Evening Post. FRIDAY, JANUARY, 31, 1919. THE BRITISH STRIKES

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 27, 31 January 1919, Page 6

Evening Post. FRIDAY, JANUARY, 31, 1919. THE BRITISH STRIKES

The present labour crisis in .Great Britain has arisen in circumstances that were practically certain (to cause difficulties, if not trouble. No matter what process 'was adopted, it would have been impossible to unload four millions of men upon the labour market without friction, when the market itself, after the complete reorganisation necessitated by the war, was in process at the same time of being returned to a peace footing. The British Government has been credited with having foreseen and provided for the difficulties by means of a demobilisation policy. Some of the evidence recently has perhaps suggested that it has found it expedient to aim at the maximum speed of demobilisation; but it is impossible to gather whether this object is being at the risk of exceeding the possible speed of absorption. It would not be fair, without much better information, to agree with the critic who says the Government has no concerted Labour policy, and "appears to be waiting to be pushed into action." There is, at all events, no need to wait for the push, for the impulse' is and has long been evident in ways at least as plain as through strikes in England.

It is now made to appear that the labour crisis is largely the result of the vigorous action of unripe leaders. Tt is suggested that Labour itself has not a united policy, even that the leaders of the strikes have not unified their command ; and it is evident, of course, that as long as the aims of any section of labour are wrong and its methods unsound, unity of action will be impossible and the results illusory. President Wilson, in his speech upon the League of Nations, made use of words which are quite applicable to the Labour movement. " Select classes of mankind," he said, " are no longer the governors of mankind. The fortunes of mankind are now in the hands of the plain people of the whole world." The "plain people " are neither the so-called governing classes to whom President Wilson specially refers \is select, nor are they the extreme reactionaries who have swallowed formulas which they cannot digest and which exert their force in fantastic and outrageous manners. The plain people are the average people, who desire the best they can get, and seek to get it without.turning the universe upside-down in the process—the people who in matters of State would prefer to do without war, and in industrial affairs would prefer to' do without strikes, if any other method will give the results.

Unfortunately, it is • not the plain people who are responsible for the labour crisis in its present form. If it were, there would be reason for believing in the paradox that the nation which was able magnificently to organise for the war is groping blindly through the even more important task of organising for peace. If, as Mr. O'Grady, secretary of the General Workers' Federation, says, the employers-are taking a gratifyingly new standpoint, and show a, real desire-to bring about & better state of things, they have opened the road for the " plain people" to advance. The strange scheme which Russia is curiously failing to advocate is not on that road. Intimidatory methods may succeed in winning results for the limited groups who are prepared to intimidate; but the " plain people" desire neither the methods nor the winnings. The Bolshevist doctrine is evidently, a very important factor in Russia j yet neither its friends abroad nor its leaders at home have given the world at large *ny reason to trust it, or to regard it with anything but disgust. Germany, where a sanely-led people might have moved smoothly towards rectification of the nation's evil past, shows how disastrous a part the Russian influence can play in a crisis. In Austria, Bolshevik propagandists, masquerading as a war prisoners' commission, have been expelled; in Argentina the recent great strikes ha-ve had their authors in Russian firebrands, who are being deported. The plain, people will not have them. In British labour circles the extremist is already evident, if only in a minor degree. The soundness of the British worker, will be gauged by the degree to which he succeeds in resisting the invasion of unreason, and prevents the evils to which he ascribes his grievances being merely exchanged for a worse form of unfairness and oppression.