But the worst tactical move of the trade union candidates was their effort to keep the vexed question of the Capital Levy in the background. It most cases it was just mentioned in their election addresses, figured a little more conspicuously in their platform speeches and was quite absent on their posters. In consequence not one elector in a hundred had any other conception of it than as a proposal for the wholesale confiscation of Capital. Needless to say this general ignorance was taken full advantage of by their political opponents and pathetic descriptions were given at their meetings of poor widows whose little capital would be taken from them by Bolsheviks.
The Scottish workers are intellectually more keen and_politically alert than are the English. They show a more painstaking inter. est in detail and are reported carefully to read and criticize the elec: tion literature given them. e English worker throws it on the fire almost as soon as it appears under his front door. As a result of this difference of temperament the average Scotsman has mastered the details of the Labour Party's Capital Levy proposals and is aware that a fortune of £5,000 will only be mulcted to the extent of £50.
Another factor advantageous to the advocate of a Capital Levy in Scotland is the terrible housing conditions in the great tenements there. The sense of ang "dispossessed"—of having no stake in the country, is consequently much more acute than in England, where tens of thousands of workers own their own little houses and are therefore to a slight degree tinged with that conservative spirit that the possession of property gives to every owner.
The policy of advocating a Capital Levy was particularly harmful to the cause of Labour in Lancashire. That thrifty spirit which even now enables the hardworking cotton operative to acquire a share in the shed where he works has always made him look askance at any attack on capital. The anxious desire of the Labour candidates to relegate the subject to the background has also excited his suspicious interest.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.