The Labour Party prides itself on being the party of brotherhood—an admirable sentiment, one too seldom encountered in the industrial world to-day. We are entitled to test such a profession by examining to what extent the spirit of fraternity operates amongst the 122 different Trade Unions which are members of the Party. If any one part of the community is torn by internecine strife it most certainly is the Trade Union section. Consider for example the question of demarcation of work. If we take trades like those of the shipwrights and the joiners, they are separated by thin divisions; so much so that in one port shipwrights do work which in another port is done by joiners. If anywhere there is the least invasion by one trade into the work of the other the most unbrotherly struggles ensue, resulting almost invariably in one Union or the other calling their respective members out and so stopping work in the port. Time after time during the war I had the fitting out or refitting of urgently needed vessels held up by these kinds of fratricidal disputes. Again, take trades like engineers, members of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and plumbers, members of the Plumbers’ Union—between them there is the most bitter animosity. Certain pipes on board ship are, according to the custom of the port, bent and fitted by the members of one Union, and certain other pipes, possibly of the same material but a little larger or smaller, or of the same size but of a different material, are bent and fitted by members of the other Union. After the Jutland fight, I had most vital naval repairs held up owing to the whole of the engineers in one large district going on strike because plumbers had been put on to bore a few holes in the outer casings of searchlights, as there were no available engineers to do the work. Instances might be multiplied indefinitely of this industrial enmity which is to form the basis of the new political brotherhood. We have again the perennial dispute between the Amalgamated Engineering Union and the National Union of Railwaymen in respect of the men in the railway engineering shops, or the acrimonious controversy, growing in intensity, between the General Workers’ Union, representing the unskilled or semi-skilled men, and the Amalgamated Engineering Union. The former Union asserts the right of an engineering employer to promote its members from the job of general labourer “on the floor” to work semi-automatic or other similar machines “in the shop,” which without question the man is usually quite competent to do; on the other hand the Amalgamated Engineering Union, or its district committee, claims that no person, however competent, can be put on to work any of those machines unless he is a member of the Amalgamated Engineering Union and receives in respect of the work the prescribed rates of pay. So then we have this curious paradox that the Labour Party, which knows that there exists,