The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers—Can and Ought they to be Satisfied?—The Vagueness of Labour’s Scheme of Reconstruction—The Recent Change in Labour’s Proposals—Reform of Industry _v._ Reconstruction. The Three Dominant Aspirations of the Workers The organization of industry cannot continue in its present state of instability; something must be done. The Socialist who would reconstruct industry, the anti-Socialist who would reform it, each assumes it to be necessary to satisfy aspirations of the workers that are not satisfied under conditions as they exist to-day. The three greatest aspirations animating the workers are, in their order of relative importance: first, removal of the ever-present menace of unemployment; secondly, recognition in industry of the worker’s human status; thirdly, distribution, as of moral right, of an equitable share of the product. Talk, as I did during the war on over three thousand occasions, to the ordinary working-man, those are the three basic sentiments you find swaying him. All the intricate schemes for reconstruction of industry which the fertile and fervid imaginations of the Labour intellectuals have evolved are largely unintelligible to him, and leave him unmoved and cold. He cares nothing about the delicate and subtle regimentation of industry and society as Guild Socialists would have it; he wholly fails to grasp, indeed, is acutely suspicious of, a Socialist commonwealth constructed and controlled on a vocational or functional basis. The test which he applies to such complex and conjectural conceptions is their efficacy in satisfying those three great fundamental aspirations. But that is too restricted a purview for an aspirant political party, and was astutely declared by the old parliamentary hands of the Labour movement to constitute too narrow a class-basis to support a popular appeal. Hence it was that all the non-industrial doctrinaires—and there are many of them attached to the Labour Party—were set to work to compile a new Social Contract. Scores of pamphlets have now been published descriptive of the policy of the Party on every conceivable topic—political, administrative, judicial, local government, social, and industrial—national, imperial and international. If formulation on paper of ideals of humanitarianism, and quixotic Utopianism, without any consideration of cost or practicability, is statesmanship, the Labour Party’s policy is truly admirable. It outlines in glowing splendour a wonderful new mechanism of politics, society and industry, in which every exterior part falls into place with the smoothness and precision of a model engine constructed out of a box of parts—but, like the toy, with no works inside. That this mysterious mechanism may provide in some subtle and not very obvious way, the means of securing the three fundamentals is its only recommendation in the eyes of the great mass of Labour.