Social Forces in England and AmericaWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Social Forces in England and America
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
This discontent, this resentment, this contempt even, and hostility to
duly elected representatives is no mere accident of this democratic
country or that; it is an almost worldwide movement. It is an almost
universal disappointment with so-called popular government, and in many
communities—in Great Britain particularly—it is manifesting itself by an
unprecedented lawlessness in political matters, and in a strange and
ominous contempt for the law. One sees it, for example, in the refusal
of large sections of the medical profession to carry out insurance
legislation, in the repudiation of Irish Home Rule by Ulster, and in the
steady drift of great masses of industrial workers towards the
conception of a universal strike. The case of the discontented workers
in Great Britain and France is particularly remarkable. These people
form effective voting majorities in many constituencies; they send
alleged Socialist and Labour representatives into the legislative
assembly; and, in addition, they have their trade unions with staffs of
elected officials, elected ostensibly to state their case and promote
their interests. Yet nothing is now more evident than that these
officials, working-men representatives and the like, do not speak for
their supporters, and are less and less able to control them. The
Syndicalist movement, sabotage in France, and Larkinism in Great
Britain, are, from the point of view of social stability, the most
sinister demonstrations of the gathering anger of the labouring classes
with representative institutions. These movements are not revolutionary
movements, not movements for reconstruction such as were the democratic
Socialist movements that closed the nineteenth century. They are angry
and vindictive movements. They have behind them the most dangerous and
terrible of purely human forces, the wrath, the blind destructive wrath,
of a cheated crowd.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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