The darkest shadow upon the outlook of European civilisation at the present time is not the war; it is the failure of any co-operative spirit between labour and the directing classes.  The educated and leisured classes have been rotten with individualism for a century; they have destroyed the confidence of the worker in any leadership whatever.  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 result out of our national efforts.  But in Germany there is a greater tradition of subordination; in France there is a greater clarity of mind than in any other country.