Very early in the war, almost before the Expeditionary Force was under arms, the Government was forced by the grave urgency of the national case to apply the principles of socialism to certain outstanding problems. To name only one instance, we may mention the work of the railways. Socialists have always urged that the railroads should be taken over by Government in the national interest, and countless reams of paper have been wasted by individualists to demonstrate the impossibility. But needs grew paramount, and the Government, by a stroke of the pen, took the railroads into its inexpert keeping. Nothing has happened to make the country regret the change. The fashion in which our railways (with a few notable exceptions) are conducted is so utterly bad and so profoundly inefficient, that Government, in giving precedence to Government business, made them very little worse. Fares are a trifle higher, trains rather less frequent, carriages dirtier than heretofore, but Government's proper needs and unpractised handling could do little or nothing to depress the normal standard. As the war progressed, and various common-sense measures were required to deal with war profits, war contracts, and war crises generally, it was recognised with something akin to dismay by the hierarchy that lives behind the times that in many instances socialism had anticipated common-sense. Then a strange thing happened. In a very unguarded moment, Mr. Runciman, that bright young man whose statesmanlike qualities and keen sympathy with our poor shipowners have endeared him to a small minority at least of English-speaking people, was heard to declare before a pained and startled House of Commons that where Socialism was practical and met the needs of the hour, he was prepared to adopt it. In other words, he would not discard a useful measure because it was socialistic in origin or tendencies! What magnanimity; what a sterling recognition of a nation's needs!

Nobody perhaps quite knows what measure of concession to hard truth was here intended, but as a statement made by a President of the Board of Trade, the utterance deserved more attention than it received. Perhaps the Press Bureau asked newspapers to take no marked notice of a hard-worked "statesman's" slip of the tongue. One would wager that it did not pass altogether unrebuked by those descendants of the wise men of Gotham, who would rather see the Empire lost by party politicians than saved by Socialists or Socialism.

It is a curious fact, and one that the historian of the future will surely acknowledge, that Individualism has been discredited by the war, and that the appeal of both our leaders and misleaders, whatever the colour of their party-political opinions, has been to the principles underlying Socialism. Even in Russia, an autocracy, a land in which the Tsar comes in the popular mind very near to God, the appeal to the nation has been an appeal, however unconsciously, to Socialism. The root principle of Socialism lies in a great National Act. The nation must work together for the national good. So far has this idea developed that in the last days of February, a reputed reactionary, M. Markoff, rose in the Duma to implore the Government "to withdraw its shield from the old gang of officials who look upon their country's adversities merely as a favourable opportunity for increasing their perquisites" (Daily Telegraph, Feb. 28th). Here, under the pressure of giant circumstance, we find an appeal made for the united action and the national act. In Germany, as all our responsible, and not a little of the irresponsible, Press has frankly admitted, the Socialist party is the only one that has kept its head, and endeavoured in very difficult circumstances to preserve ideals. The Vorwarts, leading organ of German Socialism, though it regards the war as an evil for which Germany was not responsible, has courageously opposed all the actions of the governing class that have tended to lower the character of the German people, and I have heard some of the best informed students of European politics declare that, had Social Democracy been allowed another ten years of peaceful development throughout the German Empire, no German ruler would have dared provoke a war for the hegemony of Europe. They cannot deny that Socialism, in its International aspect, was making for the brotherhood of man. No other force in national life was working with any approach to equal strength and sincerity along the same road and in pursuit of the same goal.

Unfortunately, under the conditions that beset and damn all Europe, the people have no voice in the supreme decision of war. Their privilege is to fight those with whom they have no quarrel. Theirs, too, to sacrifice in appalling numbers their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons, to give up their homes and savings, to acquiesce blindly in every evil that marches in the wake of strife. Just as the men ordered from the trenches to be mown down by shot and shell are given or offered some form of raw spirit to stimulate and even intoxicate them, so before war is declared, Governments, through the medium of a docile Press, circulate the lies best calculated to make the imminent enormity appear inevitable and just. As soon as the declaration of war is made, the common patriotism of nations obscures every other issue. Men must fight for hearth and home, for fatherland and all that it implies. Primal necessity is speaking, and on every banner of every nation the ominous words "VÆ victis" are inscribed. The people who make war and, somewhere out of Death's ample range direct it, understand the psychology of nations; their skill in all the arts of deception is unrivalled. Yet of all the lessons enforced by the war there is none that has come with greater force to all whose minds are not hermetically sealed than the lesson that Individualism has failed completely in the hour of the world's extremist need. The price we have paid for it within the compass of two brief years is the total loss of millions of lives, the future ineffectiveness of still more, the sheer, brutal waste of wealth more than sufficient to have solved all the economic troubles of Europe. Countless thinkers in all belligerent countries have been forced to the conclusion that Socialism is the only force capable of rendering what is left of Europe capable and adequate to the demands upon it. Great Britain, insular by act of God and the general tendency of the population, is fully prepared to accept Socialism as long as it is not called by that name, for such is the state of our mental development that we judge all political goods by their labels. In other countries, where social, political, and economic conditions are not merely discussed, but understood, where the people's representatives are required to have some minimum of knowledge in addition to birth, money, and influence, these concessions to popular ignorance and prejudice have been swept aside. The recognition of the necessity for sweeping changes is made without fear. Even in Germany, when Dr. Frank, the eminent Socialist, was reported killed, a statement was published to the effect that the Kaiser had expressed his regrets at the death of a man whose gifts would have helped the country in the days when schemes of reconstruction are under consideration.

This may have been no more than a sop to the social Democrats, of whom upwards of two millions have been called to the colours, but even if this be so, the sop is a significant one, and could not have been lightly given.

In stricken Belgium, the man who comes next to King Albert in sheer patriotic endeavour and in the gift of inspiring the nation to hold up its head under conditions hard for any of us to realise, is the famous Socialist leader, Emile Vandervelde. He is not only at the head of the Belgian Ministry of War, but is King Albert's most trusted adviser; his gifts overshadow those of his equally devoted and patriotic colleagues. The thrill of horror and shame that ran through France when Jean JaurÉs fell to the assassin's bullet in the opening days of war, was felt far beyond the French borders. Even in the tense excitement of that unhappy season, the French Government, after voting the murdered patriot a public funeral, posted in every Commune throughout the country its expression of horror and regret. To-day, a Socialist Prime Minister directs with rare skill and courage the fortunes of the Republic; the French National Council has not hesitated to summon to its ranks such an uncompromising foe of Individualism in whatever form as Jules Guesde. None, having eyes to see, ears to hear with, and even a modest gift of comprehension, can fail to gather from this the tendency of the great Power with which we are now so closely allied. Of all the European nations there is none in which the gift of political sagacity is so strongly marked as it is in France, none to which the gifts of political foresight and courage have been granted in equal measure. What Paris thinks to-day, London must be at least prepared to discuss in the very near future.

There is no secret about the cause of the action that France and Belgium have taken of set purpose. The whole essence of a successful struggle is unity—unity of purpose, of feeling and of thought. The working classes, now as ever, are bearing in every country the bulk of the burden of war. Sane Governments must needs endeavour to secure for labour an adequate representation in their midst. Knowing that their proper interests are being subordinated, if at all, to the national cause, and not for private profit or exploitation, labour feels that it is secure, and will give all it has to give with a generosity that may be rivalled, but can never be excelled. The white flame of patriotism is only kept glowing if it is fed by the efforts of a whole community. This result will never be quite realised here in England until all interests are united in a Cabinet that stands just now for very little more than the propertied classes. I admit, Mr. Henderson, Mr. Brace, and Mr. Wardle, have all been given some office to placate the great Trade Unions from which so much is demanded to-day. But this is not enough. Our Cabinet of aged ostriches still hides its head in the bushes of precedent and prejudice, content to believe that what it does not wish to see can have no existence, and fortified in this strange method, that would be comic if it were not tragic, by all sections of the capitalistic Press. International Socialism is gathering its forces throughout Europe, and in the United States as well, to impose permanent peace on kings and other anachronisms. Thinking people in all the centres of civilisation agree that this war is sounding the knell of privilege. But England remains content to be ruled by lawyers, professional politicians, mid-Victorian relics, and doctrinaires. Socialism, the master force of the immediate future, is deliberately ignored. Well might Father Adderley (Canon the Honourable James Adderley, so beloved in the slums of Plaistow and Birmingham) deplore in his recently published memoirs, the absence from Parliament or from the Government itself, of H. M. Hyndman, the Nestor of English Socialism. The astonishing part of our national attitude towards this crisis is that the men who really guide and influence our public opinion, the live men of letters, are for the most part Socialists, and make no secret of their principles, nor have they ever hesitated to voice their suspicion of what Matthew Arnold called "the unelastic pedantry of theorising Liberalism." Does this Government think that all this teaching has fallen or is falling on deaf ears? Does it forget that it was the French EncyclopÆdists who made the French Revolution? They taught a discontented and unhappy people to think and the people did the rest. Our rulers have always moved respectfully behind the times, but, to do them what justice we may, be it remembered that they never expected to live through seasons that impel the times to move with giant and sudden strides.

Now, even in the latter days, all these things have come upon them. Will they, can they, rise to the height of the occasion?