Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from British Labor and the War Reconstructors for a New World
Public attention has been absorbed in What has been happen ing in Russia. Now in Germany. The working class revolutions there have been so much more Spectacular as to have quite overshadowed the formidable British labor movement or to have been confused with it.
Some writers on the great war have said that the thing which set this war off from any known for a thousand years has been that it was the wrestlings of Whole peoples; that here we have been dealing With folk movements unlike any that had occurred Since the days when Saxons and Franks, Teutons and Huns and Slavs swept over western Europe. However that may be, there has been another folk movement at work in the midst Of war in Europe which is tremendously significant. It asserted itself disruptively in various stages of the Russian revolution. The same forces are at work elsewhere. And in England we have the attempt to harness them in a great constructive working class movement which will make for changes in the economic and political life, in the period following the war, as sweeping as the changes wrought by those middle-class movements which manifested themselves in the ascend ancy Of nationalism, and in the struggle for liberalism within the nations.
In all European history, we have had in England forecasts of fundamental changes that were coming on the continent. The English reformation preceded the continental reformation; the English swing to parliamentary government and democracy preceded the political revolutions on the continent. For the most part Englishmen did not go through anything like the travail and bitterness which the continental peoples traversed in running the same course. They did not come out at the same point; but they Showed the trend, and they showed it in advance. Even so, what has been going forward under the stress of war among the wage-earning population of the island commonwealth foreshadows changes which will affect and condition the Whole fabric of western civilization.
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