Labour stands apart, intractable. If there is to be any such rapid
conversion of the economic machinery as the opportunities and
necessities of this great time demand, then labour must be taken into
the confidence of those who would carry it through. It must be reassured
and enlightened. Labour must know clearly what is being done; it must be
an assenting co-operator. The stride to economic national service and
Socialism is a stride that labour should be more eager to take than any
other section of the community.

The first step in reassuring labour must be to bring the greedy private
owner and the speculator under a far more drastic discipline than at
present. The property-owning class is continually accusing labour of
being ignorant, suspicious, and difficult; it is blind to the fact that
it is itself profit-seeking by habit, greedy, conceited, and half
educated.

Every step in the mobilisation of Great Britain's vast resources for the
purposes of the war has been hampered by the tricks, the failures to
understand, and the almost instinctive disloyalties of private owners.
The raising of rents in Glasgow drove the infuriated workmen of the
Clyde district into an unwilling strike. It was an exasperating piece of
private selfishness, quite typical of the individualistic state of mind,
and the failure to anticipate or arrest it on the part of the Government
was a worse failure than Suvla Bay. And everywhere the officials of the
Ministry of Munitions find private employers holding back workers and
machinery from munition works, intriguing--more particularly through the
Board of Trade--to have all sorts of manufactures for private profit
recognised as munition work, or if that contention is too utterly
absurd, then as work vitally necessary to the maintenance of British
export trade and the financial position of the country. It is an
undeniable fact that employers and men alike have been found far readier
to risk their lives for their country than to lay aside any scale of
profits to which they have grown accustomed.

This conflict of individualistic enterprise and class suspicion against
the synthesis of the public welfare is not peculiar to Great Britain; it
is probably going on with local variations in Germany, Russia, Italy,
France, and, indeed, in every combatant country. Because of the
individualistic forces and feelings, none of us, either friends or
enemies, are really getting anything like our full possible re