unselfishly to spend and be spent for God and the people, I shall be glad to have written it. Many thanks to all the friends who have helped to make the book known._ GEORGE LANSBURY. _March, 1918._ CONTENTS PREFACE BY THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER, 7 INTRODUCTION, 11 I. WORKMEN, 25 II. WOMEN AND CHILDREN, 45 III. BUSINESS, 73 IV. CHURCHES, 88 V. WHAT WE MUST DO, 105 THE PREFACE BY THE BISHOP OF WINCHESTER Mr. Lansbury has done me the honour, for as such I feel it, of asking me to put a few words before his book. Under ordinary circumstances I should possibly have declined, partly because (with the exception of one chapter) I have not read the book, partly because there would be points in any writing or action of Mr. Lansbury’s with which I should disagree, perhaps in some cases vehemently. But the circumstances of to-day and to-morrow as we all know are not ordinary but entirely extraordinary. And, in these matters, one consideration, to my thinking, outweighs all others. It is that of the imperative need that the men and women of organised religion and the men and women of manual labour (thank God the division between them is not mutually exclusive) should understand one another. The degree of their present aloofness and misunderstanding is easily the most sinister fact in our present condition. On the side of the Church we are in no mood of complacency. The National Mission of Repentance and Hope has been the sign on our part of readiness to take ourselves to task and to acknowledge faults and mistakes. Therefore when a man with the integrity and enthusiasm of George Lansbury, who belongs to both sorts, to whom the faith and worship of Christendom mean what they do to his fellow-Churchmen and who, as a popular leader, longs with righteous passion in his heart for social changes in the interests of manual labour--when he comes forward to tell us what Labour asks and what, in his judgment on Christian principles Labour ought to have, and why, then I think that every motive should make us of the Church give him not only a fair but a ready, open-hearted, and brotherly hearing. He will probably ask more of some of us than we can give. I myself, for example, who have done the little I could in life to prevent Churchmanship from being bound up with Toryism, should have very likely to maintain that it cannot be bound up with political Socialism. But if we think, as I hope most thoughtful Christian people do, that the changes of the future will and ought to be in the direction of giving more status, security, and influence to those who work with their hands, at the expense of those who have had so much more, we shall want to get closer to such a man as Mr. Lansbury, to understand his position better, and to ask him to consider with us our difficulties about accepting the whole of it.