The whole of the Labour argument for this official inauguration of direct action turned on the assumption that the Bolshevik Government was standing in a white sheet and contemplated no ulterior threat to Polish independence. Labour accepted Bolshevik professions to this effect with credulous alacrity. Then came the amazing _dénouement_. It turned out that, with characteristic Bolshevik duplicity, there had been deleted from the draft of the proposed peace terms, communicated to England, certain vitally important articles going to the root of Polish independence, which, however, were inserted in that presented by the Bolsheviks to the Poles at Minsk on August 19. The doctored English version, after specifying the strength to which the Polish Army was to be cut down, provided that all arms over and above those required for the needs of the army as so reduced, “as well as of the Civic Militia,” were to be handed over to Russia. In the Minsk version, the Civic Militia was the crux of the terms; it was to be recruited from one class only, _the workers_; to be in strength four times that of the regular Polish army, and armed; in other words, a Red Army in Poland. This exactly enforced Section 8 of Lenin’s Third International Constitution, which stipulates for the “disarmament of the bourgeoisie and the arming of the workers to defend Communism until Capitalism shall finally have been abolished.” There was in truth at no time any argument from Poland to support direct action. The reason for its adoption was far more accurately stated by Mr. Robert Williams, the Secretary of the National Transport Workers’ Federation, a leading member of the notorious Council of Action. In the _Daily Herald_ for August 25, 1920, he is reported to have said as follows: “We felt that with the policy of Mr. Lloyd George, which sways to and fro according to events, we were menaced with war from the moment that the Poles were in peril. Together with several friends we drew up a manifesto which even the Conservatives among the Labour leaders signed, because they recognized clearly that they could no longer oppose the advanced elements _which had for so long insisted on the employment of direct action_.” This recalls Lord Bacon’s aphorism on faction: “It is often seen that a few that are stiff do tire out a greater number that are more moderate.” The extremists had been struggling for ten years to establish the adoption of direct action under all circumstances as Labour’s normal weapon of attack. They succeeded because the chief anxiety of Labour leaders, whether advancing at the head or running at the heels of their flock, is always, at any price, to secure or conserve solidarity. Setting-up of Local Soviets