Soviet Government of Russia was discontinued; the scheme for a strike put forward by the miners in August and September 1920 under the guise of a claim for increased wages, but really for the political purpose of forcing the nationalization of the coal industry. The very name “direct action” indicates that the action in question is alternative to some other action regarded as indirect, which is invariably the orderly method of procedure, prescribed by industrial agreement, or by the rules of the Trade Union, or by the Constitution of the country. Hence, in my opinion, the fundamental quality of direct action is its anarchic character. Some groups or individuals in the Labour movement resort to anarchic action in preference to orderly procedure, deliberately as recalcitrant minorities, who, bound by the formal agreement of majorities, intend to prevent the view of the majority being carried into effect. Others, impatient reformers who regard orderly methods as too cumbersome and dilatory, and are either not able or not prepared to work for gradual amendment, follow their example. And one further sees direct action adopted with the ulterior object of wrecking existing craft Trade Union organization, as for instance by revolutionary Unionists in old skilled Unions like the Amalgamated Engineering Union, or by revolutionary Syndicalists who wish to exercise and develop all the latent power of manual workers so that the weapon of the general strike may be sharp and bright on the day when it is to be used to hack down the Constitution, and usher in the social revolution. These, however, are special reasons. In the minds of great and slow thinking sections of Labour, direct action has come to be regarded as the easiest and quickest, sometimes as the only, road to political power. Labour is greedy for political power; it intends to make its political fortune, in the words of Horace, “_Si possis, recte; si non, quocunque modo...._” The anarchic character of direct action constitutes its real danger far more than its non-economic purpose, if the purpose be non-economic, which it very frequently is not. Just as any anarchic method betokens, so does it beget, a lawless as distinguished from law-abiding quality of mind. Human nature is not lawless in one sphere of its activity and constitutionally minded in another, anarchic, for example, in industrial affairs and orderly in politics. The same strain runs right through; an undisciplined individual makes as bad a citizen as he does a Trade Unionist. It was the anarchic character of direct action that impressed itself most strongly on the writer’s mind during the anxious years 1914-1918 before any non-economic strikes such as those described above had occurred. Direct Action on the Clyde, 1916