The purpose, therefore, was economic, but the method was anarchic. Subsequently, the Clyde Workers’ Committee (a committee of Clydeside shop stewards working in co-operation with the Socialist Labour Party) established revolutionary Workers’ Committees in various parts of England, and were behind similar direct action unofficial strikes, repudiated by the Executives of all the Unions concerned, in Barrow-in-Furness in June 1916, on the Mersey in the autumn of 1916, in the engineering shops of England in May 1917, and at other times. These were all economic strikes against trade agreements and arrangements constitutionally concluded between the Government and the Unions. That such anarchic strikes are entirely subversive of all law, order and government in a Trade Union organization as well as in the body politic needs no emphasis. They are just as dangerous to society as any strike regularly declared by a Trade Union for a non-economic purpose. Conversion of the Labour Party to Use of Direct Action But to revert to the non-economic strike: Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, who have a wide knowledge of the currents and under-currents of opinions in the industrial world, say on p. 672 of their _History of Trade Unionism_ (1920): “With regard to a general strike of non-economic or political character, in favour of a particular home or foreign policy, we very much doubt whether the Trades Union Congress could be induced to endorse it, or the rank and file to carry it out, except only in case the Government made a direct attack upon the political or industrial liberty of the manual working-class, which it seemed imperative to resist by every possible means, not excluding forceful revolution itself.” The kind of direct attack by the Government which the writers had in mind was action such as disfranchisement of the bulk of the manual workers, or deprivation of the Trade Unions of their present rights and liberties, or confiscation of their funds. Short of attempted measures like these, it was the considered opinion of those eminently competent writers, looking out over the Trade Union world as recently as the autumn of 1919, that direct action would be rejected by the Trades Union Congress. But the Portsmouth Congress of 1920 was yet to come.