The Meaning and Qualities of Direct Action In the revised edition of their _History of Trade Unionism_ (1920) Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb point out (p. 664) that when they published in 1897 their _Industrial Democracy_ the term “direct action” was unknown. In point of fact, this name for the principle or practice of social coercion through economic pressure made its advent into this country from France and the United States of America in 1905. By 1912 it had passed into full currency among advanced sections of organized Labour in Scotland and parts of England, and in practice almost invariably implies either a sectional Strike by a particular group or groups of labour, or a general strike by all groups of labour combined. All strikes are not, however, direct action. Wage-earners reasonably contend that as any individual workman has the right to refuse to enter into or continue under a contract of service, any group of workmen or all groups acting together in a strike are entitled to exercise a like freedom. Mr. and Mrs. Webb are disposed to call such a strike “an economic strike” and to use the phrase a “non-economic strike” to designate a strike undertaken “not for an alteration in the conditions of employment of any section of the trade union world, but with a view to enforce, either on individuals, on Parliament, or on the Government, some other course of action desired by the strikers.” It is only strikes of the latter type that they place in the category of direct action; in other words, they make the purpose of the strike the test. That is too limited a definition of direct action, but it would include such a case as the refusal in 1917 of the National Union of Sailors and Firemen to work vessels by which two members of the Labour Party were preparing, at the instance of the Government, to travel on their way to Petrograd; also a like refusal of the same Union in 1918 to carry Mr. Arthur Henderson and M. Camille Huysmans across the Channel _en route_ for Paris, the object of the Union being to prevent the organization of an International Socialist Conference. Another case of the same kind was the action of the Electrical Trades Union in 1918 in “calling out” their members engaged in the Albert Hall in London with instructions to appropriate the fuses—which did not belong to them—so as to keep the Hall in darkness and prevent it being used for any purpose, as a reprisal against the proprietors for cancelling the letting of the Hall for a Labour demonstration. Further illustrations of the “non-economic strike” were the threats of the compositors and printers in certain London newspaper offices to cease work during the railway strike in 1919 because of the adverse criticism of the railwaymen by the editorial staff; the threat of the miners to close down the coal mines in 1919 unless compulsory military service was abolished, and unless military and naval action by the British Government against the