The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
Of course in this war, while some of the strange things one sees
and hears in Europe may pass with the dawn of peace--woman, for
instance, may return indoors and come out only on election day,
yet unquestionably most of the changes in economic adjustment have
come to stay. They are the most important salvage that will come
out of the wreck and waste of this war. In England, for instance,
the new ballot reform laws are fundamental changes. They provide
virtually for universal manhood suffrage and suffrage for women
over thirty upon something of the same terms as those provided for
men. So revolutionary are the political changes in England that
after the war, it is expected--conceded is hardly too strong a
word, that the first political cabinet to arise after the coalition
cabinet goes, will be a labour cabinet. Certainly if labour does
not actually dominate the British government, labour will control
it indirectly. And the labour gains during the war will not be
lost. Wages in England, and for that matter in most of the allied
countries are now being regulated by state ordinance and not by
competitive rates. "The labour market" has passed with the slave
market. Wages are based not upon supply and demand in labour, but
upon the cost of what seems to be a decent standard of subsistence.
This change, of course, is fundamental. It marks a new order in the
world. And the labour party of England recently adopted a program
which provides not merely for the decent living wage for workmen,
independent of the "labour market," but also provides for the
democratic control of industry: national railways, national mines,
national electricity, national housing, and national land tenure.
And as if that were not enough the demands of the labour party
include the permanent control of the prices of all the necessaries
of life, without relation to profits and independent of supply and
demand. Such things have been done during the war, and in a crisis.
Labour demands that they be done permanently. And still further to
press home its claims upon society, British labour demands a system
of taxation levied conspicuously and frankly at the rich to bring
their incomes and their holdings only to a moderate rise above the
common level--a rise in some relation to the actual differences of
mind and heart and soul and service between men, and not a difference
based on birth and inheritance and graft and grabbing. It is, of
course, revolution. But Labour now has political rights in England,
and has time and again demonstrated that it has a majority in every
part of the United Kingdom, and it is closely organized and rather
determined, and probably will have its way. In France and in Italy
where for ten years the Socialists have more or less controlled
assemblies and named cabinets, demands like those of the English
are being made.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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