Jan. 25.
To judge by the speech of Sir Eric Geddes on the railway settlement in England, another nation-wide strike was at one time well within the realm of possibility. After the nation and the railwaymen had settled down to their respective. jobs subsequently to the autumn strike, one certainly did mot look for a recurrence of such a threat so soon, in fact we were told how much more smoothly—things would run. Yet the country seems only just to have escaped another rude upheaval, so it may be permissible to ask whether, when the previous settlement was made, either side had more than a hazy conception of the feelings of the other and what they thought. We pretend to know each other—all we different classes—better than we used to do, yet we come to loggerheads just as quickly as we possibly can, so our boast of mutual understanding, engendered by the war, needs some investigation. Granted that we all suffer from shell-shock to a certain degree, which causes us to take hysterical views of matters—at the same time this will not explain how we misjudge situations so badly as we are doing, especially when the war has been supposed to have helped us to fathom somebody else's fundamental principles. Little did the Government know of the railwaymen when it concluded the autumn strike in the belief that a working basis had been provided for a time, at least, to come. Equally little did the railwaymen know of anybody else when again on this occasion they rattled their sabre, or whatever takes its place in the railway armoury, and hoped for a speedy capitulation.
Trying to find out what is the attitude of the working classes towards the world in general and their employers and fellow countrymen in particular, is a special job of its own. Leave aside the newspapers and the leaders, and there is precious little to be obtained from individual indications. The war may have taught us much which we failed previously to grasp, but almost equally it has supplied a new mass of misapprehension, so that we are nearly as badly off as ever. Probably the majority still fail to understand anybody but themselves, and that only in a mid-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.