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Moreover, even if a Labour party could be a Labour party and nothing more, there would always be a tactical as well as a philosophic reason for clearing our movement of all complicity with the ideas of Liberalism. During the first half of the nineteenth century it was always supposed that the working classes of this country were generally, if not exclusively Radical. Possibly at that time they were, but since their enfranchisement in 1867 they have proved themselves overwhelmingly and unrepentantly Tory. The history of the decades which have intervened since then has been the history of the gradual capture by the Tories of all the great industrial districts where the working-class vote is most powerful. Politicians of the ’forties spoke of the “Conservative Working Man” as incredulously as men would speak of a white negro. Yet events have proved not only that such a person exists, but that he can by his vote control the politics of nearly every great manufacturing town in England.

Now the Conservative working man has no fundamental objection to Socialism. The word no doubt displeases him, partly because of its foreign origin, partly from its vaguely revolutionary associations, but on the practical application of Socialism he looks with very decided favour. In fact it is not improbable that the conversion of the labouring classes to Toryism was in part at least due to the fact that during the sixties and seventies the Tories had for a leader Mr. Disraeli, whose quick Hebraic imagination and insight made him perceive the significance of the social problem, while the Liberals were led by Mr. Gladstone, who regarded all social reform from the first with supreme indifference which in his later days deepened into a hostility so intense and deep-rooted that he was ready to shatter his party and his own career over Home Rule, if by so doing he could stave off economic questions. But to return to the Tory workman. I have said he has no objection to applied Socialism. It would be a comparatively easy matter to secure his support for a programme of advanced industrial reform, were he not required to swallow first a number of Liberal doctrines which have no relation to his class interests and to which he really has a strong objection—anti-Imperialism, the reduction of armaments, doctrinaire republicanism and Irish Home Rule. Once cut the Labour party free from these things and the increase of its electoral power will be enormous.