* THE LAND

"But this is not Socialism," you say. Very well. Keir Hardie told me that these "reform laws are only the prelude to the time when property will not stand between men and their happiness. We will then legislate away the causes of poverty."

M.Hyndman, with brusque rhetoric, said:

Utopianism is mere moonshine. These people who think the day will come when roasted pigeons, roasted pigeons, mind you, will fly into their mouths, are foolish dreamers. We make the world better by doing the little things that need to be done. I can see an immense difference between the attitude of society toward

the poor and oppressed from the time I was a labor orator in the parks, and to-day. And what has brought about the change? Not dreaming, sir, not dreaming."

Bernard Shaw himself has confessed the orthodoxy of this neo-democracy. "Nobody now conceives Socialism as a destructive insurrection ending, if successful, in millennial absurdities." And of Lloyd George's budget, he says: "If not a surrender of the capitalist citadel, it is at all events letting down the drawbridge." But he dropped a few acid adjectives on my theory of the Liberal-Socialist alliance. "No, they can't be Socialists," he said. "It takes brains to be a Socialist: and these fellows need to be guided." And Sidney Webb, of course, has put his shoulder to the wheel of the new Socialist Juggernaut that is to squeeze the red ducats out of the prostrate form of lord, landowner, and millionaire by "constitutional" methods.

LIBERALS NOT SOCIALISTS

Now, I do not accuse Mr. Asquith and his followers of being Socialists. Winston Churchill, of the Admiralty, has often protested that "Liberalism is not Socialism, and never can be. Socialism attacks capital; Liberalism attacks the abuses of monopoly. Socialism wishes to wreck; Liberalism to rebuild."

Last winter, when a Socialist member in the House of Commons moved "a bill establishing the right to work, by placing upon the State the responsibility of directly providing employment or maintenance for the genuine unemployed," the motion was defeated by a brilliant speech of John Burns. Only this summer, during the railroad strike, Lloyd George gave Keir Hardie a fearful lashing on the floor of the House of Commons, because the veteran Socialist had bitterly arraigned the Home Secretary for using soldiers in maintaining order.

But it was this same Lloyd George who, in a speech in the City Temple, more than a year ago, said that there were thousands upon thousands in the city "who do not know where their next meal is coming from," and then asked dramatically, "what kind of government do you call

that which allows such conditions to continue?" And one old deacon was so wrought up that he cried: "It's a sin to be patient!"

Little wonder that the venerable dean of the church Socialists, and one of the oldest Socialists in England, could tell me: "I have known Lloyd George since he was a young man. he was a young man. He is a magnificent fighter, and stands for everything we Socialists are fighting for at the present time."

No, the Liberal-Radicals are not Socialists. But they have "strong leanings." Sometimes they fight each other, occasionally they help each other on the hustings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded for the election of Mr. Lansbury who is now making the most exciting speeches against the use of soldiery in economic warfare. And even learned John Morley Americans find it hard to say "Lord" Morley - even benign John Morley, friend and biographer of Gladstone, Whig of the old school, appeared on the stump in behalf of Philip Snowden, journalist and ardent Socialist.

The Liberals are not Socialists. And I will let the reader make his own adventures in treading the tortuous and narrow channel that separates "enlightened Liberalism" from "Liberal Socialism.”

The truth is, Liberals and Conservatives are helpless on the rushing tide of an awakened English sentiment. Brougham Villiers wrote, some years before the Liberals got into power, that the hope of the country lay in an "alliance, won by persistent, intelligent helpfulness on the part of the Liberals, with the alienated artisans, for the betterment of the condition of the poorest, so as to give at once hope and life and better leisure for thought." And Professor Hobhouse, now a member of the Cabinet, said a few years ago: "I venture to conclude that the difference between a true, consistent, public spirited Liberalism and a rational collectivism ought, with a genuine effort at understanding, to disappear."

SYNDICALISM APPEARS

And now, just as we had comfortably concluded that the Radical-Liberal Party

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little island soon realized its absolute dependence upon its railroads and its ships for food. It has on hand provisions for a scant fortnight, then its people must go hungry. The strikers soon had the phlegmatic Englishman in a panic. I have never witnessed such a change as came over the Londoners in the few days of the strike from stolid, beefy indifference to nervous, panicky haste. The brilliant The brilliant luck of Lloyd George stayed with him, and

has democratized parliament by killing the Lords' prerogative. It has begun to strangle the land monopoly and to foster the weak and unemployed at the expense of the State. In no other country in Europe has so much genuine progress been made toward trying out the practical aspects of Socialism.

And yet, just in this country of stable and stolid conservatism, a general strike suddenly breaks over the realm.

I have every reason to believe that this strike was the result of a plan long conceived and carefully worked up. In April, last year, a labor leader whose political disappointments embittered him toward the Labor Party, suggested to me that "things would be doing in the summer." Tom Mann was coming on from Australia, a general strike of transport employees would be an effective way of teaching people a lesson, etc. Tom Mann came, and when I returned to England in the late summer from the continent, he was leading the men in Liverpool and Ben Tillet was busy with the dockers in London.

This strike was part of an international movement. English emissaries visited Paris and Berlin before it began. France, England, Belgium, Germany, even Holland and Scandinavia, have an international labor understanding. Their transport workers are well organized.

The strike in England was partly a revolt against oppressive exactions made by employers. It was also a revolt against the leaders of the Labor Party and against the peaceful methods of the Liberal-Labor alliance.

No sooner had the railroad strike subsided, than the agitators got busy with the coal miners. Rumblings were heard in Wales, the most excitable of the mining population. They were echoed from Scotland and the north counties; and suddenly the strike broke. It was a general strike of coal workers; it was fostered by the same militant Socialistic leaders who had planned and instigated the railroad strike; it was rapidly drawing the sympathetic action of the railroad workers, dock workers, and other transportation unions and was beginning to excite international action among the transport workers of Belgium and France, when the Government succeeded in bringing about an agreement for arbitration. But not until the Prime Minister had prepared the passage of a minimum wage bill. This is, perhaps, the most significant event in recent labor wars. It means that the Government is not only willing to use the government to force industrial disputants to conciliation, but is willing to dictate how much profit a coal owner can make upon his property. When

you dictate profits you absorb property, and reduce ownership to a mere bailment. And in each successive strike, the Government is finding conciliation a more difficult task.

But all violent Socialistic movements are foredoomed to failure in England. These orderly people resent destruction of property. They have had but one bloody revolution, and that was forced upon the yeomanry by a singularly stubborn aristocracy. The attempts at upheaval will be repeated but will never succeed. It is not the English way.

THE MARCH OF SOCIALIZATION

You

Wherever you go in England you hear that "Socialism is in the air." cannot talk ten minutes with anybody without touching upon some phase of the social question. It is not the red Socialism of Marx and the continent; it is the practical British Socialism of amelioration. "This practical, constitutional, evolutionary Socialism," a chronicler for the Fabians calls it. It would have to be practical to appeal to the British voter, constitutional to appeal to the British statesman, and evolutionary to appeal to the British philosopher.

"We are all Socialists now," the brilliant, word-loving Lord Rosebery said, a few years ago.

In the dark days of 1888 and 1890 there were a great many young Socialists who believed that the social revolution was waiting around the next corner, and would soon sweep over London in bloody reality. Many of the young men are Fabians today. Some are even straight-laced Conservatives and loose-construction Liberals. They think they were mistaken. They were not. There was a revolution around the next corner. It was not sanguinary. It was a British revolution, and to-day it has captured the high places. Government is rapidly encroaching upon private property through the powers of taxation, of police supervision, of sanitary regulation, and through State aid to the unfortunate.

Ownership, even in land, is now only an incident. The rights of society are growing daily more paramount. So far has the "revolution" advanced.