538 THE CLASS STRUGGLE BRIDGING THE GAP 539 tice to keep the millions of soldiers supplied with food and deathdealing implements, and to furnish the other millions of noncombatants behind the lines with the necessities that the insatiable monster of modern war keeps calling for and must have.
These millions of men, women and children are laboring under different conditions, under a different form of industrial organization, than they labored under previous to August 1914. Naturally, they are thinking different thoughts from those they harbored in the days that are gone, never to return. They have experienced a psychological transformation, even though they hardly realize it themselves. What they are thinking of, no one exactly knows, as the conditions are so complicated by both the spectacular and sordid phases of the war. Furthermore, they have been unable to get together and discuss adequately the situation, present and future, that confronts them. However, efforts are being made by the Socialists to overcome this fault as far as possible.
Furthermore, news coming from Europe is so carefully filtered by censorship that we are not enlightened as to the real state of mind. And most of the news that gets through is predigested by various inspired interpretations, which leaves the average reader with a rather insipid morsel for reflection, were he so inclined.
England is the only country that we seem to get any authentic labor news from, and as long as some newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets come through, we cannot be kept altogether in the dark. Without looking for the millennium, or expecting the impossible, there is every reason to believe that much real progress is being made by the English labor movement, and that some sound thinking is being done by the British workers. This conclusion is drawn not only from what the working class is saying and demanding, but from the fears, expressed and implied, of the capitalists themselves.
Before the war, perhaps most of the discontented, radical workers of England were inclined to look to the State for relief from the exploitation to which they were subjected. Nearly four years of constantly growing State control has shown them the futility of emancipation, or even of moderate improvement, from that direction.
From every side, we hear the English workers protesting against the intolerable master. the State; and they are submitting, begrudgingly, only because they believe it is a lesser willone that they can more readily overcome than the danger of possible German domination.
The capitalists, too, are fully alive to this unrest and antagonism on the part of the workers to the tyranny of State control, and to offset the inclination toward industrial democracy, they are trying to buck the irresistible trend of evolution by commanding the great social forces to stand still and reverse themselves. These modern economic Joshuas are as yet apparently unaware of their finite impotence in the majestic presence of evolution.
Walter Runciman, in an article entitled The Radical Outlook in the January issue of The Contemporary Review, says: It (control of the State over industry) has overspread the industrial life of nearly every trade, and has conferred on officials powers intolerable to the Trade Unions, now hated by men who formerly called themselves State Socialists. They have had a surfeit of the State official.
All of this is perfectly true, so Runciman of the shipbuilding family throws in a few tears of sympathy, and hastens to assure the workers that he is perfectly willing (oh, that such good intent should be in vain. to relieve the State of its unwelcome job as exploiter when the war is over.
For the other side, Arthur Henderson puts in a word. No one can accuse Henderson of being a revolutionist in his writings he shows his utter dislike for the word but he states in a paper. The Outlook for Labour, with apparent conviction, in reference to the newly voiced aims of the Labour Party. The whole organized movement. can only interpret the present universal catastrophe as the final stage in the disintegration and collapse of the civilization which was founded upon the