TOPICS OF THE DAY.
" ILLEGAL GOVERNMENT " AND THE REMEDY..
TN another part of our issue of to-day Sir William Davison, the energetic and vigilant Member for South Kensing- ton, sends us some correspondence about the Council of Action which he has had with the secretary of that body. The matters discussed and disclosed are, in our opinion, of the very greatest importance, and the public will do well to give them close attention. It will be seen that the Council of Action has not, as some easy-going people imagined, proved a mere bogy, which would soon disappear and be forgotten. On the contrary, the Council of Action has done exactly what it proposed to do, or what its final architects, the Comronnists of Moscow, designed it to do. Lenin, in one of those free-and-easy constitutional talks which are his speciality, told the world in general and his friends in England in particular that they must get busy with their Communistic revolution and the " heavy civil war " which was to be the necessary accompaniment of the revolution. In addition, however, to these promised pleasures Lenin insisted that the proper plan of campaign was to set tip what he called an illegal system of Govern- ment side by side with the legal system, which could be used partly as a lever to destroy the old system and partly as the mechanism which would be ready to take over the work of government—or shall we say coercion, for under the Soviet system they are much the same 1 As soon as the members of the old Government had been placed. with their backs to the wall or were swinging from the lamp:posts, to use the very words in which our Communists rejoice, the Council of Action would step into the vacant seats in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. Whatever else is obscure from the correspondence with Sir William Davison, it is first of all clear that the Council of Action takes itself quite seriously and is prepared partly by menaces but chiefly by action—i.e., by a universal strike —to compel the Government to carry out not the policy adopted by the representatives of the electors in Parlia- ment assembled, but the policy adopted by the Labour Party, in other words by certain minority sections of the population, plus a number of co-opted members. The next fact which emerges from the letters sent us by Sir William Davison is that the Government appear to think it quite unnecessary to take up the challenge thrown down to them by the Council of Action. That is the only way in which we can read the astonishing answer of the Home Secretary to the question put to him in the House of Commons. We venture to say that this official cowardice or complacency is not only perilous in itself, but will not, if persisted in by the Government, be much longer tolerated, or, to put it more plainly, pardoned by the British people. They look at things from a very different angle from that of Mr. Shortt. They are determined not to be ruled by a self-elected Soviet of persons, some of them actually in liaison with the Communists of Russia and some blackmailed into acquiescence by the aforesaid extremists. Others, like the Jacobins of the French Revolution, are intoxicated by abstract ideas. These hold the comfortable belief that the shedding of much blood, though disagreeable in itself, is absolutely necessary to the production of revolution. If you start with the assumption that revolution is an end, and a beneficial end in itself, apart from its object, as do many revolu- tionaries, bloodshed and cruelty and destruction seem somehow natural and appropriate. In #ny case the revolutionary is always opposed to the idea of majority rule. You have, in his opinion, to give the people not what they want, but what they ought to want. By this easy graduation in political degeneracy minority rule actually becomes an ideal-majority rule, while real-majority rule is regarded as both contemptible per se and suspect from its results.
We shall assume until we are better taught that the British people as a whole, whatever the Government may think, are not going to sit down under the menaces of the Council of Action. Though the Government appar- ently do not see it, the people perceive that a very dangerous piece of machinery has been publicly set up in this country piece of machinery which, if skilfully, recklessly, and boldly employed, is quite enough to destroy our Con- stitution and bring upon us untold, though entirely un- necessary, misery end. degradation. The machine is capable of reproducing the horrors of Bolshevik Russia, and horrors, though at firist that sounds hardly possible immensely intensified owing to the thickness on tin; ground of our population. In the vast spaces of Russia men can just live under a Soviet Government. In crowded places like the towns of England the agony would be far greater. Russia is all country and no town. We are all town and no country. These are grim facts, but they are worth remembering. " But," it will be said, " there is no reason to worry about this fantastic* machinery that was put together so openly in our midst. Don't you notice with what trembling fingers the work is done I Don't you see how little pleased its authors really are with it, and how obviously the whole thing is only meant to frighten us 1" Our answer to such pleas for not bothering and for not indulging in a pleasant lassitude is that those trembling fingers and that half-heartedness in the men who are now at work on the Council of Action are the very worst and most dangerous symptom of all. The men at this moment on the Council of Action are, we admit, not the kind of gentlemen who would desire to plunge the country into misery, or wage a " heavy civil war " or use the blank walls of London as convenient places for getting rid of superfluous anti-revolutionaries. We are surprised, however, that the Government and our leading people, who have had plenty of time to study the history of revolutions, do not realize what we may call the theory and practice of the warming-pan. This is one of the most ingenious and most successful of revolutionary inventions. By threats, menaces, cajolery, bribery, and the rest of the machinery of blackmail you induce a set of moderates or semi-moderates to get ready the scaffolding. When it is ready, and the proper time is come, the moderates are pushed aside and the true uses of the scaffolding are made clear by those who suddenly and decisively take the place of the constructors. If the machinery for calling a general strike, not for economic reasons but to coerce the Government, is allowed to become one of our institutions, it will some day be Used. But it will not long be used by the men who created it or who now work it. The stages will be something of this kind. Moderates will be coerced into threatening a general strike and then backing up their threats 1py fin attempt at action. But the moment the real strain begins the Girondins of the Council will be superseded by a much more formidable and a much more desperate set of people. These will be a set of people of which the British public up to then has never heard. They will not be known even by many of the members of the organized trades. They will be men who will have been as much kept in the shadow as were Mr. Collins and his colleagues of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and of the /Ash Republican Army till the appointed hour arrived. During the years between the rebellion and the present year Mr. Collins was to most of us not even the shadow of a name These are not the vaticinations of a latter-day Cassandra, but plain facts drawn from revolutionary experience. And at present they are emphasized by an unusual fact. Most revolutionary conspirators and plotters suffer from a lack of money. This is not the case now. Instead of the old condition that the more extreme a man's views the less the money he had, the pockets of the extremists are much better lined than those of the moderates. And for a very good reason. It is Lenin, the prince of ex- tremists, who has got the gold. Strangest fact of all, he has no use for it for himself or for his own revolution, but a great deal of use for it in bringing on that world revolution which is his obsession. Finally, though to say this, we admit, will make many people think that we are overdoing it, Lenin realizes that with England left out there can be no real revolution. There- fore he must concentrate upon getting a move on in England. That was the real reason why he wanted to buy the Daily Herald, and he is now apparently getting hold of other Labour papers. Most significant of all, that is why he has set in motion those trembling wires which have ended by resounding through the land the praises of the Council of Action. But enough of proof that we have got to take the Council of Action seriously. We are convinced that the country does not want conversion on this point. What it wants to know about now is the remedy. How are we to deal with a phenomenon of this kind ? That the country means to rule itself through the will of the majority of the Voters is quite certain. But people are unquestionably puzzled by the problem of how to deal with a general strike. " You can't force people to work if they won't. But if they get cross the minority in three or four of the big trades might prefer to starve the country and themselves to death rather than give in." The answer is that men won't do these things voluntarily. Unless there is coercion by some organization, by some minority which seizes power and authority and acts the part of a tyrant, a general strike, if attempted, will be a half-hearted affair. The represen- tatives of the Majority can always oppose successfully their will against the will of a Minority, if they are not panic-stricken, weak, or negligent, or somnolent. But how are we to ensure that some unwillingness to resist, or some failure to act at the right moment, will not paralyze those in power ? Governments, though they have all"the necessary power in reserve when some violent minority springs at their throats, are as apt to be stampeded as is a huge bull by the attack of a panther which has not a twentieth part of its victim's weight. An effective remedy is to be found in the institution of the Referendum or Poll of the People—the lodging in the hands of the people themselves of a veto over the acts of their representatives. We do not want to destroy representative institutions, but to give them a buttress that they have not got now—a ready appeal to their master and the master of us all. We have got Democracy in this country, but we want to add to our Constitutional machinery the power which will prevent, as far as mere institutions can, the seizing of power by a revolutionary minority. If it is really the will of the People that we should embark upon great Socialistic legislative schemes we shall have to endure them till by persuasion we can show the People a better way. But let us make sure what is the Will of the People. This we can accomplish by Constitutional machinery, which in all matters of great importance will enable the People, if they so desire, to veto the handiwork of their representatives. These representatives notoriously often pass Bills by a system of Party log-rolling rather than on conviction. The present situation affords a good illustration of what we mean. We are faced with a very serious and growing amount of unemployment. Such unemployment is the great opportunity of the revolutionist. He sees the troubled waters in which he loves to fish and in which he knows that he can get good sport. Hence the extremist first exaggerates the amount of unemployment, then stimulates the panic, local and general, out of which unemployment comes. Finally he still further inflames the situation by insisting upon remedies so violent and so dangerous that they are sure to intensify the disease they pretend to cure. Such is the nature of Parliamentary man, that if Governments are weak and not far-seeing, he gradually slides into a system partly of blackmail and partly of party auction sales, and ends, though he calls himself a moderate, by playing the game of the extremists. If he does so under our present system, there is no remedy, and infinite harm may be done. For example, we may get, without the country understanding what is being done, the acceptance of that great revolutionary instrument which wrought such terrible disaster in Paris in 1848—" le droit du travail," the right to work. The yielding to such claims in a moment of Parliamentary panic would no doubt be bad in itself, but it could be rectified if the country had to give the final word. This statement is not mere theory. Look at what happened in Switzerland. In 1894 in Switzerland there was a great deal of trade depression, and a considerable proportion of the population was unable to find work. The Socialists, full of hope that in so complete a Democracy as Switzerland they could carry their favourite remedy, insisted on a project being put before the people which made the right to work one of the essential rights of the Swiss citizen. It was said that the duty of the State was to provide employment on demand. The result was one of the most remarkable facts in the history of the Poll of the People in Switzerland. Only some 70,000 electors voted in. favour of " le droit du travail,". over 380,000 against it.
It is no use for the enemies of the Poll of the People to say that this result was only procured because Switzerland is a peasant State. In the first place, there are very many more manual workers in Switzerland than those who voted for the Bill. Next, one can easily see how those peasants who cannot make their whole living out of their land, and so for a great part of the year are employed at wages, might have yielded to the skilful propaganda of the Socialists. It could be represented to them that they would be immensely benefited by " the right to work." We are sure that no endorsement of such a legislative proposal as " the right to work " would be given by the British people. Therefore we desire to maintain our Democracy by true Democracy's greatest instrument, the Poll of the People. Our readers have so often read in our pages an account of the very simple mechanism by which we can put the Referendum, used as a veto power, into operation, and of the methods by which unnecessary and frivolous appeals can be prevented, that we shall not describe them again. If, however, they will refer to the review columns of this week's issue they will see an account of how the Referendum works in Switzerland, which will prove that we are not, as supporters of the Referendum are so often accused of being, mere theorists, visionaries, and cranks. You will never find a Switzer outside the extreme Socialist parties who would like to abandon the Referendum.
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