[721]The Daily Citizen was started by a separate limited company, in which the control was permanently secured to representatives of the Trade Unions and the Labour Party, on November 8, 1912. The total capital raised from the Trade Unions from first to last was approximately £200,000. This important journalistic venture, starting under good auspices, met with untoward circumstances. It was crippled by a legal decision that Trade Unions had no power to subscribe to its cost, or even to make investments in its shares (an inference from the Osborne Judgement, which was reversed by the Trade Union Act of 1913, subject to compliance with the conditions as to political expenditure). Before this set-back could be got over, the outbreak of war upset all financial calculations, and made the conduct of a newspaper increasingly onerous. The paper stopped on June 5, 1915, and the company was wound up, all creditors being paid in full, but the shareholders losing practically all that they had ventured. The failure was a serious blow to the Labour Party, which has been badly in want of a daily newspaper—a lack supplied in 1919 by the energetic and adventurous Daily Herald, which, under the direction of Mr. George Lansbury, has drawn to itself an unusual amount of talent, and now needs only whole-hearted support from the Trade Unions.
[722]It was, for instance, only the determined private resistance of the Trade Unionist leaders of the Labour Party that compelled the Government to abandon its project of introducing several hundred thousand Chinese labourers into Great Britain; a project which, if carried out, not only might have been calamitous in its effect upon the Standard of Life of the British workman—not to mention other evil consequences—but would almost certainly have also led to a Labour revolt against the continuance of the war. In this connection may be noted the valuable work done throughout the war, not in the interests of Trade Unionism only, but in those of the wage-earning class, and of the community as a whole, by the War Emergency Workers’ National Committee (J. S. Middleton, Honorary Secretary), a body which included representatives not only of the Parliamentary Committee, Labour Party, and General Federation, but also of the Co-operative Union, the National Union of Teachers, and other organisations. The valuable though often unwelcome assistance which this Committee gave to the Government by insisting on the redress of grievances that officialdom would have ignored, and by its working out of policy and persistence in agitation on such matters as pensions, limitation of prices, food-rationing, rent restriction, and other subjects, on which its publications had marked results, deserve the attention of the historian.
[723]Subsequently Mr. J. R. Clynes (National Union of General Workers) was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Food; and on Lord Rhondda’s death he succeeded him as Minister of Food.
[724]See the printed reports of Labour Party Conferences and Trades Union Congresses, 1914-19.
[725]Report of the Inter-Allied Socialist and Labour Conference, February 15, 1915.
[726]Mr. Hodge succeeded to Mr. Barnes as Minister of Pensions, Mr. Roberts to Mr. Hodge as Minister of Labour, and Mr. G. J. Wardle (National Union of Railwaymen) to Mr. Roberts as Parliamentary Secretary of the Board of Trade.
[727]Memorandum on War Aims(Labour Party), February 1918.
[728]It is difficult not to be struck with the greater breadth of vision, the higher idealism, and (as we venture to say) the larger statesmanship of the Labour Party in its projects and proposals for the resettlement of the world after the Great War, compared with those which the statesmen and diplomatists of the capitalist parties of Great Britain, France, Italy, and, as we grieve to say, also the United States, with the acquiescence of deliberately inflamed popular electorates, succeeded in embodying in the Treaty of Peace. Apart from the indefensible redistributions of political sovereignty, not essentially differing in spirit from those of the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 (and probably less stable even than these), against which Labour opinion had strongly protested in advance, it is impossible not to regret the failure to incorporate in the Treaty the proposals, for which the Labour Party had secured the support of the organised working-class opinion of the world, for (i.) the universal abandonment of discriminatory fiscal barriers to international trade; (ii.) the administration of Colonial possessions exclusively in the interest of the local inhabitants, and on the basis of equality of opportunity for traders of all nations; (iii.) concerted international control of the exportable surplus of materials and food-stuffs of all the several countries, so as to mitigate, as far as possible, in the general world-shortage which the Labour Party foresaw, the inevitable widespread starvation in the most necessitous areas, whether enemy, allied, or neutral; (iv.) deliberate Government action in each country for the prevention of unemployment, instead of letting it occur and then merely relieving the unemployed. In questions of foreign policy the Labour Party, inspired by its idealism, has shown itself at its best, instead of this department of politics being, as is often ignorantly assumed, altogether beyond its capacity.
[729]The new constitution and enlarged programme which the Labour Party adopted at its Conferences of 1917-18, after six months’ consideration and discussion by the constituent organisations, were little more than a ratification for general adoption of what had become the practice of particular districts. Thus, the more active Local Labour Parties, such as those of Woolwich and Blackburn, had long welcomed the adhesion of supporters who were not manual workers. The successive annual Conferences had passed resolutions which, taken together, amounted to a pretty complete programme of constructive legislation, wholly Collectivist in principle. Hence the deliberate and formal opening of the Party, through the Local Labour Parties, to “workers by brain” as well as “workers by hand”; and the explicit adoption, as a programme, of Labour and the New Social Order were not such innovations as the newspapers made out and as the public generally supposed. But they created a sensation, not only in the United Kingdom, but also in the United States and in the British Dominions; and they led to a considerable accession of membership, largely from the professional and middle classes, which was steadily increased as the unsatisfactory character of the Treaty of Peace, the continued “militarism” of the Government, and the aggression of a “Protectionist” capitalism became manifest.
[730]Messrs. Barnes, Roberts (who became Minister of Food), Parker, and Wardle.