• 

No. 207 

The Labour Party 
on the Threshold 


By 
SIDNEY WEBB 


The Chairman;s Address to the Annual 
Conference of the Labour Partv; 
26th June; 1923 


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THE LABOUR PARTY ON 
THE THRESHOLD. 


Bv SIDNEY WEBB. 

I
I
T is just ten years since the Annual Conference of the 
Labour Party was last held in London; and it is natural 
that we should compare its position then and now. In 1913, 
after more than a decade of persistent, and often heroic work, 
the Party counted an affiliated membership of considerably 
under two millions. It could contest only one-tenth of the 
constituencies and in them could poll less than half a million 
votes. After three General Elections it had returned only 
six per cent. of the House of Commons. Its Parliamentary 
position was ambiguous. Whilst its principles were already 
definite enough, its programme was still very incompletely 
formulated. And up and down the country its organization 
was usually as shadowy as its programme. 

To-day we see the Labour Party with about four million 
affiliated members, being at once the poorest and quite the 
largest political organization in the land; locally organized 
in all but half a dozen out of the 6oo constituencies in Great 
Britain; placing some 1o,ooo elected representatives on the · 
various municipal and other local councils; proclaiming not 
only principles but also a definitely formulated comprehensive 
programme over the whole range of home and foreign 
affairs; placing this programme before the electors in over 
400 Parliamentary seats; polling in them alone four and a 
quarter million votes, being only a million or so fewer than 
the victorious Unionist Party in the whole country; returning 
just upon a quarter of the House of Commons; and becoming 
officially recognized as " His Maje~ty's Opposition," 
prepared to form an alternative Ministry whenever called 
upon to do so. And in the seven months that have elapsed 
since the General Election, the Labour Party has, in all the 
contested Bye Elections, increased its aggregate vote by ten 
per cent., and gained two seats. Those who are curious in 
statistics may be interested to compute that a continuation 
of the rising curve of Labour votes from the 62,698 of rgoo, 

• 



through the 323,195 Of 1906 and the 505,690 of January, 
1910, the 2t millions of 1918, and the 4! millions of 1922, 
would produce a clear majority of the total votes cast in 
Great Britain ISOmewhere about 1926. This forecast it is 
that we have now to make good. 

THE TASK BEFORE US. 

For our long and detailed programme at the last General 

Election-more specific, precise and unequivocal than that 

submitted by any other political party-of which some 15 

million copies were printed for distribution to every registered 

elector in the 416 constituencies in which a Labour candidate 

was in the field, we polled, in November last, one-third of 

all the voters in Great Britain. In order to secure such a 

decisive majority of the whole House of Commons as will 

make it necessary for the Leader of the Opposition to be 

entrusted with the duty of forming a Labour Government,

1 
1
we have practically to transform our present one-third of all 

the voters into two-thirds. We have therefore to convince 

the bulk of the electors, not that the present Unionist Govern


ment is failing to deal successfully with the very grave 

problems, economic and social, domestic and international, 

with which the country is confronted, for that is obvious 

enough; but that these problems can be satisfactorily solved 

on the principles that we preach. It used to be objected that, 

however sound might be its principles, the Labour Party 

was, from inexperience and lack of education, unfit to assume 

the responsibilities of office. Whatever may have been the 

case in past years, this is not an accusation that would now


adays be made by any instructed person of candour. In the 

present House of Commons, comparing parties as wholes, 

I venture to say that, whilst there are differences of dialect, 

and sometimes of phraseology, I see no superiority whatever 

on the Unionist benches in economic and political knowledge, 

or even in the ess·entials of courtesy and good manners. In 

acquaintance with the facts of life, and in appreciation of 

the actu·al effects of governmental action, the Parliamentary 

Labour party is, I think, on an average, considerably ahead 

of the other parties. It habitually takes, as it seems to me, 

longer views, and aims at a larger expediency than either 

Ministers or the rank-and-file on the Government side. It 

is true that the members of the Labour Party, unlike so 

many Liberals and Unionists, have seldom to their credit 

years of success in the making of profit. It is not usually 

remembered, on the other hand, how extensive has been 

the experience of at least half of the Labour Members, and 

how valuable the business training thereby afforded, in the 

administration of the vast and ever-growing Consumers' 

4 


Co-operative Movement, and in the highly complicated work 
of the great Trade Unions. As for knowledge and experience 
of public administration, it might easily be calculated 
that the Labour Members have an average of far more years 
of service on municipal and other local councils than the 
members o~ either the Liberal or the Unionist Party. It is, 
indeed, time that the insolent gibes at the Labour Party for 
ignorance or incapacity were given up. In my brief experience 
of the House of Commons it is from the Unionist 
benches that I have heard the most numerous and the most 
egregious blunders in Political Economy. And certainly not 
even the most partial of its supporter's would claim that the 
Treasury Bench has this year distinguished itself, either in 
finance or in law, in knowledge of international affairs or in 
that instinctive wisdom that we call statesmanship. It is 
cormmon ground that the nation's public life appears at the 
moment barren of political genius of the first rank. But 
speaking merely as a lifelong o;.tudent of Government, I have 
no hesitation in saying that the Parliamentary Labour Party 
wiH be able, when the time comes, to take over the responsibilities 
of office at least as competently as the majority of 
Ministers of different parties whose public administration 
during the last forty years it happens to have been my particular 
business to scrutinize and study both from inside 
their offices and from without. .J 

THE IMMORAL TREATIES OF PEACE. 
Let us turn now to the grave problems with which the 
nation is confronted. At the root of all our present troubles 
is the state of warlike tension from one end of Europe to 
the other, which is plainly the outcome of the unsatisfactory 
treaties by which the war was ended. The historian of the 
future cannot. fail to record that Paris, in rgrg, was a factory 
of international inefficiency on a quite calamitous scale. Today 
this inefficiency is patent to all men. Nearly five years 
have elapsed since the Armistice. But the necessary complicated 
economic organization of Europe as a commercial 
whole has not yet been resto,red; food surpluses and raw 
materials in one part can only with the utmost difficulty be 
exchanged for the products of labour in other parts; indeed, 
all sorts of additional barriers to the free movement of goods, 
persons and communication have been set up; we have not 
yet ·got even anything like a unified system of transport 
across the political frontier lines that have been so fantastically 
drawn across the map of Europe; among the peoples 
penury and privation almost universally prevail; even the 
mere material damages to the fields and factories of France 
have not been made good. Never perhaps in all history has 

5 


there been so impressive a failure as that of the statesmen 
to whom the world of rgrg entrusted the task of making a 
real peace. What was the cause of this failure? It has been 
~Said, with a great deal of truth, that the blunders embodied 
in these treaties, were the direct result of what is termed in 
theology an invincible ignorance. In ~pite of all the knowledge 
and wi,sdom with which their official subordinates provided 
the " Big Four," these great men apparently could 
not divest their minds from the idea that they were free to 
{:boose, irrespective of the hard facts of the situation, what 
they presumed to think was politically the best for their 
several countries or for themselves. Certainly, we of the 
Labour Party hold that the treaties failed because, almoot 
from end to end, they ignored, on the one hand, economics, 
and on the other hand morality. I confess to the simple 
faith that morality, like economics, is actually part of the 
nature of things; and, in great matters and in 'small, whenever 
we fail to take into account the nature of things, our 
calculations and arrangements are inevitably brought to 
naught. But where the world itself went most wrong" in 
rgrg, and I think that all countries must share the blame, 
and the great majority of their citizens, was in the spirit with 
which the problem was approached. We can all see now 
that Europe could no more be rebuilt upon the passion of 
hate, the passion of greed, and the passion of fear than 
upon anger and violence. And neither hate nor greed, 
neither fear nor violence is brought more into accord with 
the requirements of economi~ or of ethics merely by being 
national instead of individual. 

I .say to-day that we ought as a nation to come out of our 
nationalist illusions of this kind. It is high time that we 
based our foreign policy, not on what we presume to think 
our rights, but on what we can discern to be in the common 
interests of the world; not on national hatred, national greed 
or even national fear, but on a sense of brotherhood with 
all men; not on what we may hope to make out of other 
nations to our own profit, but on how, with our p~uliar 
gifts and special opportunities, we can best serve humanity 
as a whole. And as all the nations now discover they are 
in a very real sense members one of another, we shall find 
that brotherhood in whatever best serves humanity as a 
whole will be, in the long run, most conducive to the interests 
of each. What the Labour Party stands for ·is a 
policy of mutual service, as contrasted with a policy of the 
deliberate pu'r'Suit of profit for self-it matters not whether 
the self to be profited be the individual at the expense of 
other individuals, or the nation at the expense of other 
nations. 

6 


LABOUR'S FOREIGN POLICY. 

Such a foreign policy would promptly assert for this 
country that leading position in the concert of Europe which 
the present Government has abandoned. It would tell 
France plainly that we will go no !Step further with her in 
what ~Seems to us a fatal policy of aggression, arising, as it 
seems, from what the psycho~analysts would call a '' fear-
complex " unworthy of a great nation. · It would accept 
with cordiality the willingness of the German people, provided 
the claims to extravagant war indemnities are withdrawn, 
to make good, up to the limit of economic capacity, 
the material damage inflicted on the mines and buildings of 
France and Belgium, and to compensate the civilian victims 
of bomb or torpedo. It would, for the sake of a general 
settlement, waive all further claims, and press for a univer:sal 
cancellation of inter-governmental war debts. It would convert 
the League of Nations into an organization absolutely 
world-wide, seeking to make it in its own sphere as continuously 
effective as is the International Postal Union. Such 
a policy would aim persistently and wholeheartedly at the 
earliest possible restoration to economic prosperity of all the 
nations of the world, including, as a matter of course, those 
with whom we were lately at war. It would make continuously 
for an ever-progressing common limitation of armaments. 
In my view, it would inspire our advocacy, within 
the League of Nations, of the establishment of some practicable 
international currency and some uninterrupted machinery 
of international remittances, possibly by the intermediation 
of the International Postal Union itself. It would work 
towards a universal suppression of customs and pa.ssport 
barriers; or at least their subordination to the far superior 
interest of unhampered intercommunication; and, assuming 
that the political particularism of the different states forbids 
at present a European Customs Union; at least for the establishment 
of a completely unified railway and canal administration 
from Astrachan to Algeciras, with undisturbed and 
untaxed passage of all goods and passengers merely in transit. 
And along with such an economic policy, there might 
be urged upon the Governments of Europe the adoption of a 
common policy of education in internationalism, in elementary 
'Schools and universities alike, in substitution for the 
ludicrously false history and economics still inserted, in the 
suppos_ed interests of patriotism, in the school books of the 
world. 


MAKING THE WEAKEST PAY FOR THE WAR. 
I am not sure that there may not be some truth in the 
suggestion that it is not so much national particularism as 
the private interest of international Capitalism that is t<rday 
J the main obstacle to such a foreign policy as I have outlined. 
Certainly, if we turn to our own domestic problems we must, 
I fear, agree that it is essentially the determination of those 
who are wealthy to hold to their riches, and to their power 
over other people's lives, that is standing in the way of 
social reform. What is going on around us, often unconsciously 
to those concerned, is, fundamentally, a struggle as 
to who shall be financially the losers by the war, those who 
live by owning or those who live by working; and among 
those who do participate in industry, between those who do 
the initiating, directing and managing, or those whe contribute 
the manual and routine mental labour. This it is 
that lies at the back of the almost universal attack upon 
wages of the past two years, which has extended to establishments 
and industries that are admittedly making large 
profits. This attack has already cost the wage-earners something 
like 700 million pounds a year, or nearly twice the 
whole of the payment this year in Income Tax. The employers' 
determination to pull down what they called the 
'' swollen wages of war time '' was, indeed, more than once 
openly avowed in 1919-20, though the opportunity came only 
in 1921-22. But we see the same thing elsewhere. There 
is, in all industrial and economic problems and reform projects, 
a very distinct '' ruck up,'' even among those who 
were formerly inclined to philanthropy. Whether it be 
Housing or Education, the Trade Boards Act or the Shop 
Hours Act, provision for maternity and infancy or provision 
for the feeble-minded, there is a very decided check to any 
progress, almost avowedly on the ground that in face of the 
terrible taxation no more money can be spent without 
actually lessening the total net income available of the well-
to-do class. One public-spirited local administrator put the 
case quite simply to me. If the County Council, he said, 
established the new institutions that were required, the increase 
in rates would compel him to give up his orchid house. 
This, of course, means that it is the feeble-minded and the 
mothers and infants, the children and the slum dwellers, the 
workers in the sweated trades, and generally all the wage-
earners, who are to be made to bear the burden of the war 
debt. This was not the idea, let us say in justice to Mr. 
Bonar Law, of the Chancellor of the Exchequer of 1917. It 
is not the idea of the economists. It is certainly not the 
idea of the Labour Party, which must go on asserting that 
there can be no financial security, and indeed no complete 


restoration of industrial prosperity in this country, so long 
as one million pounds have to be taken out of the product 
of labour each working day, before either wages are paid or 
profit is made, merely to defray the interest on the war debt. 
A War Debt Redemption Levy, on fortunes exceeding 
£s,ooo in graduated proportion to the ability to pay, 
sufficient to redeem the main bulk of the debt, stands as the 
indispensable step to any stable economic order in this 
country. 


THE INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGE. 

There are three dominant features of the economic life of 

to-day peremptorily demanding the consideration of every 

statesman, and challenging every political party. There is 

the almost complete supersession, by ·subtle forms of trust 

and monopoly, of that free competition among capitalist en


terprises which used to give the consumer at least some 

guarantee that prices would oscillate closely around the 

necessary cost of production. This problem, I find, reduces 

the candid statesman of either of the older parties privately 

to despair. He sees no solution. There is in the next place, 

that equivocal influence, if not sinister dominance, in all 

important issues of government, in the newspaper press, 

and even in educational and social organization, of the 

private interests of the owners of great masses of wealth. 

In the form in whic.h it exists to-day, this is a new feature. 

I do not find that such Liberal or Unionist members of the 

House of Commons as I have talked to on the subject, even 

•when 
they recognize its danger, have any idea of haw to 
prevent this illegitimate dominance. And the third of these 
outstanding economic problems-into which, as it seems to 
me, both the others enter-is that of Unemployment; not 
1 

so much in its present magnitude, which is exceptional and 
transient, but in its persistence and universality. 


THE BANKRUPTCY OF THE "GOVERNING CLASS." 
It would, I suppose, be very mde of us to " butt in " at 
the domestic recriminations of the conferences of either section 
olf the Liberal Party--or to intrude on those more 
shrouded interchanges of counsel among the influential personages 
of the Unionist Party-with any peremptory challenge 
as to the substance of their respective policies. I fear 
that neither Liberalism nor Unionism would·abide our questioning. 
But I may at least put the inquiry before this Conference. 
What has the Liberal Party-what has Mr. Asquith 
or Mr. Lloyd George-what has the Unionist Party under 
Mr. Baldwin-to propose to the consumer by way of protection 
against the now continuous profiteering of the various 
capitalist combinations that dominate prices? How does 


9 


either of these statesmen suggest that the illegitimate and 

almost limitless power of private wealth in the newspaper 

press and in public administration can be checked? Finally, 

does either of these parties or these statesmen believe that 

the British wage-earners will go on acquiescing in the com


mon refusal to deal adequately and systematically with the 

tragedy of nation-wide unemployment? It is, I venture to 

say, in the failure of political leaders even to apply their 

minds to these three fundamental economic problems, still 

less, to permit them to appear in their political programmes, 

that stands revealed to-day the bankruptcy of both Liberal-
L ism and Conservatism. 

LABOUR'S HOME POLICY. 
The Labour Party at least grapples with these problems 
in all their ramifications. Where the candid Liberal or the 
honest Unionist admits that he sees no way out, the inquirer 
who comes to the Labour Party finds that it has principles, 
directly applicable to the very questions about whicl! he is 
puzzled. And what has become unusual in political parties, 
the Labour Party has not only principles but also a practical 
programme worked out in considerable detail; and a pro-
gramme which flows out of its principles, and is consistent 
with these. This consistency between party principles and 
party programme is indeed a iuxury ! Nothing strikes me 
with greater astonishment than the unabashed way in which 
Ministers, whether Liberal or Unionist, whenever they are 
compelled to grapple with a pressing evil, adopt, not a!\ 
individualist solution, which is what, in my innocence, I used 
to expect from them, but always and inevitably a Collectivist 
solution. The policy that they continue to profess is, of 
course, violently Anti-Collectivist. But whenever they have 
actually to do anything in their several departments it is 
always a Collectivist line that they follow. Naturally, because 
along this line they lack both faith and knowledge; 
they make a botch. The nation will sooner or later see the 
wisdom of calling in those doctors who both understand and 
believe in what they prescribe. 
Now, it is not my business here to expound once more the 
principles of the Labour Party; nor even to recite the titles 
of the Bills and pamphlets in which its practical programme 
is embodied. Any non-member who sends threepence to the 
Party Secretary at 33, Eccleston Square, will receive by return 
of post Labour and the New Social Order, in which he 
will find a comprehensive statement of what the Party stands 
for. I can best utilize my present opportunity by emphasizing 
for your own consideration certain general features of 
our position to-day. 

10 


"GRADUALNESS." 

First let me insist on what our opponents habitually ignore, 
and indeed, what they iSeem intellectually incapable of understanding, 
namely the inevitable gradualness of our scheme of 
change. The very fact that Socialists have both principles 

and a programme appears to confuse nearly all their critics. 
If we state our principles, we are told " That is not practicable." 
When we recite our programme the objection is 
" That is not Socialism." But why because we are idealists, 
should we be supposed to be idiots? For the Labour Party,
it must be plain, Socialism is rooted in poJitical Democracy; 
which necessarily compels us to recognize that every !Step 
towards our goal is dependent on gaining the assent and 
support of at least a numerical majority of the whole people. 
Thus, even if we aimed at revolutionizing everything at once, 
we should necessarily be compelled to make each particular 
change only at the time, and to the extent, and in the manner 
in which ten or fifteen million electors, in all ISOrts of conditions, 
of all sorts of temperaments, from Land's End to the 
Orkneys, could be brought to consent to it. How anyone 
can fear that the British electorate, whatever mistakes it 
may make or may condone, can ever go too fast or too far 
is incomprehensible to me. That indeed, is the supremely 
valuable safeguard of any effective democracy. 

But the Labour Party, when in due course it comes to be 
entrusted with power, will naturally not even want to do 
everything at once. Surely, it must be abundantly manifest 
to any instructed person that, whilst it would be easy to 
draft proclamations of universal change, or even enact laws 
in a single sitting purporting to give a new Heaven and a 
new Earth, the result, the next morning, would be no change 
at all, unless, indeed, the advent of widespread confusion. I 
remember Mr. Bernard Shaw saying, a whole generation 
ago, " Don't forget that, whilst you may nationalize the 
railways in one afternoon, it will take a long time to transform 
all the .third-class carriages and all the first-class carriages 
into second-class carriages.'' Once we face the 
necessity of putting our principles first into Bills, to be 
fought through committee clause by clause; and then into 
the appropriate administrative machinery for carrying them 
into execution from one end of the Kingdom to the other-
and this is what the Labour Party has done with its Socialism 
-the inevitability of gradualness cannot fail to be appreciated. 
This translation of Socialism into practicable projects, 
to be adopted one after another, is just the task in 
which we have been engaged for a whole generation, with 
the result th<lt, on every side, fragments of our proposals 

II 


have already been put !SUccessfully into operadon by town 
and county councils, and the national government itself, 
and have now become accepted as commonplaces by the 
average man. The whole nation has been imbibing Socialism 
without realizing it! It is now time for the subconscious 
to rise into consciousness. 

INCREASING RESPONSIBILITY FOR ACT AND 
WORD. 
Let me add a word in passing about our position as a party 
in this matter. The Labour Party, after more than twenty 
years' >Strenuous work, has now attained the position of the 
Official Opposition, holding itself out to the electors as the 
Alternative Government, prepared to take over the whole 
administration of the nation as soon as it is called upon to 
do so The Party must remember this position, and rise to 
its responsibilities. We have, from now onward, to work 
and speak and act, under the sense of the liability, at any 
moment, to be charged with putting our plans and projects 
in operation. This does not mean, I suggest, that we should 
abandon our investigations and researches whether individual 
or departmental, which have proved of the greatest value in 
putting us ahead of the other political parties, or give us 
refining and enlarging our ideals, or as individuals, cease 
the expounding of inspiring visions of what the future might 
and should unfold. But it does mean, I suggest, that we 
shou'ld not lightly commit ourselves as a party-and we 
should not even seek to commit the party as a party-to new 
or additional projects, or to the details of reforms, if these 
belong more appropriately to a stage of greater freedom and 
less responsibility. 

THE FUTILITY OF VIOLENCE. 
This brings me to the suggestion that surely every CJhzen 
of our own land must see, in the experience of the past decade, 
an overwhelming demonstration of the fact that violence 
is, and must be, always accursed, injuring both him who 
does and him who suffers it, and futile to both. Violence 
persuades no one, convinces no one, satisfies no one. Thus, 
it may produce death, or the acquiescence which is the death 
of the mind-that is to say violence may destroy, but it can 
never construct. Moreover, in our practical British way we 
can see that, by the very nature of the case, violence can 
be much more easily and effectively applied on the Conservative 
side-to keep things as they are, becau<;e this requires 
only acquiescence-than on the side of chang-e, because every 
change requires the active participation of the citizen, the 
adoption of new methods of life and work, or at least the 

12 


formation of new habits. What has happened in the United 
States on the one hand, and in Italy on the other, where property, 
in small holdings as well as great, has successfully 
used violence against the popular cause, are but examples 
of the general proposition that when it comes to the brutalities 
of physical force, reaction easily goes one better than 
the revolutionary mob. It is when the decision is arrived at 
by counting heads, not by breaking them, that we get the 
nearest approach to Government of the people, by the people, 
for the people. At any rate it is in this faith that the Labour 
Party is rooted. 

THE ABUSE OF AUTHORITY. 
Let me add that in my judgment it behoves us to weigh 
our words when we voice our intuitive objection to the 
authority of government. We must, of course, be outspoken 
in our denunciation of every form of governmental tyranny, 
whether " white," " red," black or any other colour, at 
home or abroad, in Asia and Africa as well as in Europe and 
America. The public opinion of the civilized world-for 
which in this matter the Labour Party has largely the responsibility-
has a real influence, slow moving though it be, 
even over the most obdurate of authorities. We have need 
to exercise the greatest vigilance to detect and at once oppose 
every instance o.f the illegal exercise of power, to which all 
governments, whether democratic or monarchical, municipal 
or national, are perpetually prone. Even in the land of 
Habeas Corpus, as recent instances show, we have by no 
means yet recovered all the liberties that we lost during the 
war. The strenuous and ultimately successful fight against 
the Home Secretary's arbitrary Irish deportations, which 
was maintained by the Labour Party, in the House of Corn-. 
mons, in the constituencies and in the Courts of Justice, 
will, I hope, be repeated whenever fresh cases occur. 

THE MEANING OF GOVERNMENT. 
But whatever is done to safeguard individual liberty, and 
to safeguard it, also, against economic and social as well 
as against governmental tyranny, let us always remember 
that it is not against government itself that we are protesting. 
For government is, after all, only another word 
for that deliberate co-operation of citizens in a common task 
which lies at the root of all our proposals. The alternative 
to government is not freedom. It is the very anarchy of 
competition, unrestrained and unregulated, from which the 
world is still suffering; it is, in short, fighting, whether between 
individuals, between groups, between classes, or between 
nations; fighting which, even when limited to what 


we blandly call economic weapons, is inevitably destructive 
of personal liberty on a far greater scale than any governmental 
tyranny can be. When this fighting takes the form 
of war we see that it destroys civilization itself. The only 
alternative to the !Struggle expressed by the sinister maxim, 
" Every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost," 
is, let us remember, exactly that deliberately arranged cooperation 
among citizens in social tasks that we term government. 
To-day, I make bold to say, what the world needs 
is not less government but more. This need for a perpetually 
increasing c~peration in social functions, in place of 
individualist anarchy, springs inevitably from the ever-growing 
complexity of the social life of crowded populations, in 
which this very co-operation is the condition under which 
alone individual liberty can be maximized. We enjoy actually 
greater freedom on the highways because there is a Rule of 
the Road, than we ·should if everyone drove as the whim of 
the moment dictated. It is because we want more government 
internationally (and thereby a wider measure of national 
freedom in any real .sense) that we support the League of 

Nations, and seek to render it both more democratic and 
more and more effective as an instrument of world control. 
At the other end of the scale we ask perpetually for greater 
powers for our Town Councils, and other local authorities, 
and we look to their obtaining an ever-widening sphere for 
their beneficent administration by which the freedom of the 
mass of the people to live their own lives is so much increased. 
And even at Whitehall, though we grumble at bureaucracy, 
it is not a diminution but an increase that in the name of 
freedom the Labour Party demands in the functions exercised, 
for instance, in connection with mines and railways, 
shipping and insurance, health and housing or the conditions 
under which ninety per cent. of the people have to work and 
live. What we have always to insist on is that government 
shOIUid, at all points, be effectively democratized; that it 
should be, wherever practicable, entrusted to the local representatives 
of the community, rather than to the necessarily 
centralized departments at Whitehall; that in every branch 
the widest possible sphere should be assigned to the voluntarily 
associated Consumers' Cp-operative Movement, which, 
be it remembered, is, to the Socialist, an integral part of 
Socialism itself ; and that everywhere the necessary supervision 
and control to be exercised by Parliament and the 
Central Government should be supplemented by a steadily 
increasing participation in management by the vocational 
organizations of all grades of workers concerned. How difficult 
it is to make the academic philosophers, not to mention 

Lord Chancellors, understand that vocational organization 


is itself an indispensable part of democratic government-
that political democracy without industrial democracy is .-~ 
sham ! But subject to these improvements in governmental 
machinery-improvements which, I admit, are of the essence 
of the case--I repeat that, in my opinion, what the world 
needs to-day-what Britain needs to-day-what even the 
Labour Party needs to-day is, not less government but more. 

THE SPIRIT THAT GIVETH LIFE. 
Finally, let me remind you that there is a higher need even 
than government, whether it be the government of a city or 
the government of our tempers or the government of our 
tongues. It is not upon its plans or its programmes-not 
even upon its principles or its ideals-that a political party 
is ultimately judged. It is not upon them or any of them 
that its measure of success in the continuous appeal to the 
judgment of the average citizen finally depends. The success 
of the Labour Party in this country depends, more than 
on anything else, upon the spirit in which we hold our faith , 
the spirit in which we present our proposals, the spirit in 
which we meet our opponents in debate, the spirit in which 
we fulfil our own obligations, the spirit in which, with inevitable 
backslidings, we live our own lives. We shall not 
achieve much, whatever changes we can bring about, unless 
what we do is done in the spirit of fellowship. For we must 
always remember that the founder of British Socialism was 
not Kart Marx but Robert Owen, and that Robert Owen 
preached not " class war " but•the ancient doctrine of human 
brotherhood-the hope, the faith, the living fact of human 
fellowship--a faith and a hope reaffirmed in the words of 
that other great British Socialist-William Morris-in The 
Dream of John Ball. " Forsooth, brothers, fellowship is 
heaven, and lack of fellowship is hell; fellowship is life, and 
lack of fellowship is death; and the deeds that ye do upon 
the earth, it is for fellowship's sake that ye do them; and 
the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for ever, <·t:d 
each one of you part of it, while many a man's life upon the 
earth from the earth shall wane. '' 


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