stupid announcements issued by the mineowners urging the men to lay aside their old strife, to work to their utmost in order that the navy and their Allies might have steam coal. A discordant note began to creep into the debates in the heated barroom; strange, unpatriotic speeches were made at the union meetings; violent disputes broke out. The miner felt that it was a disgrace, but sentences crept insidiously into his mind and could not be rooted out. This was a capitalists' war, he was told; it had no relation to his own life; it was an instrument to crush organized labor finally. Everything of this nature that he heard fitted in with the theories that had been pounded into him all his life. The absurd logic of the patriotic speeches at the recruiting meetings in the public square became evident to him.

Then suddenly he awoke to the realization of the fact that the ugly rumors that were in circulation were true. Capital was undoubtedly raising the price of commodities, for his food, clothes, everything cost him more. In some districts even the

rents had gone up. It was proved that fabulous prices were charged by steamshipowners for the transport of the coal that he had been urged to mine for the benefit of his country, that in London there was a charge of twenty shillings a ton over the contract price for the poorer grades of stove coal. The workmen knew that that meant sickness and destitution to hundreds of poor people. The logic of it all was unavoidable. The owners were getting rich out of the war, while labor became poorer. His old suspicion and fear of the power that controlled him awoke from its lethargy. There was no statement so bitter and prejudiced now that did not seem to have its measure of truth.

Organized labor met and urged the facts on Parliament-damning facts which every working-man's paper published. Due to exorbitant freight charges, wheat had risen twenty per cent. over the normal price. On January 14 the Workmen's National Committee re-issued the demands it had announced on the last week in October. They asked for protection

against exorbitant prices and the commandeering of supplies by the nation wherever possible. Food prices by this time had risen from twenty to thirty per cent. over the pre-war level, though the slowly increasing wages affected fewer than two hundred thousand workers out of the whole nation, while a decrease in wages had actually occurred to 150,000 workers in November alone. This condition was unendurable; no amount of patriotism or stoic endurance could blind their eyes to its significance.

On February 11, Parliament debated on the menace of the rise in prices. The attitude of the Government in this debate and the one that followed six days later was one of the immediate causes of the labor unrest of that spring. "Wait till June," said Mr. Asquith, and comforted the labor world by announcing that things were not half as bad as they might be. It is difficult to tell exactly what labor expected of its law-makers at this time; perhaps an outburst of indignation at the discoveries that the Price Committee had made, at least sympathy and immediate palliative measures to establish maximum prices on the necessities of life, leading to their eventual control by the Government. They were told to wait as a child is silenced while its elders talk. "Don't bother us," droned the honorable members of Parliament from their sleeping benches; "we are meditating higher things than the price of food to fill your stomachs."

The effect on working-men was immediate all over the country. Thoroughly awake to the significance of their position, filled at heart with patriotic pride at the way in which their younger brothers and sons had entered the army, they were in so sensitive a condition that if the Government and the capitalist had shown at the beginning a desire to aid them, their unrest might have been stilled until the end of the war. Instead, they were met with stupidity from their rulers and with what seemed to them to be treachery on the part of their employers. In every working community in Great Britain the suspicion. and bitterness which had been bred by

years of struggle against capital aroused again the formidable monster of class hatred. Every public house and labor meeting became a bar of indictment against the sins of employers. Through the winter. months and early spring the facts of the case were piled up, and added to them were Heaven knows what malicious, and incredible tales. There was proof positive of what has been called "an unholy alliance of profiteers," of ship-owners, employers, and merchants.

When June came, and the Government instituted its Munitions Act, which promised that war profits were to be taxed, that labor was to receive an extra wage, and asked in return that there should be no strikes, it was already too late. The working-man in Wales and elsewhere had made up his mind. The young men were flooding into Kitchener's new armies in an undiminished stream. In his willingness to sacrifice himself on the battle-field, the laborer had not changed, but in everything that concerned his work and his attitude toward capital there had been a revolution since those first three months of

war.

How great that revolution was may be judged by the labor disputes that grew up over the country like evil mushrooms. In the June before the war there were 118 strikes; in July almost 50,000 men were involved, all of them in minor disputes, a low average in times of peace. In August came the war, and the number of strikes dropped from 99 to 15, with fewer than 2000 men concerned. By January there had been only 107 strikes in five months, with 15,828 men directly involved. But two months later there were 26,129 men who struck work during the month, and in March there were 74 strikes. The labor committee of investigation and the somnolent debate in the House of Commons had indeed borne fruit. In May there were 6000 more workmen on strike than there had been in the June before the war.

This represents only the graver disputes. In every industrial region there were scores of cases in which strikes of imposing magnitude were diverted only

by the sudden submission of the employers or through the medium of the trade-union leaders and the Government. Outside of the mining districts, the gradual admission of unskilled men and woman labor was beginning to cause discontent and irritation in the ranks of organized labor.

In all this growing confusion the country at large seemed aware of only one source of disturbance, that in the great shipyards along the Clyde. Against the thousands of workers engaged on admiralty work there were vague charges of neglect, wilful slowness, drunkenness, or anything in the world that could prove the laborers engaged on work vital to the safety of the nation were unpatriotic and hostile to the war. The nation could not comprehend why Scotch workmen toiling at the pleasant task of building battleships should behave so outrageously that 9000 of them should dare to strike at the same time. The press began to invent the phrases which now come readily to the lips of men who wish to express their feelings toward organized labor. The Clyde workers were "a stain on the honor of Scotland," though at the same time the Scotch workmen who had enlisted were proving themselves the finest fighters in the army.

It is an anomaly that cannot be solved unless you conclude that the man who has entered the army and the striker are of the same kind and have the same feelings toward their country except that the man who has gone to the firing-line has chosen by far the easier task. The choice between the work of forcing hot rivets into the sides of a battle-ship, breaking coal in a mine, and fighting the Germans for the honor of the nation is incomparably to the advantage of the last. If you know the conditions under which the British working-man lives and his bitterness toward the men who are growing rich from the war, to ask him to cease his conflict with capital is as futile as King Canute's command to the sea. The British laboringman is not, and never will be, a domesticated animal, like his brothers across the North Sea.

Despite the warning furnished in February by the Clyde strike, the nation was unprepared for the upheaval in South Wales in July. That strike, involving the united action of the entire coal-field, awoke England and nations across the seas to the true state of affairs. It is unnecessary to relate the history of the strike. The world knows too well its complete success, and the humiliating position into which it forced the Government by revealing that the penal clauses of its new Munitions Act were unworkable and that a single united labor-union could force the nation to its knees. The second strike in Wales was over a mere technicality as to whether the enginemen and surface-workers should receive the war bonus promised by the Government, and although it concerned only the eastern and central valleys, it threatened to stop work in the entire coal-field if the Government had not yielded again.

As I tramped over the hills of Wales and along the endless streets of mining towns I found an absolute confidence in the men I met as to their power to win that strike or any other that might come in the future. Not one miner of all that I saw seemed to question in the slightest their right to stop work in war-time, though there was a good deal of dispute over the advisability of anything less than united action on the part of the whole field. Their feeling toward the hostility of the rest of the nation other than their own class was almost one of contempt. A group of miners would read a certain scathing editorial which I had cut from a great newspaper and burst into laughter over it or cheerfully curse the man who had written it. It seemed the height of absurdity to a miner whose brother was at the front, and who was thinking of leaving wife and children to go himself, that any one should think him unpatriotic; and as for being a "slacker," it was the men of wealth who in his estimation were the slackers, and not those who worked ten hours a day for a weekly wage of less than thirty shillings.

I have emphasized the situation in

Wales because it is proof of the impregnable position in which the British working-man found himself at that time. The power of organized labor is not only unassailable, but it is increasing steadily. If the attitude of the Government and of capital remains hostile to the workingman's interests, if they do not coöperate with him to keep down the cost of living and to stifle the profiteers who are making fortunes out of the war, there is every evidence that this new-born power will assume a most sinister significance. It has already weakened England's position in the war by a grave restriction in the normal output of mines and factories. If its patriotic attitude, its willingness to send its men to the armies that must be recruited should turn into indifference and aversion, it may prevent the ultimate victory toward which England looks with stoic assurance. Labor might readily become a greater danger than the German armies.

There has never been a long-continued period in Great Britain when the employer and the working-man understood each other, and the rift that began to destroy the brief harmony at the beginning of the war is widening every day. To one who watches the current of affairs there comes an ominous foreboding and fear of what the future may bring, for the assumption becomes unavoidable that labor is preparing itself, either after the war or during it, should it be prolonged, for some stupendous struggle with capital. Already, in the few months since the beginning of the war, it has gained what it needed most if it was to defy its masters-a new assurance of its vast power, a common purpose, and a clear vision. That is an alarming statement, but it is borne out by my personal observation that their class struggle is assuming a larger significance, is of greater interest to them, than their war with Germany. "What is the use," I have heard a railway worker say, "of England's winning this war if organized labor is smashed by capital as its result?" A miner on strike spoke to me of treachery at home, and meant not treason to the

state, but unfaithfulness to the cause of labor and to the thousands of workmen in the trenches. Incidents like that speak more eloquently than volumes of official speeches and reports, because it is the mental attitude of the common laboring-man that counts; not what he has already done, but what his mind may impel him to do in the future.

Since the Welsh strikes there have been a great number of minor disturbances; a munitions plant has struck work as a protest to the transference of skilled labor from the army to the workshop, and under the threat of strike higher wages have been granted to railway men and government employees. Though there are no figures in evidence to establish it, there can be no doubt that the rank and file of labor has not been faithful to its agreement with the Government, and that it is purposely restricting its output, forcing the skilful worker to slow his pace to that of the average. During the Trades Union Congress in September, at which labor adopted its unanimous edict against conscription, Lloyd-George gave concrete examples of this slowing down of production on materials vital to the army and navy. Little has been done to remedy this condition, and, indeed, what can be done when the

working-man knows that the Munitions Act is an empty threat that cannot be fulfilled?

Grave as these incidents are, the appalling feature in the labor situation has been the change in the mind of the mass of working-men, and the gradual consolidation of organized labor into a vast army of men who are beginning to think in common and may some day act in com

mon.

The unity of labor in its opposition to conscription is the most obvious sign of its strength. The unanimous decision at the Trades Union Congress was a proclamation of this to the nation, but there have been other signs of their determination not to endure conscription, though the country is split in the process or the war is won or lost. In the House of Commons, J. H. Thomas, a representative of the railway-men, stated that "on the first day that conscription was introduced, the Government would be compelled to deal not with compulsory service, but with industrial revolution." More and more it has become evident that his statement was not an exaggeration, and that unless labor swings suddenly to the opposite pole, conscription can be introduced only as a perilous expedient, a last resort.