Out. its annual conference, the largest ever held the British Labour Party has proclaimed its absolute opposition to Communism by a vote of millions against hundreds of thousands, But whether the millions of voters who appear on the side of the moderates would uphold them in an elec pioneering fight, is a question that one faces rather ni Too many instances a record of trade unions refusing, to honour the terms to whic their leaders have agreed in an industrial dispute; and the underground workings of Communists have all tended to destroy the loyalty of the rank and file of Labour to their official leaders. This is the inwardness of Mr. Ramsay Mac-Donald's call to the Communists "to come out of the trade unions and propagate their opinions honestly outside." That, ever, is not Moscow's way, nor of the men who work for her, By what is known as the "cell" method they honeycomb the unions with revolutionary pro-Paganda; and more than once in recent months our Labour ce: respondent in Manchester has emphasized that nothing in the tone of working-class talk is more noticeable than the extent to which the cautious and moderate policy of Labour in Parliament has lost popularity and direct action and extreme methods have gained favour. The granting of a subsidy to stave off the coal strike was undoubtedly hailed by the extremists as a victory for their! principles and the disapprobation j with which it was widely viewed was due to the encouragement it gave to other malcontents to only more In any case, the principle of subsidies is thoroughly bad, because it means simply the spoliation of the nation for the benefit of a class, end once that path is entered upon it leads swiftly to the multiplication of unprofitable taxes, stagnation trade and even national bankrupted. Letters from Home in recent weeks have been extremely gloomy; the fight with the! coal and allied industries is everywhere regarded as only having been put off to the spring and the outcome is viewed with pessimism. The Labour! Conference vote at Liverpool! may bring some reassurance. But the hidden influence <f Bolshevism is making itself} widely felt and not unjustly! dreaded.
The answer to these fears ie, perhaps, to be found in th belief so well founded that it! practically amounts to fact, that] in the last resort Englishmen do not love to smash things up. Neither the coal nor railway strike of a few years ago was accompanied by any worth mentioning, consi the magnitude of the upheaval. And always in British history' with a central bogey, Popery in Stuart! times, Jacobinism in Pitt's, which must have appeared as formidable to those ages as Communism does to ours. The peculiar evil of the present day Ves in the fact that men are better educated, and worse: there are more who can read and write and fewer who know ithe dignity of the old craftsmen, who made the whole of any tide they produced instead of, snow, only an imperfectly, understood part and who formed the backbone and solidity of the nation, To-day we have made the mistake of educating the workers enough to realize the dull horror of their sur-soundings compared with the Joyous existence of the rich, but not enough to enable them to get out of it, This surely is the root of the problem and it would be hateful to have to believe that there was no way out of it except to destroy all existing institutions and construct others, which indeed would only incorporate the old evils in a new and worse form, as Russia shows to-day. We may not believe that there will ever be an age in this world in which there are not rich and poor, for the simple fact that no two men are born with equal But surely the gulf between them need not be so wide and cruel; and with the Labour Party's revolt against the apparent law that the happi-8 requires the 8 of another, we must, ize. In certain inap, mustard, cocoa, Mr. Ford's motor-cars and others in minor degree, the problem seems to have been solved. No one has ever heard of a strike at Norwich, the seat of the Colman industry, and would-be how- agitators have been quietly but firmly pushed out of by the workers themselves initial idea was that capital vould be content with smaller id ends so that labour might have more: and yet, in the industries mentioned, it does _not seem that capital has fared so badly, perhaps because contented work means better work. It! takes time for ideas to spread ind the process always involves inconvenience. But one may believe more in the ultimate triumph of the moderation of the Labour Conference than in the extremism of the Harry Pollitt's, because it is in accord both with the sympathies of the telegram from Peking says that De
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.