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It is therefore particularly disheartening to find that “Liberal principles” are apparently as sacrosanct in the eyes of many Socialists as in those of the Liberals themselves. That Socialists also denounce the idea of a State Church, that Socialists also rail at Imperialism and condemn “bloated armaments,” that Socialists also proclaim the universal holiness and perfection of Free Trade—this is the really extraordinary and disturbing fact.

This, though none seems to see it, is the real root of the difficulties which beset every attempt to form an independent Socialist or Labour Party. You cannot have an independent party with any real backbone in it without independent thinking. And, omitting pious platitudes about “the socialization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange” there does not seem to me any perceptible difference between the way in which the Independent Labour Party (for example) thinks about current problems and the way in which the Liberals think about them. They may think differently about economic abstractions, but they do not think differently when it comes to practical politics. Consequently whenever a question divides the Liberals and the Tories, the I.L.P. always dashes into the Liberal camp at the firing of the first shot without apparently waiting to consider for one moment whether perhaps Socialism may not have an answer of its own to give which will in the nature of things be neither the Liberal nor the Tory answer. And then the I.L.P. and their allies of the Labour Representation Committee boast proudly of their “independence” because they are not allowed to speak on Liberal platforms. Of what avail is that prohibition if the platform on which they themselves stand is in its essence a Liberal platform.