 
 ing task of government. The result will be a remodeled 
 British Constitution. The present total eclipse of Parlia- 
 ment is more complete than it will be after the war. Some 
 of Parliament's former power will return to it. A resultant 
 will be established between the various pressures of pro- 
 ducers and consumers, between syndicalism and cooperation 
 and state and municipal socialism. 
 
 TARIFF REFORM 
 
 The effort will soon be made in Great Britain to thrust 
 into the forefront of politics minor fractional parts of re- 
 construction as if they were major. A valuable pamphlet 
 called "The Elements of Reconstruction" says: 
 
 There is a danger — and nowadays it is the great danger — of be- 
 coming just as blindly superstitious about a tariff (as about the 
 kindred superstition of Free Trade). A tariff is perhaps a neces- 
 sary part of any national economic scheme, but it is not in itself 
 an economic scheme. A tariff varies in public value with the 
 economic constitution of the State it protects. The country will 
 not stand a merely protective tariff in foodstuffs, or in any com- 
 modity. 
 
 CHILD WELFARE 
 
 Sir George Newman, chief medical officer of the board of 
 education, states: 
 
 The machinery for dealing with the welfare of infants and of 
 children of school age is in existence, although all that ought to 
 411 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 be got from it is not yet being obtained. But the machinery for 
 dealing with children between one year and five years of age 
 has yet to be built. 
 
 BACKWARD RACES 
 
 The whole question of undeveloped countries and back- 
 ward races has never been thought through by our people. 
 We are lazy-minded on the causes of the war, and cherish 
 a vague pacifism, as if the instinct of nationality and the 
 lust for territory and new markets were non-existent. 
 
 A. E. Zimmern writes: 
 
 It may still be argued that the question is not Have the civilized 
 powers annexed large empires? but Ought they to have done so? 
 Was such an extension of governmental authority justifiable or 
 inevitable? Englishmen in the nineteenth century, like Americans 
 in the twentieth, were slow to admit that it was; just as the 
 exponents of laissez-faire were slow to admit the necessity for 
 State interference with private industry at home. But in both 
 cases they have been driven to accept it by the inexorable logic of 
 facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed, is possible? 
 
 He then quotes another authority on the impossibility of 
 standing aside and letting adventurers and exploiters en- 
 ter, and on the need of backward peoples having contact 
 with the outside world, and receiving protection from op- 
 pression and corruption. This is a "duty" of the great 
 powers — "a still better name would be the great responsi- 
 bilities." 
 
 The late Lord Cromer, in defending his rule in Egypt, 
 once said: 
 
 What, gentlemen, has there been no moral advancement? Is 
 the country any longer governed, as was formerly the case, ex- 
 clusively by the use of the whip? Is not forced labor a thing of 
 the past? Has not the accursed institution of slavery practically 
 ceased to exist? Is it not a fact that every individual in the 
 country, from the highest to the lowest, is now equal in the eyes 
 of the law; that thrift has been encouraged, and that tlie most 
 412 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 humble member of society can reap the fruits of his own labor 
 and industry; that justice is no longer bought and sold; that 
 every one is free — ^perhaps some would think too free — to express 
 his opinions; that King Backsheesh has been dethroned from high 
 places and now only lingers in the purlieus and byways of the 
 administration; that the fertilizing water of the Nile is distributed 
 impartially to prince and peasant alike; that the sick man can be 
 tended in a well-equipped hospital; that the criminal and the 
 lunatic are no longer treated as wild beasts; that even the lot of 
 the brute creation has not escaped the eyes of the reformer; that 
 the solidarity of interests between the governors and the governed 
 has been recognized in theory and in practice; that every act of 
 the Administration, even if at times mistaken — for no one is in- 
 fallible — bears the mark of honesty of purpose and an earnest de- 
 sire to secure the well-being of the population; and further, that 
 the funds, very much reduced in amount, which are now taken 
 from the pockets of the taxpayers, instead of being, for the most 
 part, spent on useless palaces and other objects, in which they 
 were in no degree interested, are devoted to purposes which are 
 of real benefit to the country? If all these, and many other, points 
 to which I could allude, do not constitute some moral advance- 
 ment, then, of a truth, I do not know what the word morality im- 
 plies. 
 
 Let us criticize as much as we like the arrogance of 
 tone in this and in the English belief in general that 
 they are born to govern. But what do we offer in place 
 of their imperfect administration? Are we willing to take 
 on our share of the job of internationalizing these plague- 
 spots, or are we going to turn them over to the people who 
 live there? Which people? To the Mahdi and Khalifa 
 who rise on a wave of religious hysteria and cause the death 
 of over five million Egyptians in the space of fourteen 
 years? To the particular tribe with the sharpest sword? 
 To the most corrupt, and therefore most powerful, native 
 prince who will use machme-guns on the "aliens" in the next 
 province because they honor the prophet instead of the all- 
 highest Lord Buddha? Is laissez-faire satisfactory? Ac- 
 413 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 tually there are only three "futures" for the undeveloped 
 countries: anarchy, with the slavery and murder of the 
 gentler tribes, and the unbridled exploitation of most of 
 the natives; colonial rule; internationalization. 
 
 HORATIO BOTTOMLEY 
 
 The value of Horatio Bottomley as a leader in time of 
 crisis can be appraised by these extracts from "John Bull." 
 This is his contribution to child welfare : 
 
 EDUCATION 
 
 Will the new Education Minister just try to shake off his Uni- 
 versity prejudices, and bring in a short Act releasing from school 
 attendance all children capable of assisting on farms or doing 
 other useful work— for the duration of the war? Never mind when 
 William the Conqueror came to the throne. 
 
 This is his knightly militant note: 
 
 To win through to victory we must make every German bite the 
 dust. The women who danced in the streets when the Lusitania 
 murders shocked civilization are fighting us just as much as the 
 men who reeled with drink when the joy bells rang over little 
 children done to death by the bombs of the Zeppelin. 
 
 One of his contributors has a word for backward races: 
 
 Why drain Great Britain dry of its manhood, until the colored 
 sons of Empire have been called into the fighting lines to help 
 to bear the burden of war? We want more men to bring the 
 Hun to his knees — why not three, six, or ten million colored 
 soldiers to help to ram the sword of Victory home? I know 
 many of the colored races, and I believe they would fight willingly 
 and splendidly. Some opponents allege otherwise; if the latter 
 are right, why ask the British taxpayers in time of peace to shell 
 out to keep and protect a population that is no good to us in 
 time of adversity? 
 
 Finally we have Bottomley, the man of faith and vision, 
 facing the unseen, a gentleman unafraid: 
 414 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 I, the man of the world, the man of Business, the man of 
 affairs, the disciple of Foote and Bradlaugh, the nephew of 
 George Jacob Holyoake— I have come to be convinced that there 
 is no such thing as Death. 
 
 LORD NORTHCLIFFE 
 
 If labor becomes the crowned king, Lord NorthclifFe will 
 be found the first by the throne. The most popular news- 
 paper in Great Britain is his "Daily Mail." It is getting 
 ready to make the flop. On January 25, 1917, it stated 
 editorially : 
 
 ' LABOR AND THE NORTHCLIFFE PRESS 
 
 WHY WE ARE PLEASED 
 
 Far from believing that Labor has supplied too many Cabinet 
 Ministers, we look forward quite confidently and cheerfully to the 
 day when it will have many more, believing that after the success 
 of our present Labor Ministers other Labor Ministers will be 
 just as good. The responsibility of carrying on this Empire is 
 great enough and inspiring enough to bring out the best qualities 
 of any man of energy and insight who puts his back into the 
 work. And if we are told with bated breath that a Labor Cabinet 
 is a possibility of the future, then we reply without hesitation 
 that we are quite ready for it. We are satisfied that whenever 
 it does come, as, no doubt, it will in due course, it will be as 
 good as any other Government we have ever had and it may be 
 assured that in working for the welfare of our country and the 
 Empire it will have the support of the Northcliffe Press. 
 
 THE WHITE KNIGHT 
 
 Here is a touch out of the eleventh century. A recent 
 issue of "The Observer" stated that "if we are not mis- 
 taken," the line of the White Knight was now extinct. 
 Philip John Fitz-Gibbon thereupon wrote to them in No- 
 vember of 1916: 
 
 415 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Observer: 
 
 November 12, 1916. 
 
 I beg to observe that this is not the case. Though I have never 
 assumed the title, 1 am the liolder of it. . . . At the time of my 
 father's death in February, 1881, my uncle published an obituary 
 notice in "The Times" and other papers stating that my father, 
 Maurice Fitz-Gibbon, was tiie Wliitc Knight and that I was his 
 successor in the title. 
 
 In Vol. XVII, No. 93, of the Journal of the Cork Historical and 
 Archaeological Society for January -March, 191^, Colonel J. Grove 
 White, J. P., D.L., of Kilbyrne, Co. Cork, published the White 
 Knight's pedigree (from Domiuus Otho in A.D. 1057 to date), 
 which was taken from the authorities he has therein quoted, and 
 stated clearly that I hold the title of White Knight, being ^tth 
 in descent from the said Dominus Otho and 17th in descent from 
 the first White Knight, Maurice, who was the eldest son of Gilbert, 
 or Gibbon, whose second and third brothers, John and Maurice, 
 were the respective ancestors of the Knights of Glinn (Black 
 Knight) and Kerry (Red Knight). These Knighthoods date from 
 the battle of Ilallidon Hill in 1333. 
 
 The pedigree is taken largely from the Cotter MS., now in the 
 British Museum. Burke's "Landed Gentry," too, states that I am 
 the White Knight. 
 
 LOCAL PATRIOTISM 
 
 The Englisli love of locality is often overlooked by for- 
 eign observers, because the Englishman seldom puts it into 
 words. Thus Monsieur Davry says that the word patrie 
 does not exist in English: for a Frenchman patrie means 
 his sacred soil: home and inheritance. But "the place and 
 all around it" are equally dear to the Englishman. Re- 
 cently Lieutenant Lord Newborough died from trench-chill. 
 In his will he wrote: 
 
 I wish to be buried, if I die in England, in the simplest manner 
 compatible with decency, on the summit of tlie Bluff in Festiniog, 
 which lies on the western side of the road from Bryn Llewellyn 
 
 416 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 and which Bluff is known to my sisters and intimate friends as 
 Newborough Hill, as from that spot there is my favorite view 
 down the Vale of Festiniog; and I wi-^h my tombstone to be a 
 simple slab of stone from my estate, protected from desecration 
 by tourists, but otherwise leaving my burial-place free for sheep and 
 cattle to roam all around the actual grave. 
 
 THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH 
 
 Archdall Reid has written in the "Eugenics Review" of 
 the British Commonwealth. He says: 
 
 This conflict (the war), however huge, is no more than an 
 episode in an immensely vaster struggle, of which the prize is not 
 precarious political supremacy in Europe for a few generations, but 
 world predominance irre%-ocably established by nature. True de- 
 cision was reached nearly a century ago. The great immigrations 
 and permanent conquests are drawing to a final close. Germany 
 joins a contest already decided. The battle is over, and with us 
 rests the ultimate victory. The Anglo-Saxons have more space for 
 expansion than any other people. ''AH Xorth America" is "in the 
 grasp of the Anglo-Saxon and his race" has "almost limitless space 
 for expansion." Subsequently he colonized Australasia. His place 
 in the sun, his ultimate world-supremacy was now established. . . . 
 With the exception of temperate South America and parts of the 
 western seaboard of that continent, our race has colonized almost 
 all the regions of the new world in which it is possible for a 
 European race to flourish. In the coming future no other people 
 will be so numerous, so widespread, or in command of resources so 
 tremendous. 
 
 Canada and Australasia may follow the example of the United 
 States, and separate politically from the parent stock. BUT THE 
 RACE ITSELF IS SECURE. It is impossible, within the bounds 
 of probability, to imagine a conjunction of circumstances capable 
 of uprooting it from its new habitations. The sword and disease 
 are the only agents of racial elimination known to us, and now the 
 latter, like the former, is losing its power. 
 
 Dean Inge, who is one of the two or three best thinkers 
 in the Established Church, has visioned the same future, 
 417 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 and he sees the possibility of a white race of 200,000,000 
 in the British Commonwealth. 
 
 WHAT TO READ 
 
 A bibliography of the present reconstruction in Great 
 Britain would number thousands of books and pamphlets. 
 I wish to suggest a few of the more important of these 
 for my reader who cares to make a study. 
 
 Graham Wallas's "Human Nature in Politics" and "The 
 Great Society" are the products of a lifetime of construct- 
 ive thinking by one of the fertile intellects of the modern 
 world. No one who wishes to understand the deeper 
 psychological elements in the problems of modern England 
 can do without the help of Wallas. He is one of the few 
 writers on human nature in national and international poli- 
 tics and industrial organization whose conclusions have been 
 left unassailed by the war. 
 
 Bertrand Russell's "Principles of Social Reconstruc- 
 tion" (published in America as "Why Men Fight") is a 
 stimulating instance of the new psychology applied to so- 
 ciety. It contains passages of great beauty. Mr. Russell 
 is not a fundamental thinker in social matters in the sense 
 that Graham Wallas is. His book is a poem. 
 
 A. E. Zimmern's essays in the "Round Table" and in the 
 volume "Progress and History" are a careful study of the 
 industrial situation by a man who understands the present 
 tendency toward workers' control. 
 
 "The Reorganization of Industry," a pamphlet issued by 
 Ruskin College, contains a skilful analysis of what the post- 
 office would be under democratic control. 
 
 W. Mellor, the secretary of the National Guilds League, 
 has kindly drawn up for me a list of references on work- 
 ers* control. The list includes "Labor in War Time" by 
 
 418 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 G. D. H. Cole; the publications of the National Guilds 
 League on "National Guilds/' "The Guild Idea/' "Towards 
 a Miners' Guild"; "National Guilds/' edited by A. R. 
 Orage; "The World of Labor" by Cole; "The Coal Trade" 
 by H. S. Jevons; "Experiments in Industrial Organization" 
 by Cadbury; "Trade as a Science" by McBean; "Coopera- 
 tive Production and Profit Sharing/' an investigation by 
 the committee of the Fabian Research Department. 
 
 The investigation by the section of economic science and 
 statistics of the British Association for the Advancement of 
 Science has been published under the title of "Labor, 
 Finance and the War." 
 
 The pamphlet "Great Britain After the War" by Sidney 
 Webb and Arnold Freeman is a short and valuable sum- 
 mary. 
 
 The Garton Foundation has issued a book on the "In- 
 dustrial Situation after the War" which analyzes the revo- 
 lutionary unrest and suggests remedies. Mr. Balfour is 
 one of the trustees of this foundation. 
 
 The investigations of Seebohm Rowntree are already 
 classics for social workers. His studies of York, of agri- 
 cultural labor, of land, of Belgium, are wadely known. It 
 will be found that his recommendations will be influential 
 in the reconstruction. 
 
 "The Times" has had four series of articles of high im- 
 portance. One series has been republished in a pamphlet 
 called "The Elements of Reconstruction," with an intro- 
 duction by Viscount Milner. A second series was on the 
 resources of the empire, written by Wilson Fox, and led to 
 the formation of the Empire Resources Development Com- 
 mittee. A third was on the South Wales miners, and was 
 instrumental in leading the Government to take over the 
 mines. A fourth was on the industrial situation after the 
 
 419 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 war, and is a powerful statement for workers' control. It 
 is written by Sidney Webb, and is now republished in 
 pamphlet form. 
 
 Miss Proud's book on "Women and Welfare Work," with 
 an introduction by Lloyd-George, is a careful compilation 
 of the improvements in the status of the British worker 
 instituted by employers, the trade-unions, and the state. 
 There is little interpretation in the book, but a valuable 
 mass of facts. 
 
 There is unfortunately nothing comprehensive on the 
 woman's movement in its present development. The re- 
 ports of Miss Anderson to the home office and Mrs. Bernard 
 Drake's "Women in Engineering" are valuable for the 
 area they cover. Files of the "Woman Worker," the organ 
 of the Women's Trade Union Movement, cover many spe- 
 cific instances. But the book of the movement remains to 
 be written. What is needed in England to give coherence 
 and self-consciousness to the woman's movement is as good 
 a book as Katharine Anthony's "Feminism in Germany 
 and Scandinavia." 
 
 An excellent English statement of the Irish situation is 
 given in the "Round Table" for September, 1916. George 
 Russell ("A. E.") handles economics with his own admir- 
 able rhythm in his volume, "The National Being: Some 
 Thoughts on an Irish Polity." He is one of the three lead- 
 ers in the Irish Cooperative Movement. No book exists to 
 give us the full history of the cooperative movement in 
 Ireland. It should be written. 
 
 For an understanding of the young men of Ireland to- 
 day the files for recent months of such weeklies as the "New 
 Ireland" and "Irish Opinion" are necessary. Nowhere else 
 is there so bold and clear an expression of the idealism 
 which is penetrating the younger elements of the nation. 
 420 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Such, then, are a few of the publications of comment 
 on the vast changes now under way in the British nation. 
 The opportunity is ripe for a book on the British common- 
 wealth corresponding to Bryce's "American Common- 
 wealth," 
 
 421 
 
INDEX 
 
 A. E.: 180; solution of Anglo- 
 Irish problem by, 198-205; 
 quoted on tenant farmers in 
 Ireland, 313, 214, 264.. See 
 George Russell. 
 
 "A Nation Once Again": pa- 
 triotic Irish song, quoted, 
 19.2. 
 
 "A Study of Working Class 
 Households in Northampton, 
 Stanley and Reading" : 
 quoted on housing of work- 
 ingmen, 384, 385. 
 
 Actresses' Franchise League, 
 103. 
 
 Adams, Mrs. Bridges, 355, 356. 
 
 AflForestation, 23. 
 
 Agricultural communities: past 
 success of, 60 et seq. 
 
 Allen, Miss, 159. 
 
 "Amalgamated Society of Engi- 
 neers Journal," 285, 286. 
 
 America: English emigration 
 to, 31 ; wages of women in, 
 96 ; birth-control movement 
 in, 116; attitude of, toward 
 birth restriction, 124 et seq.: 
 national thought in, 317-326. 
 See United States. 
 
 Anglo-Indian: type of, 329, 330. 
 
 Anitchkin, Dimitri, 285. 
 
 Antin, Mary, 325. 
 
 Aristophanes: quoted on eman- 
 cipation of woman, 393. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 211. 
 
 Art: attitude of modern democ- 
 racy toward, 61 et seq. 
 
 Artists' League, 103. 
 Asquith, Mr., 36. 
 "Atheneum," 266, 
 Atkinson, Miss, 101, 
 Australia, 4, 9. 
 
 Bairnsfather, Captain Bruce: on 
 the "Tommy" attitude toward 
 trench fighting, 280, 281. 
 
 Bakunin, 283. 
 
 Balfour, Mr.: type of mind of, 
 8; quoted on democracy, 367, 
 381. 
 
 Beatty, 3. 
 
 Belgium: in relation to social 
 problems, 69 et seq.; relief 
 work for, 237, 238, 341. 
 
 Bell, Sir Hugh: analysis by, of 
 wage problem, quotation, 48, 
 49, foot-note; on cost of pro- 
 duction of steel, 382. 
 
 Belloc, Hilaire, 273. 
 
 Bibliography of reconstruction 
 movement in Great Britain, 
 41S-416. 
 
 Bigland, Alfred: quoted on em- 
 pire resources, 363, 364. 
 
 Birth-control: problem of, 113 
 et seq.; movement in Amer- 
 ica, 116; English opinion on, 
 390-393. 
 
 Bishops: attitude of, toward 
 workers, 30. 
 
 Black, Clementine, 101. 
 
 Blatchford, Robert, 248. 
 
 Bloomfield, 92. 
 
 423 
 
INDEX 
 
 Bonar Law: "Tory" type of 
 
 mind of, 8. 
 Bosanquet, Mrs., 101. 
 Bottomley, Horatio, editor 
 
 "John Bull": 348, 267-^69, 
 
 295; quoted on education, 410; 
 
 attitude toward death, 410. 
 Bridges, Robert, 273. 
 Brisbane, Arthur, 268. 
 British Association: report of, 
 
 cited on modern automatic 
 
 machinery, 22, 59. 
 British Commonwealth: plan 
 
 and purpose of new, 4 et seq.; 
 
 influence of war on, 6 et seq., 
 
 96, 252, 253; relation of south 
 
 of England to, 292, 293; Lord 
 
 Milner quoted on, 353; Arch- 
 
 dall Reid on, 412, 413. See 
 
 England, Ireland. 
 British Empire: unification of 
 
 into one state, 7 et seq. 
 "British Weekly," 272. 
 Bryce, Viscount: quoted on 
 
 English war spirit, 229. 
 Burns, Robert, 93. 
 Butler, Geoffrey: quoted on 
 
 class system, 27, 350. 
 Button, 62. 
 
 Cabinet: cause of changes in 
 
 British, 7 et seq.; predictions 
 
 as to shifts in, 9. 
 Cambridge: influence of, on 
 
 class system, 28. 
 "Cambridge Magazine," 24S. 
 Canada, 4. 
 Canning, 321. 
 Carels Freres, 380. 
 Carpenter, Edward, 63; quoted 
 
 on English people, 183, 184, 
 
 314. 
 Carson, Sir Edward: 8; quoted 
 
 on Ulster's attitude, 202, 
 
 Cathery, E.: quoted on right of 
 asylum, 285. 
 
 Catholic Women's League, 103. 
 
 "Chamber's," 274. 
 
 Chamberlain, Joseph, 378. 
 
 Chesterton, Cecil, 260, 261. 
 
 Chesterton, Gilbert K.: remark 
 of, on writing books, 63; 
 quoted on the democratic 
 movement, 229, 258; effect of, 
 on public opinion, 260-262 ; on 
 the "Tommy" attitude toward 
 war, 280. 
 
 Child labor, 144, 166 et seq. 
 
 Child welfare: Sir George New- 
 man quoted on, 407. 
 
 Childers, Erskine: cited on the 
 new social order in Ireland, 
 177. 
 
 Children: withdrawal of, from 
 industry, 144. 
 
 "Christian Commonwealth," 
 
 British periodical, 272. 
 
 Church: "brotherhood of trench- 
 es" tried in, 366, 367. 
 
 Class system, 26 et seq. 
 
 Clergy: influence of Church of 
 England on socialism, 29 et 
 seq. 
 
 Clifford, Dr., 344, 
 
 Clothes: women's increased ex- 
 penditure on, since entering 
 industrial field, 393-395. 
 
 Cohan, George, 267. 
 
 Collet, Clara, 101. 
 
 Colonies: attitude of, toward 
 present status, 4. 
 
 Combines. See Trusts. 
 
 Common people: awakening of, 
 13. See also Workmen. 
 
 "Common Sense," 274. 
 
 Commonwealth: genesis of the 
 British, 4 et seq.; effect of 
 war on, 6 et seq. See British 
 Commonwealth. 
 
 424 
 
 i 
 
INDEX 
 
 Companion help: wage and 
 work-schedule of, in boarding 
 house, 146. 
 
 Connolly, 188. 
 
 Constitutional reconstruction : 
 effect of war on, 6 et seq. 
 
 "Contemporary Review," 273. 
 
 Cooperation: study of, in Eng- 
 land, 368-380. 
 
 Cooperative communities: influ- 
 ence of, 82 et seq. 
 
 Cooperative socialism: tendency 
 of England toward, 15 et seq. 
 
 Cooperative Society, 379. 
 
 Cooperative societies: in Ire- 
 land, 213 et seq. 
 
 "Comhill Magazine," 274. 
 
 "Cotton Factory Times," 285. 
 
 Croatia, 96. 
 
 Cromer, Lord: 253, 329; quoted 
 on moral advancement of 
 Egypt under British rule, 
 408, 409. 
 
 Croom, Sir John Halliday: 
 quoted on birth-control, 391, 
 392. 
 
 Cuba, 322. 
 
 Curtis, Lionel, 253, 269, 273. 
 
 Curzon, Lord: type of political 
 mind of, 8, 14, 262, 329. 
 
 "Daily Mail" (London): 270, 
 295, 311; quoted on labor, 411. 
 
 "Daily News" (London): 271; 
 census by, of church attend- 
 ance, 388. 
 
 "Dallas News," 271. 
 
 Devenport, Lord, 311. 
 
 Davles, Mr., war secretary, 339. 
 
 Davis, Thomas: author of song 
 "A Nation Once Again," 
 quoted, 192 
 
 Davray, Monsieur, 412. 
 
 Dawson, Miss Darner: 159; quo- 
 
 tation from speech by, on po- 
 licewomen, 161-163. 
 
 Debt: post-bellum problem of 
 national, 248, 249. 
 
 Democracy: England's influence 
 on, 3 et seq.; effect of, on la- 
 bor, 5; influence of present 
 war on, 6; meaning of, 9; as 
 a producer of leaders, 10 et 
 seq.; purposes of, 12; growth 
 of industrial, 58 et seq.; Eng- 
 lish workman mainspring of, 
 75, 76; three great sons of, 
 80; demands of England on 
 new, 82 et seq.; war run by, 
 238, 239, 2^2:, attitude of, to- 
 ward leaders, 254 et seq.; 
 compulsory, 367, 368. 
 
 Democratic control : explana- 
 tion of, 53 et seq.; Dr. 
 Graham Wallas quoted on, 
 56. 
 
 Denmark: relation of, to social 
 problems, 69 et seq. 
 
 Desborough, Selborne, 363. 
 
 Despard, Mrs., 101. 
 
 Detroit: a model industrial city, 
 75. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 261. 
 
 Dickinson, Lowes, 277, 314. 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin: quoted on 
 tariff, 249, 250, 329. 
 
 Dixmude, 70. 
 
 Domestic policy: attitude of 
 colonies toward England's, 4. 
 
 Domestic service: war's effect 
 on, 137. 
 
 Donnington Hall, 278. 
 
 Dostoyevsky: quoted on free- 
 dom, 78. 
 
 Dreyfus trial, 176. 
 
 Drummond, Mrs. (The Gen- 
 eral): Lloyd-George and, 20, 
 158; comparison of, with 
 Chesterton, 258, 259. 
 
 4^5 
 
INDEX 
 
 Dublin: congested population 
 
 of, 207. 
 Du Cros: women in the, factory, 
 
 105. 
 Dunraven, Lord, 363. 
 Dunsany, 180. 
 
 "Edinburgh Review," 274. 
 
 Education: systems of, in Eng- 
 land, 305 et seq. 
 
 "Elements of Reconstruction," 
 pamphlet: quoted, 407. 
 
 Ellis, Havelock: quotation from 
 "Essays in War Time," by, 
 116, 119, 124, 314; quoted on 
 English arrogance, 349. 
 
 Empire resources, 231, 232. 
 
 England: influence of, on de- 
 mocracy, 3 et seq.; extension 
 of power of, 4 et seq.; tend- 
 ency of, toward cooperative 
 socialism, 15 ; solution of labor 
 problem in, 18 et seq.; privi- 
 leged classes in, 26 et seq.; 
 penalty to, if industrial de- 
 mocracy fail, 35 et seq., 58, 
 59; influence of, upon Russia, 
 64; eflfect upon, of cheap 
 transportation for workmen, 
 70, 71 ; the supreme need of 
 England, 71-73; demands of 
 new democracy on England, 
 82 ; Zimmern's views on indus- 
 trial Germanization of, 89- 
 94; champion of freedom and 
 justice, 183; spirit of, at war, 
 228 et seq.; why, will win 
 present war, 231 et seq.; tem- 
 perament of people of, 231, 
 232; attitude of, toward tariflf 
 on McKinley basis, 949; heart 
 of social problem of, 250; de- 
 mand of, for representation, 
 254 et seq.; emotional change 
 in, 257 et seq.; question of lib- 
 
 erty in, 274 et seq.; attitude 
 of, toward free speech, 274- 
 281 ; "right of asylum" grant- 
 ed by, 281-291; patriarchal, 
 compared with modern, 292, 
 293; passing of Little, 293- 
 296; public opinion in, on 
 peace, 299-301; systems of 
 education in, 305 et seq.; co- 
 existent civilizations in, 309- 
 312; study of cooperation in, 
 368-380. 
 
 English: "a sentimental nation," 
 240. 
 
 English Cooperative Wholesale 
 Society, 372. 
 
 "English Prose Rhymes," an- 
 thology, by Professor George 
 Saintsbury, 314. 
 
 Englishmen : individuality of, 
 16: faults of, 40, 41: national- 
 ity of, 329-336. 
 
 Esher, Viscount, 381. 
 
 "Essays in War Time": quota- 
 tion from, by Havelock Ellis, 
 116, 119, 124, 314. 
 
 "Eugenics Review," 412. 
 
 Euripides: quoted on woman's 
 emancipation, 393. 
 
 Europe: impossibility of united 
 commonwealths of, 6; demo- 
 cratic forces in, 80; effect on, 
 woman's fight for political 
 recognition, 95 et seq. 
 
 "Evening Gazette," Cedar Rap- 
 ids, Iowa: opinion of, of Cap- 
 tain Hans Rose, 317. 
 
 "Everyman," 272. 
 
 Exports : Irish, to Great Britain 
 in 1916, 217. 
 
 Fabian Research Committee, 
 
 373. 
 Fabian Society, 313. 
 
 426 
 
INDEX 
 
 Factories: joint boards in, 30; 
 effect of war on, 24:3-245. 
 
 Fall River, 250. 
 
 Fawcett, Mrs., 101, 390. 
 
 "Fecundity versus Civilization," 
 by Adelyne More: quotations 
 from, 390-393. 
 
 Female. See Woman. 
 
 Feminists of the War Office and 
 Admiralty, 118 et seq. 
 
 Fisher, H. A. L., minister of 
 education, 303, 304. 
 
 Fitz-Gibbon, Philip John: let- 
 ter from, 411. 
 
 Ford, Henry, 207, 337. 
 
 Foreign policy: attitude of col- 
 onies toward England's, i et 
 seq. 
 
 "Fortnightly Review," 273. 
 
 "Forward," 274. 
 
 France: the privileged classes 
 in, 26, 27, 96, 176; nationality 
 in, 326. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 323. 
 
 Free Speech: attitude of Eng- 
 land toward, 274^-281. 
 
 Free trade: Disraeli quoted on, 
 249, 250. 
 
 "Freeman's Journal": quotation 
 from, on agriculture, 400. 
 
 French communards, 283. 
 
 French railway strike, 41. 
 
 French reactionaries, 15. 
 
 French Revolution, 41, 96. 
 
 Fumes, 70. 
 
 Gaelic: effect of study of, 182. 
 Galsworthy, 272. 
 Gardiner, A. G., 271. 
 Garton, Sir Richard, 381. 
 Garton Foundation: result of 
 investigation of, quoted, 381. 
 Garvin, J. L., 272. 
 "General, The" (Mrs. Drum- 
 
 m 
 
 mond): 158; comparison with 
 Chesterton, 258, 259. 
 
 Germany: attitude of, toward 
 woman, 100, 243; ignorance 
 of, as to England's resources, 
 278, 279. 
 
 Ghent, 70, 86. 
 
 Gillingham: domestics' war-sav- 
 ings association of, 237. 
 
 Gilmour, Lennox: campaign 
 story told by, 234-236. 
 
 Giovanitti, 189. 
 
 Girl: letter of, revealing true 
 war spirit of England, 230, 
 231. 
 
 Gould, Baring, 311. 
 
 Great Britain: changes in gov- 
 ernment leadership of, 3 et 
 seq.; effect of war on rela- 
 tions between, and colonies, 7 
 et seq., 100, 252; northern and 
 western, in fight for democ- 
 racy, 291 et seq.; public opin- 
 ion in, 291-302; study of co- 
 operation in, 363-380; tariff 
 reform in, 407. See also Eng- 
 land. 
 
 "Great Society, The," by Gra- 
 ham Wallas : passage from, on 
 rights of small nations, 211. 
 
 "Greek Commonwealth, The" : 
 quoted on professional 
 women, 292, 293. 
 
 Gregory, Lady, 180. 
 
 Grey, Viscount, 270, 363. 
 
 Grimsby: relation of, to war- 
 savings, 237. 
 
 Gwynne, 14, 248. 
 
 Gymnastic Teachers' Suffrage 
 Society, 103. 
 
 Hague Conference: stimulus of, 
 to British commonwealth, 
 253. 
 
 Haig, Sir Douglas, 3. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Harcourt, Lewis: quoted on 
 public ownership, 377. 
 
 'Harrison, Austin, 248. 
 
 Hay, John, 323. 
 
 Henderson, Arthur, 311. 
 
 Henry, O., 279. 
 
 Henson, Dean, 367. 
 
 "Herald" (London), 272. 
 
 "Hibbert Journal," 274. 
 
 Hodge, Mr., Minister of Labor; 
 quoted on war's effect on new 
 plants, 242 ; on free trade, 230. 
 
 Holy Alliance, 321. 
 
 Home Office, 62. 
 
 Home Rule: new Irish attitude 
 toward, 181, 182, 193-227, fas- 
 sim. 
 
 Hornsey, 160. 
 
 Hours: influence of long, on so- 
 cial movement, 25. 
 
 Housing, 23, 69, 70, 384-386. 
 
 "How the Laborer Lives": quo- 
 tation from, on rural condi- 
 tions, 385, 386. 
 
 Howells, William Dean, 272. 
 
 Hughes, Mr., premier of Aus- 
 tralia, 254. 
 
 Huguenots, 283. 
 
 Hysteria: growth of, among 
 English middle class, 258 et 
 seq. 
 
 Independent Labor party, 90. 
 
 India, 4, 5. 
 
 Industrialism, 67 et seq. See 
 also Workmen. 
 
 Inge, Dean: quoted on "indus- 
 trial celibacy," 392 ; on future 
 of British Commonwealth, 
 413. 
 
 International relations: prob- 
 lem of, 11. 
 
 Ireland: pioneer work of, in 
 peasant proprietorship, 22 ; 
 nationalism in, 173 et seq.; 
 
 force of tradition in, 175, 176; 
 industrial activities of, 179; 
 attitude of the man in the 
 street toward, 189, 190; total 
 cultivated area and propor- 
 tionate productiveness of, 
 219, 220; micultivated land in, 
 219-225; how, must be ruled, 
 219, 220; financial gain of, 
 since the 50's, 222 et seq., 252. 
 
 Irish agriculture, 400-403. 
 
 Irish Agricultural Organization 
 Society, 179. 
 
 Irish- Americans, 208. 
 
 Irish newspapers: independence 
 of, 263, 264. 
 
 Irish people: changed attitude 
 of, toward Redmond, 255, 
 
 Irish players, 180. 
 
 Irish question: 173 et seq.; real, 
 poverty, 206; a stumbling- 
 block to England's conduct of 
 present war, 209 et seq.; Eng- 
 lish public opinion on, 297- 
 299. 
 
 Irish railways: 397-400; British 
 government control of, 399. 
 
 Irish rebellion, 173-227, passim. 
 
 James, Senator OUie: quoted on 
 
 America's attitude toward 
 
 present war, 317. 
 James, Professor William, 340. 
 Jameson, Sir Starr, 363. 
 "John Bull": 267, 295; extracts 
 
 from, 410. 
 Joint committees: settlement 
 
 by, of trade disputes, 49 e* 
 
 seq. 
 Journalism: studies in British, 
 
 260-274 ; effect of war on, 263- 
 
 267. 
 
 Kl : 334. 
 K2: 334. 
 K3: 334. 
 
 428 
 
INDEX 
 
 K4: 335. 
 
 K5: 335. 
 
 "Kansas City Star," 271. 
 
 Keithley: war savings of, 237. 
 
 Kenney, Miss, 259. 
 
 Kerr, P. H,, 253. 
 
 Key, Ellen, 118. 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 248, 273, 279, 
 
 363. 
 Kitchener, Lord, 384.. 
 Kropotkin, 283. 
 
 La Panne, 70. 
 
 Labor: effect of democracy on, 
 problem, 5; effect of war on, 
 14 et seq.; shell-making as 
 light on problem of, 18; ef- 
 fect of peace on, quotation, 
 42, 43; future of, 73 et seq. 
 
 Labor College, 353-362. 
 
 "Labor Leader," 274. 
 
 Lady help : salary and duties of, 
 147, 148, 150; at ladies' hostel 
 for war workers, 151 ; at army 
 pay officers' mess, 152; at 
 lodging-house, 153. 
 
 Lancaster, Ray, 253. 
 
 "Land and Labor — Lessons 
 from Belgium," by Seebohm 
 Rowntree : quotation from, 
 387. 
 
 Land Courts : advocacy of, 360. 
 
 Land Inquiry Committee, 357- 
 360. 
 
 Landlordism, 212 et seq. 
 
 Lansbury, George, 272. 
 
 Lasker, Bruno, 313. 
 
 Law, Sidney: quoted on decay 
 of Parliament, 404. 
 
 Leaders: cause of change in, of 
 government, 5; requirements 
 of, in a democracy, 9 et seq.; 
 England's need of wise, 71 et 
 seq.; of the woman move- 
 
 ment, 101 et seq.; demand for 
 representative, 254 et seq. 
 
 League of the Society of 
 Friends, 103. 
 
 Lee, Robert E., 190, 
 
 Leisure: the problem of, 61 et 
 seq., 68. 
 
 Lever, Sir William, 364. 
 
 Life: rules for "playing the 
 game" of, 86 et seq. 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham: product of 
 democracy, 80, 323. 
 
 Literature: effect of social 
 movement on, 314 et seq. 
 
 Lloyd-George: 3; attitude to- 
 ward drink, 18; and suffra- 
 gettes, 20, 25, 62, 100, 185; 
 opinion of, on spirit of Eng- 
 land, 229, 230; Bottomley on, 
 268, 293; study of, 337-345; 
 quoted on editors, 340. 
 
 London Graduates' Union for 
 Women's Suffrage, 103. 
 
 Lusitania, 322, 324. 
 
 Lyburn, E. St. John: quoted on 
 coal fields of Ireland, 399. 
 
 MacArthur, Mary, 101. 
 MacDonakl, Ramsay, 62, 277. 
 MacNeill, Professor: quoted on 
 
 partition question, 194-196. 
 Machinery: modern automatic, 
 
 Q'i, 59; problem of new, 243- 
 
 245. 
 Mafeking Night, 257. 
 Maine, 322. 
 Mallon, J. J.: 62; quoted on 
 
 trade-unions, 397. 
 "Manchester Guardian," 271, 
 
 293. 
 Man-supported family: passing 
 
 of the, 105. 
 Marine engines, 17. 
 Mame, 176. 
 
 429 
 
INDEX 
 
 Marx, Karl: influence of, on 
 
 EngUsh labor, 90, 283. 
 Massachusetts: minimum wage 
 
 of women in, 98. 
 Massingham, H. W., 311. 
 Mauretania: 65. 
 Maxse, Leo: 248; quoted on 
 
 United States, 298. 
 Mazzini, genius of democracy, 
 
 80, 283. 
 Meath, Earl of: on uncultivated 
 
 land in Ireland, 220, 221. 
 MeUe, 70. 
 Milner: type of political mind 
 
 of, 8, 253, 262, 266, 329; 
 
 quoted on trusts, 403. 
 Ministry: meaning of changes in 
 
 British, 7 et seq. 
 Money, Sir Leo Chiozza: quoted 
 
 on effect of war on work, 365, 
 
 366. 
 Monroe, James, 323. 
 Monroe Doctrine, 321 et seq. 
 Montreal, 293. 
 Moore, George, 180. 
 More, Adelyne: on birth-con- 
 trol, 390, 391. 
 "Morning Post" (London), 366, 
 
 293, 298. 
 Morris, William, 63, 67, 68, 90. 
 Mounteagle, 188. 
 Muir, Professor Ramsay: 
 
 quoted on Irish tradition, 175, 
 
 176. 
 Munition factories: future uses 
 
 of, 244, 245. 
 Munitions: relation of, to labor 
 
 problem, 18: women and, 20 
 
 et seq. 
 
 sional Women's Suffrage So- 
 ciety, 103. 
 
 National Mission of Repentance 
 and Hope, 30. 
 
 "National Review," 298. 
 
 National Sailors' and Firemen's 
 Union, 285. 
 
 Nationality, 326-336. 
 
 Nelson, Horatio, 3, 
 
 "New Age," 274. 
 
 New Constitutional Society, 
 103. 
 
 "New Ireland": editors of, 264, 
 
 "New Republic": 264. 
 
 "New Statesman," 274. 
 
 New Union, 103. 
 
 "New Witness," 260-263. 
 
 New Zealand, 4. 
 
 Newborough, Lieutenant Lord: 
 extract from will of, 412. 
 
 Newman, Sir George: quoted on 
 child welfare, 407. 
 
 Nicoll, Robertson, 272. 
 
 Nieuport, 70. 
 
 North Nibley: war fund raised 
 in, 336. 
 
 Northampton: war subscription 
 of, 237. 
 
 Northcliffe, Lord: quoted on 
 British army, 228, 248; per- 
 sonality of, 269; influence of, 
 on English ideas, 270, 271, 295, 
 311, 410, 411. 
 
 Norwich: war-savings of, 237. 
 
 Noyes, Alfred, 279. 
 
 "Observer," 272, 411. 
 Ostend, 70. 
 
 Oxford: influence of, on class 
 system, 28. 
 
 1 
 
 Naquet, Alfred: quoted on Pankhurst, Mrs.: 20, 159; ef- 
 
 birth-control, 391. feet of war on militancy of, 
 
 "Nation," 264-266. 254 et seq.; personality of. 
 
 National Industrial and Profes- 258. 
 
 430 
 
INDEX 
 
 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 101, 277. 
 Parliament: effect of war on 
 control of, over industrial leg- 
 islation, 246 et seq.; decay of, 
 404r-407. 
 "Partition" : a farce comedy, de- 
 scribed, 193, 194. 
 Patriotism: local, of English- 
 men, 412. 
 Pauperism in Ireland, 206-227. 
 
 Peace: program for dealing 
 with unemployed on dawn of, 
 21 et seq. 
 
 Peasantry: effect of class sys- 
 tem on, 28. 
 
 People's Suffrage Federation, 
 103. 
 
 Personal-morality campaign, 18. 
 
 Picardy, 96, 278. 
 
 Pitt, William, 3. 
 
 Platform of new social move- 
 ment, 18 et seq. 
 
 Plunkett, Horace, 179, 188, 363. 
 
 Plunkett House, 218. 
 
 Poland, 96, 176. 
 
 Police Commissioner of Scot- 
 land Yard: quoted on war 
 spirit of English, 229. 
 
 Policewomen in England, 154 et 
 seq. 
 
 Ponsonbyj 277. 
 
 "Popular Magazine," 310. 
 
 Preston: war-savings of, 238. 
 
 Prince, Morton, 323. 
 
 Protective agencies: establish- 
 ment of, in mimitions plants, 
 25. 
 
 Prothero, 269. 
 
 Proud, Miss: quoted on women 
 in industry, 389. 
 
 "Prussianism" : fight against, 42. 
 
 Public houses, 30. 
 
 "Punch," 268. 
 
 'Quarterly Review," 274. 
 
 Raemaekers, 270. 
 Railroads: inadequacy of, in 
 Ireland, 216; Belgium's pro- 
 portion of light, compared 
 with Great Britain's, 386, 387; 
 Irish, 397-400. 
 "Railway Review," 285, 286. 
 Rathbone, Eleanor: 101; cited 
 on military and naval fem- 
 inists, 119-121. 
 Reconstruction : demand for 
 state and industrial, 10 et 
 seq. 
 Recruits: local patriotism of 
 
 English, 332 et seq. 
 Redmond, John: leader of Irish 
 
 Nationalists, 254, 255, 256. 
 Reeves, Mrs. Pember, 101. 
 Reid, Archdall: on British Com- 
 monwealth, 412, 413. 
 Rhondda, Lord: dictator of 
 
 Welsh press, 246, 311, 379. 
 Roads: plan for improved, 23. 
 RockefeUer, John D., 404. 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 340. 
 "Round Table, The": 59, 187, 
 253, 273, 313; quoted on Sir 
 Hugh Bell's analysis of his 
 expenses, 382. 
 Roumania: labor societies in, 
 
 226. 
 Rowntree, Seebohm: 25, 62; 
 quoted on modern machinery, 
 65; welfare work of, 229, 269, 
 313, 339, 350. 
 Royden, Maude, 101. 
 Runciman, Mr.: quoted on Irish 
 agricultural conditions due to 
 war, 401. 
 Ruskin, John, 67, 90. 
 Russell, Bertrand A. W., 14. 
 Russell, Bertrand: quoted on 
 race decline, 122, 123; author 
 of "Why Men Fight," 265, 
 275, 314. 
 
 431 
 
INDEX 
 
 Russell, Earl: on right of asy- 
 lum, 288. 
 
 Russell, George, 188, 198 et seq., 
 264. See A. E. 
 
 Russell, T. W.: statement of, on 
 transportation, 398; cited on 
 Irish acreage, 400, 
 
 Russia: need of leaders to deal 
 with, 9; influence of England's 
 progress upon, 64. 
 
 Russian peasantry versus Eng- 
 lish masses, 31, 32. 
 
 Russian Political Prisoners' and 
 Exiles' Relief committee, 286. 
 
 Russian refugees in England, 
 283^291. 
 
 Russian Seamen's Union, 284. 
 
 Rutgers, Dr.: quoted by Frau 
 Stritt, 390. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve: Lloyd-George 
 compared with, 340, 341. 
 
 Saintsbury, George, 314. 
 
 Salvation Army, 257. 
 
 Samuel, Herbert: quoted on 
 Russian refugees, 287, 288. 
 
 Sanger, Mrs., 116. 
 
 Sarno, Charles, 287. 
 
 "Saturday Review," 36, 966. 
 
 Schoolboys: war-savings of, 
 238. 
 
 Scott: Antarctic explorer, 330. 
 
 Shaw, Bernard, 180, 273, 313. 
 
 Sheffield, Lord: on right of asy- 
 lum, 288, 290. 
 
 Shop girl: advantages of being 
 a, 108. 
 
 Siamese Twin, The (Ulster), 
 192-206. 
 
 Sigerson, Dora, 180. 
 
 Sinn Fein: principle of, 218. 
 
 Slater, Dr. Gilbert: quoted on 
 tenant farmers, 361, 362. 
 
 Snowden, Philip, 63, 277. 
 
 Snowden, Mrs. Philip, 101. 
 Social revolution in England, 14 
 
 et seq. 
 Social studies, 228-336. 
 Social workers: part played in 
 
 government administration 
 
 by, 246, et seq. 
 Socialism: in Germany: 15 et 
 
 seq., 55, 368-380, passim. 
 Society of Women Graduates, 
 
 103. 
 Soldiers, post-bellum problem 
 
 of, 250, 251. 
 South Africa, 4. 
 South Wales, 9. 
 Spalding, H. N., 304, 339, 350. 
 Spanish- American War, 322. 
 Speaker's Franchise Conference, 
 
 395. 
 "Spectator": quoted on molding 
 
 public opinion, 248. 
 "Springfield Republican," 271. 
 Standardization: effect of, of 
 
 tools, 243 et seq. 
 Status of colonies: change of, 4; 
 
 effect of war on, 6 et seq. 
 Stephens, James: 180: quoted on 
 
 Irish freedom, 197; opinion of, 
 
 on George Russell, 198, 264. 
 Strachey, St. Loe, 248. 
 Stritt, Frau: president Woman 
 
 Suffrage Union, quoted on 
 
 birth-control, 390. 
 Suffrage: societies, 103; 395- 
 
 397. See Woman, also Wom- 
 an question. 
 Suffrage Atelier, 103. 
 Sutherland, Duke of: quoted on 
 
 landed property, 356, 357. 
 Sweden: in relation to social 
 
 problems, 69 et seq. 
 Sydney, 293. 
 Syndicalism, 55, 363-380, pas- 
 
 432 
 
INDEX 
 
 Tables of wages and duties of 
 
 lady help, 146-153. 
 Tagore; quoted on nationalism, 
 
 327. 
 Tammany HaU, 102. 
 Tariff: attitude of England 
 toward, 249, 250; reform in 
 Great Britain, 363-380, 407. 
 Taxation: pressure of, 25: so- 
 lution of problem of, 248, 
 249. 
 Taylor, Frederick: quoted on 
 
 social reform, 78. 
 Tenant farmers: in Ireland, 
 
 212 et seq., 357 et seq. 
 Tennant, Mr.: organization of 
 
 labor forces by, 49. 
 Thorndike, 92. 
 
 "Times" (London) 36; cited on 
 new machinery and build- 
 ings, 242 et seq.; quoted on 
 educational status of miners, 
 354, 355, 367. 
 Tolstoy: advice of, on social re- 
 form, 78. 
 "Top Notch," 310. 
 Tory: specific meaning of, 8. 
 "Tory Tradition, The": 26; 
 quoted on national prosper- 
 ity, 249. 
 Town-planning: reform move- 
 ment in, for workmen, 69, 70. 
 Trade Unions: new concessions 
 
 of, to woman, 144, 395-397. 
 Transportation: cheap, for 
 
 workmen, 70. 
 Trevelyan, 277, 300, 301. 
 Trinity College (Dublin), 178, 
 
 179. 
 Trusts: effect of mechanical 
 standardization on, 245 ; 
 Lord Rhondda in relation to, 
 246, 403, 404. 
 "Truth," 274. 
 
 Turks: relative passive resist- 
 ance of Englishmen and, 89. 
 Tynan, Katharine, 180, 264. 
 
 U-53, 317, 324. 
 
 Ulster (The Siamese Twin), 
 
 192-206. 
 United States: in relation to 
 
 enduring literature, 93, 243. 
 
 See America. 
 
 Verdun: 176, 278; Lloyd- 
 George at, 341. 
 
 Wages: influence of, on social 
 movement, 25'. key to prob- 
 lem of, 49; effect of higher, 
 on workmen, 68; relative, of 
 women in England and Amer- 
 ica, 98 et seq.; post-bellum 
 problem of, 249 et seq.; la- 
 bor's demand for higher, 383, 
 384. 
 
 Wallas, Professor Graham: 
 opinion of, on democratic 
 control, 56; quotation from 
 "The Great Society," by, on 
 the rights of little nations, 
 211; quoted on Walter Lipp- 
 man, -im, 289, 314. 
 
 War: influence of, on plan of 
 British Commonwealth, 6; 
 tendency of, to fertilize radi- 
 cal ideas, 14; effect of, on 
 trade unions, 17; effect of, 
 on England's middle class, 
 33; social problem created 
 by, 228-352. 
 
 War conference: influence of, on 
 imperial constitution, 4 et seq. 
 
 War Council, 405. 
 
 War savings, 232 et seq. 
 
 War work: women and, 106. 
 
 Waterways: plan for, 23, 
 
 Watson, William, 272. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Watterson, Colonel, 271. 
 
 Webb, Sidney: 13, 261; quoted 
 on birth-control, 392. 
 
 Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 101. 
 
 Welfare: work, 25 et seq.; ef- 
 fect of, department of gov- 
 ernment on relation between 
 employer and employed, 68. 
 
 "Welfare Work," by Miss 
 Proud: quoted on women in 
 industry, 389, 390. 
 
 Welldon, Dean: wisdom of, as 
 a leader, 29. 
 
 Wellington, Duke of, 3. 
 
 Wells, H. G., 13, 248, 272, 313. 
 
 "Welsh Outlook": quoted on 
 Lord Rhondda's dictatorship, 
 246. 
 
 "Westminster Gazette," 271. 
 
 Wharton, Edith, 272. 
 
 Whitman, Walt: quoted on de- 
 mocracy, 80. 
 
 "Why Men Fight," by Bertrand 
 Russell: quotation from, on 
 birth-control, 114-116, 265, 
 275. 
 
 Wigstan Magna: record of, on 
 war-savings certificates, 236. 
 
 Williams, Captain Basil: quoted 
 on English people, 240, 332. 
 
 Wilson, President Woodrow: 
 143; quoted on present war, 
 317. 
 
 Woman question: solution of, 
 19, 20; full exposition of, 97- 
 173, 395-397. 
 
 "Woman Worker": organ of 
 women trade-unionists, quot- 
 ed, 255, 256. 
 
 Women: services of, in national 
 industries, 20 et seq.; emanci- 
 pation of, 95 et seq.; suffrage 
 societies of, 103; war work 
 and, 106; future of, in Eng- 
 
 land, 128 et seq.; Seebohm 
 Rowntree's work in behalf 
 of, 135; post-bellum prospect 
 for, 282; in industry, 389, 
 390; population and, 390-393; 
 increased expenditure of, for 
 clothes, 393-395. 
 
 Women police service, 159. 
 
 Woolf, 253. 
 
 Workers' control, 381-384. 
 
 Workers' Educational Associa- 
 tion, 77. 
 
 Workmen: effect of war on 
 efficiency of, 16 et seq.; wishes 
 of, 44, 45; attitude of, toward 
 modern machinery, 66; ef- 
 fect of leisure on, 68; condi- 
 tion of, after hours, 69, 70; 
 mission of, 75 et seq.; atti- 
 tude of English, toward pa- 
 triotism, 275 et seq.; produc- 
 tive power of, during war, 
 365, 366. 
 
 Workshop councils: meaning 
 of, 50 et seq., 380. 
 
 Yarmouth: Zeppelins at, incen- 
 tive to war subscription, 236. 
 
 Yeats, 180. 
 
 "Yorkshire Factory Times," 
 285, 286. 
 
 Young England: voice of, on 
 solution of Irish question, 
 quotation, 186-191. 
 
 Younger Suffragists, 103. 
 
 Ypres, 96. 
 
 Zele, 70. 
 
 Zimmern, A. E.: views of, on 
 pioneers of social reform, 89 
 et seq., 269, 273, 304; quoted 
 on nationality, 328; cited on 
 backward races, 407, 408. 
 
 434 
 
I