The effect of these resolutions was clear. Trade Unions handed over their executive responsibility to the Council of Action, or “Committee of National Security,” as one speaker called it. This Council could then impose its will upon the nation through the direct action of seizing it by the throat. That the will may be thought beneficent does not alter in the slightest the anarchic quality of the action. The Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress, in proposing the second resolution, put it plainly: “Giving effect to this resolution does not mean a mere strike; it means a challenge to the whole Constitution of the country.” The report says there were prolonged cheers. He reiterated the same statement at the subsequent meeting of the Trades Union Congress in Portsmouth. The Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Labour Party, in seconding the first resolution, was even more explicit: “When the action referred to was taken, if too much interference was attempted they might be compelled to do things that would cause the present authorities (i.e. the Government) to abdicate. They might be forced to tell them that if they could not run this country in a peaceful manner without interfering with other nations, they might be compelled, against all constitutionalism, to chance doing something to take the country into their own hands.” There is nothing confused in this outlook. The speaker regarded direct action as the method by which to achieve his ends. The Labour Party would become the Government without the ordinary preliminary of a General Election. The outsider wonders why the “International,” which was sung immediately after the passing of the first and third resolutions, was omitted after the second.