These are not self-directed. How can they have a policy?

(2) (c) The policy of the State should be to cherish the spirit of democracy (a product more fugitive and valuable than German dye-stuffs); to shun dictators; to identify itself far more closely with the worker, the thinker, and the young. It is on these that in the last resort the nation depends; not on the rhetoric of politicians or the Press, or the brutal, soi-disant patriotism of the military tribunal. Our young men, dying in the trenches, or, some of them, enduring illusage and serving terms of lonely imprisonment as a testimony against war; our women and girls, facing bodily injury and physical exhaustion in munitionmaking, and every extremity of horror in nursing the wounded and the sick-these, largely inarticulate, have earned a right to speak. Into these England has breathed her soul. It is their wishes and aims that should prevail. The spirit that has been revealed in war-time might serve to re-build the commonwealth in time of peace-if only youth enough be left in England for so high an enterprise.

MR. H. G. WELLS

(1) (a) Labour will be after some fool's grievance about the C.O.'s. or such-like, under the guidance of Fenner Brockway, Ramsay MacDonald, and so forth. Labour will be sticking on points of order. Labour will be unaware that there is an economic problem. Labour will be sheep in a narrow road.

(1) (b) Capital will be scrambling back towards the old conditions in a stupid, instinctive way, under cover of an Irish row.

(1) (c) Nonsense! Do you mean economic ? (2) (a) (b) (c) Think hard. But this is Utopian.

(b) PSYCHOLOGY

DR. HAVELOCK ELLIS

The after-war problems you raise are highly important. But I am quite unable to foretell their solution myself, and, judging from the diversity of opinions expressed, I am rather doubtful whether anyone else can.

MR. M. W. ROBIESON

I do not think I have anything to say on the first question which is not perfectly familiar to readers of the New Age. For the matters fall quite sharply into two parts, one general and the other particular.

The particular questions demand a specialised knowledge which I do not possess in the case of any single trade; and the impressions of an individual about the detailed organisation of things he knows nothing about so many months hence can be of no conceivable use to anyone except himself, and even that is doubtful,

(1) On the general matter it does not seem possible to say more than that the wage system will remain throughout the War, or, at least, that it will not be abolished, but only intensified. There is no reason to suppose that the movement towards its abolition will make any progress for some years, while the general tendency to give to Labour a legal status is clearly on the increase. In the absence of anything except vague

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and severely censored military and naval and economic news, opinion as to the probable length of the War, and therefore as to the extent this process is likely to have developed itself during that time, must be purely conjectural. And no man, as Plato pointed out, can let his mind descend lower than conjecture.

There is, however, a kind of prediction which is less unsatisfactory because it deals with extremely general and indeed universal conditions. About the attitude of other parties to Labour after the War there can be little doubt. They are inevitable, and, besides, signs and omens are not wanting. All the arguments that have been used during the War to maintain and to strengthen the essential features of the capitalistic organisation of industry will be used afterwards for a like purpose. A trade war, we are informed, is to follow; and it is significant that the most prominent organs of the Press, especially in the provincial districts where labour trouble was always present and more or less in the public mind, have not ceased to remind us that the second war will not be less important, and will equally demand the concentration and organisation of national forces and energies. No one except a section of the working classes seems to have failed to note what this means. Similarly, there can be little doubt that the general effect of the War on Capital is its consolidation. We have passed the period of competition, and entered that of integration. Judged by the familiar standard of maximised production, this is a really great advance. To consolidate a man's force is to strengthen his hands against all his enemies. Unhappily in this case the greater of these is Labour,

The condition of the nation as an economic unit is a much more subtle point, and the factors which determine it more complex and less calculable. The type of economic organisation, I should imagine, will not be dissimilar to that of Germany before the War. There is, however, as yet no evidence that it will ever possess anything like the same efficiency. Our employing classes do not themselves, it would appear, possess any public spirit to speak of. And there is no relatively independent and sufficiently powerful military organisation to compel them. Can anyon imagine an English syndicate warned off the exploitation of a district like East Prussia because the General Staff thought its undisturbed condition worth ten army corps? And so even from the narrow point of view of the size of the National Income, consolidation of Capital may not mean so much. The criterion will be the handling of the demand for protection. Assuming for the moment that the employing classes are charged with the responsibility of ensuring the security of the State and making it wealthy (for this is their apologia for themselves), there is a certain, though limited, use of the instrument of the tariff which might further that end. But if within that artificial wall the employers preserve the antiquity of their methods, and the narrowness of their aims, and neglect the endeavour to apply the best scientific knowledge to the improvement of technical processes except in so far as they can see that it will increase next year's profit some thirty and some sixty and some a hundred fold, by this thing we shall know them for what they are. The absence of this would not, of course, alter even a little the fact of exploitation. But its presence

which is, I should think, almost certain, would proclaim the stupidity of the system from the housetops.

There is one other point. I have assumed that the State theoretically preserves the attitude of the disinterested spectator, which is its tradition. It may alter this, and regard industry as a national function it should control and direct. Everything depends on the seriousness with which it adopts this principle. It may interpret it as a command as of divine right to keep the working classes in order, lest peradventure they destroy the fine fabric of an orderly and productive social life. That this inspiration may enlighten it seems probable, and it will not be disobedient to the heavenly vision. Or, again, it may even remember that to the bargain there are two parties, and that, whenever convenient, it is the other which claims to have assumed the responsibility for industry. Responsibility, as has been pointed out in selected instances, involves duties as well as rights. Therefore the State may (as the Germans did) subsidise and protect certain industries only on conditions: it may supervise them, mark out the lines of their policy, and exact a standard from them. The imperative necessity of doing this should be clear to the lowest strata of thinking minds. Its incompatibility with the wage system should be no less obvious, and the mere conjunction of the two must produce one of two things. What these are is not doubtful.

(2) About the question of policy I find the same difficulty. The general things are familiar; of the particular I am ignorant. Only the strengthening of trade unionism offers any hope to Labour of permanent deliverance. The great difficulty is to preserve