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Evening Star, Issue 17697, 25 June 1921, Page 4

If the British coal strike has been a bitter disappointment to the Communists miners as a. body, it has Disappointed, been a far worse one to the little band of Communists who hoped that national anarchy would be caused by it. Hie prospect of a general strike was rapture to these curious malcontents, who long to embrace Liberty —or whatever their goddess may be—on a pile of corpses. No efforts were spared by them to spur on the parties to tlxii mtmost violence/ and the time when that would have culminated, if all had gone well with their plans, was the time chosen by them for a special conference, held in Manchester, to seal and definitely confirm the existence of the Communist Party of Great Britain under a definite constitution. Hie conference, consisting of 150 or 500 delegacies, w r as duly held, but it met under a cloud.. The great scheme of a general strike had collapsed a week before, The “ glorious world revolution,” to which the fanatics' pledged themselves, was «ot to advance any further at that stage. The Bolsheviks made the best of their disappointment. They expelled from their party a member of it who had failed to use the influence they expected? of him, in

tho deliberations which proved decisive, to make tho general strike a reality. They passed a resolution which referred to tho "greatest betrayal of tho workers in tho history of Britain,” and adjured tho foolish miners to go on, as if they had not been “treacherously abandoned" by the unions which showed more senso than themselves. Tho " Bon Tillotta and Robert Williamses ” wero denounced in violent*terms for “not having had-the courage to start the revolution.” One speaker, an electrician by trade, declared that "if we could have blackened London we should have set such nn example that tjio whole of tho country would have risen with tho electriial member's to the support of tho Triple Alliance.” No doubt they would have blackened it with more than darkness if some of them could have had their way. But the British worker, for tho most part, does not lack sanity. The chaos and destruction that have ruled in Russia are tho last things ho desires. And the Communist zealots have cooled in their devotion to tho strike since it has been clear that it can only end in failure. The Acting President of the Miners’ Federation lias recalled how, “ when the miners were about to take action, tho Communists said I Go along, it will ho all right ’; but, now wo are in our present position, I don’t hear their shouting.” The Labor Conference has rejected a proposal to allow the Communists to affiliate with tho Labor Party, and in that tho Labor Party has shown its sense. ■’