Gathering Of The World Revolution

( Originally Published 1918 )

AT some future time the nature of the drama which is at present unfolding itself in history must make a powerful appeal to the human imagination. Under our eyes, with the confused details of the transition spread before us from day to day in the events of the leading countries of the earth, we see the curtain rising upon an entirely new order of the world.

It is one of the curious-features of our day that the nature of the change is as yet scarcely apprehended. The shadow of it rests upon all the events of the time. The- meaning of it encircles the world. The instinct of it moves in the minds of distant peoples and of strange races. But there is yet scarcely any conception of its nature. We are undoubtedly living in the West in the opening stages of a revolution the like of which has never been experienced in history. We are witnessing the emergence of causes and the marshalling and leaguing of forces utterly unknown to textbooks. They will make history for a thousand years to come. But for the under-standing of the great transition going on around us the very elements of thought do not at present exist.

It has been a feature of the time which has witnessed the greatest war in the history of the human race to talk as if the existing conditions of the West were the result of peculiar causes introduced by a single nation or affecting a single period of time. We must put aside such conceptions. The present conditions in the West are the result of causes which are universal, which have come slowly to a head in history, which extend far beyond military aspects, and into the meaning of which the development of the entire world will in the future be drawn.

It is a fact, the significance of which has been almost overlooked in the past, that Western civilization has been in a special and peculiar sense founded upon force. All the reasoned knowledge of the West is the science of force in one or other of its phases. Our civilization has been brought to the birth in time as the result of a process of force, which is unparalleled in the development of the race, and the conditions of which can almost certainly never be reproduced in history. For countless ages before history has view of him, the fighting male of the West has streamed across Europe in successive waves of advance and conquest, vanquishing, exterminating, overwhelming, overmastering, taking possession. The fittest, who have survived in these successive layers of conquest, have been the fittest in virtue of the right of force, and in virtue of a process of military selection probably the longest, the sternest, the most culminating which the race has ever undergone.

It is this fighting pagan of the world who has made the history of the West. The civilization which he has produced is the strangest flower in the fields of time. He has introduced into it at every point the spirit of the unmeasured ages of conquest out of which it has come. Into all the institutions which he has created he has carried the spirit of war, and the belief in force as the ultimate principle of the world.

But at the same time he has inherited a religion which is the utter negation of force, and which in every phase of his development has remained the outstanding challenge to his conception of the omnipotence of force. He has struggled with this extraordinary inheritance for centuries in history. Deep in the inmost recesses of his nature he has continually persuaded himself against belief in it. He has set his science and his philosophies to reason it away. He has gone forth on his business to the conquest of the world fortifying himself against it and with his spirit resolutely tuned to the doctrine of force. In his national wars he has made the right of conquest the ultimate right of the fittest. In the social struggle he has trained himself to see, in the steel claws of devouring tyrannies closing on the worsted, the natural law of efficiency.

It is only our lifelong familiarity with the out-standing features of our civilization which has dimmed our vision to its altogether surprising features. As the spirit of the belief, which is the flat denial of the conception of the omnipotence of force, has gradually overmastered the world-builder of the West, the results baffle all adequate description. The pagan has captured the world by force. He holds it by force. But the system of ideas in which he is enmeshed flings into sight an unparalleled significance. While his philosophies have argued with it, while his sciences have branded it as foolishness, it has slowly en-franchised the world around him. It is bringing into the rivalries of life on terms of equality with him every class and substratum of his societies, every race of men on the planet.

The problems which are evolving themselves out of the deep are illimitable. The blinding vision of which the West has caught sight has been that there is but one class, and but one colour, and but one soul in humanity. It is a vision under which the soul of the pagan world-builder flames in rebellion. But it has come to haunt the moods of industrial Demos as he hums his rag-time music in the midst of the mills of force which he has erected. The spirit of it moves in the dreams of strange peoples at the ends of the earth. And on the mind of Demos and of the distant peoples the effect is the same. It has brought a haunting sense of some meaning, infinite but unexplained, through which our civilization moves towards a fulfilment in which the past may pass for ever, and in which new standards of efficiency, that men have not dreamt of, may possibly arise in the world.

The male of Western civilization has become by force of circumstances the supreme fighting animal of creation. History and natural selection have made of him what he is. For at least four thousand years, and possibly for a period ten times as long, his forbears have represented the highest expression of force in the world. Every instinct of the fight, every quality of the rule of force exists in him through an ancestral inheritance measured by the meaning of hundreds of generations of successful fighting.

The consequences are felt today throughout every fibre of our civilization. As race after race of the peoples of the earth, as class after class, and layer after layer of their societies have been gradually brought, into the struggle under the emancipating influence described, there has resulted a conflict of forces never before known. The problems thereof have become in every field of activity in the West the centres of movements molten with human passion. There has never been anything like the daily sequence of events which is spread before us in the record of civilization during the past half-century. It is a record of a war continuous and intense under every phase of human activity. In the programmes of parties, in the relations of nations, in business, in labour politics, in art, in literature, in the whole realm of economic activity, it is war in progress under every conceivable aspect.

But this cannot be the meaning of the West. Through it all there runs a sense of new eras, of new values, of emerging types, of widening horizons, of more spacious ideals of human brother-hood seen through the social emotion. But it is a world of revolution, of sinking temples, of falling idols, of rending veils, of darkening skies under which the gods of force huddle towards vast Armageddons muttering, "We know not fear," while the past moves from under them.

If we could only see the age which preceded the universal war of nations which began in 1914 as the historian of the future will see it, it would present a surprising spectacle, for we should see this war of the nations to be no more than an incident in a universal movement, involving every leading form of thought and activity in the West, gradually rising to a climax throughout the world.

There is a striking feature which we may perceive to be characteristic of the half-century which preceded the war which began in 1914. At the centre of every movement of opinion in the West the same fact is to be noticed. There is visible a gradual falling back upon first principles, a retreat all along the line to those conditions of elemental force under which the civilization of the West first came into being.

The Daywinian thesis, presented to the Western mind in the middle of the nineteenth century, had a remarkable effect on civilization. It presented to the masters of force in the West a conception of the world which they rendered exclusively in terms of force and struggle. It was not science which created the universal fame of the Darwinian conception. It was rather the half-informed pagan mind of our civilization. For centuries the Western pagan had struggled with the ideals of a religion of subordination and renunciation coming to him from the past. For centuries he had been bored almost beyond endurance with ideals of the world presented to him by the Churches of Christendom. He had stiffly bowed his armoured back to them, but mostly without in-ward comprehension. But here was a conception of life which stirred to its depths the inheritance in him from past epochs of time. This was the world which the master of force comprehended. The pagan heart of the West sang within itself again in atavistic joy. Its Schopenhauers, its Omar Khayyáms, its Haeckels, its Nietzsches, its Weinigers, its Wagners became the prophets and interpreters of a meaning in the world which it drank in with understanding.

There can be no more remarkable experience in store for the observer than that which comes to him if, in any of the leading countries of the West, he sets himself to compare at any of the centres of higher learning the questions being set a few years ago to students of the social and political sciences and those which were set in the same subjects but half a century before. The trained understanding reading between the lines beholds in progress a change far exceeding in significance any political revolution which has ever taken place in the world. The iron of conviction has passed from the mind of authority. The doctrine of force has taken its place. The ears of the present generation have been glued to the ground, strained to catch the distant meaning of vast, formless, approaching causes, speaking a language absolutely unknown to those who occupied the seats of knowledge in the past.

The full effect of the change long in progress in civilization has come into view almost suddenly. The significance of it was from the first perceived by the Churches, those historic centres for centuries of the idealisms of the West. It soon reached to every centre of opinion. For a pro-longed period previously the Western nations, even in their darkest hours of struggle, had ever placed before themselves and regarded with unfaltering gaze an inward vision. They had conceived our civilization as gradually ripening, through the perfection of principles inherent in it, towards an age of universal peace and balanced harmony among all the nations of the earth.

The first startling effect in the West of the recrudescence of the pagan doctrine of the omnipotence of force was upon this ideal. For fifteen centuries, since the full adoption of Christianity by the continent of Europe, the scandal and paradox of the world, says the Honourable George Peel, was that European history was a tale of blood and slaughter.' But always hitherto this record had been shamed into irrelevancy by the permanence and supremacy of the vision in the background.

Within the short space of some fifty years all this has been changed. Those living have watched civilization becoming openly and of set purpose a universal place of arms. Within the half-century, by a process of development marking the intensity of the causes at work, they have seen standing armies, on a scale previously quite unknown, becoming a normal feature of the life of modern communities. The sun has followed its daily course from East to West over the nations of the world standing to arms and preparing for war. The full significance of the change, more- over, has lain in the fact that now it was preparation for war without any higher vision whatever of peace perduring in the background.

For the changes in the direction of thought have been far-reaching and rapid. The state of war became spoken of again among men not as a shame and a rebuke to civilization but as a state of nature. During the first period of the twentieth century in the reviews, books, newspapers, parliaments, congresses, and even in the schools of the principal countries, war has been the principal subject of interest. The discussion of war by experts and publicists—the methods by which war is to be carried on, the enemies against whom it may have to be directed, and the objects and policies for which it may have to be waged—has gone on continually.

As the result of tendencies which in a short space have enveloped the world, settled modes of thought regarding war, which in countries like Great Britain and the United States had been the slow growth of centuries of previous develop-ment, have become profoundly modified and altered. Men have come to listen silently, as they would not have listened half a century previously, when they have been told by leaders of opinion that the ultimate principles of civilization do not justify the prophecies since the beginning of our era as to an eventual age of peace and good-will; that war is the natural condition of man, that it is not an evil but a necessity, and even a good, and that the modern resources of science are not tending to abolish war but only to render it more terrible and destructive by raising to the nth power the possibilities of savagery.

The alteration taking place in the nature of the pleas urged in favour of peace has become even more striking and significant. Fifty years ago the most prominent feature in the case for international peace was that it was made to rest on the high ground of an immutable moral doctrine. War was held to be a. crime, a crime against the principle of civilization, a direct challenge to the fundamental conception of Christianity. It was held, therefore, that the higher nations must evolve beyond war, just as the higher individual has been raised beyond crime, through the growth of an internal moral standard producing a feeling of absolute abhorrence.

But almost under the eyes of the current generation this view became replaced by another conception. The high inflexible conviction urged against war in the past, that the spirit of war was a crime, that peace was a moral end to be sought for its own sake and irrespective of any cost or sacrifice whatever, ceased to be urged. Peace came to be advocated because it was said to be the condition which paid best in civilization; war was argued to be economically unsound because it was said to be a great illusion to believe that a national policy founded on war could be a profitable policy for any people in the long run.

In no phase of the time has the rapid lowering of the standards of opinion in the West been more directly in evidence than in this modification of the principle upon which the demand for peace was based. The degeneracy and futility of the argument which had come to rest the cause of peace on no higher ground than this were deeply and instinctively felt by every mind which under-stood the nature of the forces on which Western civilization rests. Even in the standards of those who had begun to base the policy of nations upon the omnipotence of force, the demand at least was everywhere for the capacity for sacrifice.

The state of international relations in the West for many years before the outbreak of the war which opened in 1914 will be one to cause marvel to students in history in times to come. We have passed so rapidly through such moving events in our time that the existing world has never seen in focus the period through which we are living. It has never fully realized that the great movements in the West in recent times are but phases of a larger development which in a generation or two has come to envelop the whole of civilization.

The gradual lowering of the standards of opinion and conduct has extended to all centres of West-ern thought and action. But it was at the beginning most clearly visible in international relations. One of the most influential of British Liberal journals, writing some years before the war, described in a vivid article the altogether extraordinary conditions which for a considerable period had come to prevail in European diplomacy. It seemed, the journal urged, as if civilization in Europe in the highest environment of culture had returned to conditions of primitive savagery. The crudity of the purposes, the danger of the aims, the thinly veiled barbarisms of the methods which were coming to prevail amongst diplomatists, were forcibly described.

Speaking of the conditions surrounding the diplomatists who were guiding modern affairs at the points of contact of the principal nations of the West, the journal with great seriousness continued :

We see them pulling wires, stealing marches on each other, laying long and crafty plans which almost invariably miscarry, and missing obvious events which throw all their designs into confusion. And on one side or the other there is a perpetual exploiting of the inherent loyalty and patriotism of their countries in quarrels which are mere combativeness for no purpose.

In international relations, in short, the minds of the men of leading and culture who were guiding the affairs of the West seemed to the journal in question to have returned so near to a state of primitive barbarism that the journal gravely wondered why the immense majority in the nations did not assert themselves and sweep it all away.

Whatever these symptoms might imply in their more immediate relations there could be even then no mistaking their import in the deeper aspects of history. The West was getting down to the first principles of force. The powers which had command of force were, with a sure instinct, preparing for a stage in which strength would be measured again in the West in those conditions of primitive force which the West understood. But the times were evidently pregnant with a wider meaning than this. It was a period more elemental still in which some new, vast, and fundamental conditions were assembling in the world, presently to emerge into full view in another era of civilization.

When we turn from these external symptoms to the social conditions existing within the fron-tiers of the nations before the outbreak of the war of 1914, the spectacle becomes more arrest-ing. The world-wide reach of the revolution which has been in progress becomes more clearly visible.

For centuries it had been a commonplace of political thought in the West that the world that is, represents the world that always will be. The masters of force from the beginning took the Darwinian conception as giving lasting support to the view that the social struggle supplied the stern, inevitable condition out of which social efficiency emerged. They took it as confirming that theory of the world, which was already presented in economic science, according to which the natural and unchangeable condition of society was one of extreme polarity. At one end there was the ac-cumulation of property and influence in the hands of the few representing the leaders and the capables, and at the other end there was the vast majority of the population ruled down by the iron necessities-of the competitive struggle to the lowest wage at which they would work efficiently and reproduce themselves.

In little more than the lifetime of a generation we have seen the foundations of this world of knowledge transformed. The emancipating influence at work in civilization has gradually brought to the multitudes the political enfranchisement inherent from the beginning in the conception of human equality and human brotherhood. In every leading country the working millions constituting the greater part of the population were to be seen becoming consolidated and organized by the actual mechanism of the process in which they were caught, with the gift of political power in their hands, with the dawning light of an intelligence in their eyes never before seen in history, crowding at last at the head of every avenue of authority and stretching out waiting and impatient hands towards all the levers of power in the State. And in the day-dreams of this multitude the sombre, insistent, infinitely widening instinct of the social emotion has already begun to close with the vast problems of the future.

Writers and historians will attempt in days to come to limn the bold outlines of the world drama in which we behold Demos in the West with the inheritance behind him of thousands of generations of successful fighting awaking in history in this situation. It is a position with every element of human passion, every element of tragedy, every element of revolution in it, and all represented on a scale without precedent or comparison in the past.

Throughout the West it may be observed that for generations the idea of the world presented by textbooks of economic science has been based on a central conception. However deftly the real-isms of the human struggle have been glossed over, however faithfully the artists of its apologies may have softened the grim silhouettes of that struggle into a background of the public weal, of one thing there can be no doubt. The , fundamental idea of the economic science of the West has always been the conception of society as a state of war.

And in this state of war the central figure has been none other than that of Demos himself as the victim of it. The leaders of the proletariat as they gradually took in the details of the position have not been slow to interpret it to the masses in their own version. Every textbook of economics in the West, it was said, presented the same picture of the toil-stained millions. In the struggle of the world the overlords of the capitalist age of force took all they were able to hold as the wages of capacity. And the millions of the wage-earners were scaled down to the minimum condition of existence upon which the great beast of the proletariat would consent to reproduce its useful kind. That has been the rendering.

But the masses of the West have been themselves, and in their own right, and no less than the overlords of capital, the inheritors of the spirit of the ages of fight and conquest out of which the West has come. Gradually as they have drunk in with their new-born political consciousness the position thus explained to them, a new spirit passed over the West of the like of which and of the significance of which the world has had no previous experience. Firmly and consciously the hand of the working multitude has stiffened on the levers of supreme power which they have come to grasp under the forms of Democracy in the West.

The leading features of a position which moves towards greater events than any recorded in the past of the world may be rapidly summed up. There was no long parleying with the situation. The leaders of the proletariat went straight to the centre of it. History will record of them that without hesitation they simply accepted the world which the economists and the interpreters of Darwin had thus rendered to them in terms of force. But they accepted it with one reservation, the significance of which has begun to overshadow all the events of Western civilization. It became the avowed intention and determination of the leaders of the proletariat so to use the weapons which the political power of labour had placed in their hands that the result of the social war should be entirely changed. It should no longer be against their class; it should be in favour of it. There can be no mistaking the wider bearing of such a resolution. Under its inspiration the movement of the proletariat in all the leading countries of the West has gradually taken on a meaning in keeping with the character of the general world movement in which all the institutions of civilization have become involved in our time. It has begun to present all the same symptoms of a development slowly concentrating on first principles, namely, on those actualities of force which are deeply inherent in it.

As we turn to watch the character of the inter-national situation contemporaneously developing, we have to observe how the cause of the working classes of civilization gradually becomes involved as part of the universal movement in progress in the West.

Historians of the future will note that it took roughly the whole span of the nineteenth century for the masters of force in Europe, while remaining carefully hidden behind the screen of our current civilization, to evolve the principles of force scientifically applied in international war. The fundamental condition of the science of force as applied among nations was that which, first systematically developed by Prussia, has changed the face of the modern world, namely, universal conscription or the compulsory levying of the whole available male population of a nation for purposes of war.

The second and equally fundamental condition of force scientifically applied has been the gradual formulation, also behind the screen of a civilization founded on the ethics of the Christian religion, of the original code of pagan ethics which placed the interests of the State resting on force above all principles of universal Right and Justice. The great aim and object of scientific war as set forth in textbooks, now notorious, of the military nations of Western Europe, was to be successful. Every means to that end was, in the last resort, held to be justifiable. All questions of right, of feeling, of justice, of the sanctity of agreements or treaties, or even of humanity, became, in the last issue, nothing more than questions of expediency or the reverse in aiming at success.

Our time has witnessed the fighting leaders of races with unmeasured ages of conquest behind them turning in the middle of current civilization with the silent joy of the essential pagan to the stupendous task of organizing all the accumulated resources of the world to the making of war on these principles. The first outward result of a gradual return to the standards of savagery in European diplomacy has just been described. The next world-shaking chapter in the international position was about to open. But the conditions in which we have to witness the labour movement in the social war becoming involved in all countries in the same cycle of events have an extraordinary interest.

It has been said that the first principle upon which the supreme overlords of force had, with far-seeing vision, based all their plans for the organization of international war was universal military conscription. It has to be remarked that the first object at which the leaders of labour with the same supreme instinct of the fight upon them aimed in the West, indicated an insight equally clear. The first demand of labour was for no-thing less than the compulsory organization of its own class throughout all the nations. Those who do not understand the magnitude of the position towards which the proletariat of the West has attempted to move in our times, and who do not therefore perceive the essential vitality to labour not only of organization but of compulsory organization, often miss the peculiar but fundamental feature of the struggle which has been opened. A study of the democratic State as it has been in history no longer supplies us with any clue to the future. It is the state of war between nations which henceforward furnishes the only parallel for enlightenment on the principles which control the existing class war in the West.

In many parts of the Western world the observer sees labour still under the old conditions of its struggle with capital, using the weapon of the local strike, throwing down its tools and engaging in feats of endurance to obtain by collective bargaining better terms than could be obtained by individuals. But in reality this era of the struggle has been left behind in the main movement where in all its controlling features the struggle with capital has now begun to converge upon essentials and fundamentals.

The principal leaders of the proletariat in the West have hitherto shown an extremely far-reaching grasp of the conditions and the limitations in our civilization of a struggle resting ultimately on force and conducted on a world-wide scale. By all the principles of effective war labour was bound to make a most determined effort to obtain exactly that same first object which the masters of military force in international war had attained by universal conscription. Its leaders proceeded, therefore, to secure through-out the world the first tremendous principle of solidarity for which labour stands. They formulated the programme known as the " closed shop."

This is, in effect, nothing more or less than the demand that no workman shall ultimately earn his livelihood without first being a member of a trade union. It is the history of the war to secure this fundamental object of labour which constitutes the real history of the labour movement during recent times. At one end of the scale we see the first phase of the struggle still represented in the United States where the effort of labour to enforce this hitherto illegal demand for the closed shop has been accompanied for years by riots, outrages, and bloodshed, which have deeply disturbed the public mind of a continent. At the other end of the scale the struggle is represented in Great Britain by the example of the cotton trade, where in the most highly organized industry in the world the principle of the closed shop is to be seen emerging at last as a successfully established objective of labour. The world has, indeed, actually witnessed in recent times the operatives of this industry, having successfully insisted in the full daylight of legality that capital shall employ no workers who are not members of their union, proceeding completely to hold up the premier manufacturing industry of civilization for such a period as the exigencies of their warfare demanded.

The interval between these two stages in securing this, the cardinal position of the labour movement in the West, has represented a large part of the internal history of the leading nations of the world for a generation. The struggle has been in progress throughout Europe and America. It has furnished the principal events for a considerable period in the politics of countries like Australia and New Zealand. And it has every-where presented the same features of a universal struggle in which a movement representing world-wide and fundamental interests in civilization is tending to fall back upon the prime and elemental conditions of force underlying it.

As the conditions of force governing the struggle have rapidly developed it has become visible how vital, how far-reaching, and how true to type has been the military instinct of labour. The principles of the democratic State from this stage forward begin to be pressed one by one into the background. One of the most effective and hardly won of the instruments of Democracy in recent times for the protection of right against force was the secret ballot in the election of political representatives. At an early stage in its own struggle we see the open ballot in the election of its representatives becoming a characteristic demand in the labour movement. In other leading features the transition of the movement towards principles of ulterior force of the kind which were being worked out elsewhere in military textbooks was rapid.

The press of the leading countries of the West for several years preceding the outbreak of the great world war of the nations in 1914 presents in this respect a most remarkable spectacle. Its leading organs are to be seen registering the opinion that a new era of civilization was arising under the prevailing conditions. Hitherto one of the most pronounced of all aspects of legality in the West had been the accepted sanctity of agreements. But in the course of the labour struggle it began to be a subject exciting profound feeling that in the agreements made by organized labour on the one side, and organized capital on the other, this principle was often no longer observed. The Times, surveying in England the labour movement for a number of years, I laid great stress on this remarkable feature, maintaining that in a long series of crises legal con-tracts deliberately entered into by labour had been " continuously violated as if they had meant nothing at all."

In these violations of agreements, moreover, remarkable features were pointed out. They were all ultimately condoned. The enormous voting power of labour in the State rendered any other action impossible. A still more striking feature, showing the retreat on the ultimate principles of force which was taking place, was the nature of the defence coming to be urged for these breaches of contract by labour. The proletariat, in a state of war, it was said, had often no option but to accept for the time being the terms of capital. But, as it began to be characteristically put on behalf of labour, "a defeated nation may have to sue for peace, and if the conquerors exact hard terms a defeated nation will, at the first favourable opportunity, repudiate such terms—and so with the men."

Here it will be seen we are face to face with the standards of international war, where all conditions of legality have come to rest on force. We are, indeed, in the presence of that last argument already being advocated under many forms in the official military textbooks of the central States of Europe in which expediency had become the sole criterion of conduct directed to the end of success in war at any cost whatever.

There need be no desire to attribute to the responsible leaders or to the body of the rank and file of the labour movement in the West a conscious intent or consent to this lowering of standards. Enormous forces of quite a contrary direction were, indeed, behind the labour programme. What we are watching is rather the labour movement as a whole becoming enveloped in the irresistible tendencies of the universal movement in civilization which was now everywhere falling back rapidly on the actualities of force inherent in it. As syndicalism developed in the next stage it brought into clear view the ultimate features of this position.

In syndicalism the controlling factors in the great class war of civilization were defined with firm grasp in the programme set out in 1912 in the leading organ of the movement in England. The demand for the nationalization of industry so prominently displayed in all the earlier pronouncements of socialism was, in that programme, shifted definitely into the background. Syndicalism, it was asserted, has ceased to put its trust in the State. Labour was fighting for its own cause. For syndicalists, it was said, had come to foresee a condition in the future in which the power of the State would be inferior to the power of organized capital, and in which the power of the State under the control of the capitalist would be turned against the workers in an industry that had become nationalized. The universal strike, therefore, to be thoroughly effective in the future must be directed, it was asserted, not simply at curtailing profits. It must aim to become a menace to the community itself through the stoppage of supplies.

We have to observe, in short, the labour movement in the West in this phase becoming at last consciously instinct with the principles of universal war resting ultimately on each side on the armed forces of civilization. This instinct ex-pressed itself quite clearly in syndicalism in two forms. In one form it urged the programme of a determined propaganda, addressed to labour by the more moderate leaders, urging the workers to obtain command of military force by acquiring as rapidly as possible political control in all the parliaments of the world which vote supplies for the armed forces of nations. In the other form the programme became, in the hands of the more extreme leaders, a propaganda addressed direct to the soldiers of the nations as the ultimate units of a civilization in which armies could be turned against labour in the last arbitrament of war.

In both these positions the leaders of the extreme wing of labour had come in sight of the situation which was already actually being discussed by the leaders of militarism in the military textbooks of Germany. For in these textbooks the masters of force had foreseen and had anticipated the day when, under universal conscription, the soldier him-self having become the ultimate unit of civilization would be subject to "all the tendencies which make him the child of his time."1 The disturbing effect of such a propaganda as syndicalism contemplated had indeed haunted the dreams of the masters of force. It would, they foresaw, interfere with the efficiency of the instrument of irresistible force which they were forging in civilization. But their policy, in this last resort, had been thought out. It was already outlined in the textbooks of war. It was "to smash the whole fabric of that spiritual life" in the soldier himself, equally with that of the enemy for they had counted upon the necessity in both cases,-which ran counter to the policy which demanded success as the supreme object of war.

Thus had the essentially pagan mind of the West reached to the elementals of the atavistic creed of omnipotent force biological necessity it had become in the military textbooks of Germany into which it had rendered the thesis which Darwin had given to it fifty years previously.

Slowly but with increasing momentum the curtain was beginning to rise upon the greatest world drama of force in the history of humanity.

It is necessary to turn now to watch other aspects of this movement in civilization, into which all local phases, national and social, have rapidly been drawn. The causes which have driven labour to organization within recent times have been irresistible. But causes operating with a similar intensity have at the same time been driving capital into a position in which all the landmarks of the past are one by one disappearing from view. The enfranchising tendencies in the life of the West have gradually set in motion tidal movements in civilization in which the social emotion is submerging all the fixed points of the past. But there is no indication whatever on the thought or activity of the time that the power-holding interests in civilization have any clear grasp of the situation in which they are involved. We see them rather everywhere falling back instinctively upon positions calculated to give them command in an environment of force if the struggle should resolve itself into one for mastery under more primitive conditions.

In the old individualistic age of the past capital-ism had come to rest in large part on the convenient maxims of a science of political economy which identified the operations of capital with the permanent public weal. But the spokesmen of capital have on the whole shown no consciousness that the foundations of this world have moved bodily in our time. As the demand of the proletariat in the modern class war has threatened to become nothing less than the demand for the replacement of capitalism by collectivism supported by the enormous voting power of organized labour, capital has had to face round to meet problems which bring into the front rank of the conflict the most fundamental issues connected with our civilization.

As the spirit of the world fight has gradually enveloped the whole range of the complex activities of the West, the position of capital in relation to the social emotion has assumed features of great interest. One of the most striking developments of the age has been the colossal concentration of wealth. Relentlessly driven from two sides towards concentration, from without by labour and from within by the nature of modern enterprise, capital has become aggregated into immense organizations worked on the basis of joint-stock companies. It has been a peculiar and inherent feature of these aggregations that they have tended through causes which they have been quite unable to control to bring capital profoundly and on a world-wide scale into conflict with the social emotion.

As the leaders of labour with the gathering instinct of the fight strong upon them have sensed the omens of the time in the West, the antagonism to capital has grown rapidly. In almost every part of the civilized world it has deepened in intensity in the first period of the twentieth century. The case, moreover, which we see being put forward on behalf of the proletariat a case which is based on the voting power of labour and which orientates itself in the last resort to the armed forces of civilization has become more uncompromising. It has come to take the form of a determined frontal attack on the whole cause of capitalism.

It amounts, as we see it put forward now, to the arraignment by labour before public opinion of the entire system of modern capitalism on the ground that it is inherently and fundamentally anti-social and therefore impossible. The attack has closely followed the lines I foreshadowed in 19o8 in the Herbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford. 1 Everywhere in the struggle we see capital in the West essaying to defend itself on the old lines. The modern tendency to gigantic concentration and control by the few is taken to be a development quite inevitable and in the public good. The circle of shareholders of its joint-stock companies will, it is maintained, become ever wider and wider. Its Companies and its Trusts will tend, therefore, to become at length identified with the general public itself. Its Corporations will tend more and more to become governing industrial republics resting on their own representation within the body politic —a kind of industrial democracy gradually supplementing and superseding political democracy.

But on the other side we see labour closing for battle with a vision which it has fixed far beyond this horizon. It sweeps away almost without parley the case put against it. The financial republics of joint-stock enterprise, it asserts, have no counterpart in political democracy. They man-age public utilities on a scale so great that their affairs are comparable only to the affairs of a first-class state or a federation of states. But they outrage the fundamental principles of democracy, labour asserts, in that they have no relation to any social or moral principle outside the earning of dividends; while they violate the cardinal necessity of democracy in that voting power is according to the amount of shares held, and that control is in the hands of the few who work in the dark, the vastest returns being obtained by the artificial raising and depressing of the Stock Exchange value of their securities. Labour does not stay to argue with the overlords of capital the case for the wages of capacity in this direction. The gigantic growth of speculation in Stock Exchange values and the vast system of finance which accompanies it have come to be described as parasitic on modern industry, representing no function that can be expressed in terms of social utility. So the propaganda becomes an appeal for the votes of the proletariat to sweep the whole system away. And the argument, as we have seen, has come in the last resort to envisage without hesitation the ultimate conditions of force and to be consciously addressed to armed men as them-selves the ultimate units of civilization.

All these profound movements in the West in which we see the foundations of society being challenged proceed with the same spirit moving through them. We appear to be everywhere witnessing a retreat upon the first principles of war. The Westminster Gazette, speaking at the centre of British politics, recently recorded a change in political conditions in Great Britain which a generation ago would have been unthinkable. The journal noted a peculiar fact of our time to consist in the substitution of a condition of uncompromising war resting on violence for a condition of free discussion in all the principal institutions on which popular government rests. The inevitable result, the journal went on to say, is that in parliamentary government the proceedings are becoming battles rather than deliberations, and that the whole procedure has to be organized on the basis of war . . . it is now the practice of all minorities to say that they will concede nothing to the majority and to threaten to carry on every controversy by violent and extra-constitutional means.

This is the spirit, the effect of which meets us at every turn in the times in which we are living. We seem to see the male of the West under every form of the activities of civilization enveloped in a kind of monstrous aura of the fight which has become essentially and profoundly atavistic. Speaking of the current life of the West in the year before the outbreak of the great world war, Mr. Harold Begbie asserted:

Look where you will, it is the spirit of I Myself which is paramount. Life exists for Me: all the dim eons behind have toiled to produce Me: This brief moment in the eternal duration of time is only an opportunity for My pleasure and My ease: I care not a jot for the ages ahead and the sons of men who shall inhabit the earth when I am dust beneath their feet. Give Me My Rights. Stand clear of My way. I want and I will have.

The questions which leap into view at this point cannot be avoided. What is the meaning of this tremendous process of life which under all these aspects in the West is undoubtedly rising to a climax in history? No observer in his senses can doubt the infinite significance in the world of the process of enfranchisement, new in the history of the race, which, moving slowly through long periods in the past, has brought our civilization to its present position. But what is the import of the apparent rebirth in the West of the pagan mind drunken with the spirit of force and of that recrudescence of the forms of force in all the institutions of the West which in a space of fifty years has followed the interpretation of the Darwinian thesis of the world in terms of efficiency resting on force? It is a development which cannot contain the meaning of the West. It is a development which is indeed entirely overshadowed by the significance of another and counter phenomenon the ever rising tide of the social emotion in our civilization. For through all the stress of ) conflict in the West there swells the deep diapason of the social passion calling for service, for subordination, for sacrifice, for renunciation on a scale unprecedented. The propaganda which it inspires is, moreover, addressed no longer to name-less mobs, but through every avenue of emotion in art and literature to the minds of voting millions who are themselves the armed millions and the ultimate units of civilization. It is an age of elementals. In the midst of the rising to the surface again in civilization, on a scale approaching the universal, of aspects of savagery belonging to epochs of the past, we are watching the assembling in the world of the governing forces of new eras of history.