Just before the war, when the governing classes wished to find some means for pacifying the workers and soothing them to sleep, Liberal capitalists organised deputations to Germany in order to be able to prove what an awful place the Prussianised German Empire was for a workman to live in because of the evils of Protection. It was the same set of capitalists who gave Mr. Lloyd George the position which enabled him to set the mark of servitude on the shoulders of the workers by his German-inspired Insurance Act, and it has been because of that Act and the accompanying Labour Exchange Acts that the Government have been able, instead of relying on the workman’s loyalty and patriotism to organise and carry through all national work, to arrange national industry during the war on purely German lines by means of highly-paid bureaucrats, without the workers having the least say as to how their work should be done. On the other side Tory capitalists organised deputations to Germany, and to their own satisfaction proved that life for the working people under Kaiser Wilhelm II. was much more desirable than under King George V. of England. We can now place our own value on the reports issued by both these deputations and on the one issued by that other deputation organised by the Labour Party. I recall these incidents of 1913-4 not to try and score off anyone, but to show that those of the capitalist class who wish to preserve and perpetuate the wages system are willing to use every means to obtain their ends. It is beyond dispute that Mr. Lloyd George, in passing Acts establishing National Insurance, &c., and the Conservatives, in wishing to establish a system of tariffs, had the same idea in mind: that is, they wished to ease and palliate some of the evil effects of industrial life. None of them wished to abolish the causes which produce strife and want and bitterness. The class war which I mentioned earlier is a very real thing in the life of the worker, and it shows itself in various ways and under varying conditions. Often we can see the war being waged by means of unemployment, when, because of some collapse in international organisation, trade breaks down, and the first victims are the workers, who by the hundred thousand are flung helpless on to the streets. After the South African War such a condition of things prevailed. In some industries this dislocation was still further accentuated because of the invention of machinery by the use of which production was increased and labour was displaced. The machine is always set against the workman, and often brings starvation and misery into thousands of working-class homes.