§ 9

And now we come to an important point of our argument. Labour has permitted itself to become a slave. Individual workers are not FREE. They have given their souls, or shall we say their freedom, to men of their own class, who, having a smattering of education, assume power as their leaders. Anyway, so they began, but time has shown them more drivers than leaders. Trade union leaders make a show of fraternity. One asks, for information: Is coercion a sign of it any more than a sign of liberty? Obedience to national law is one thing, to class law is another. Having gone far, class leaders assume the right to absorb capital, i.e., to hand it over to Labour. Were that to arrive would the nation as a whole be in a better way? Surely the same difficulty would occur which distresses advanced democrats. Capital would be still a bugbear to extremists, but in the hands of a class that has had no experience of its use, that has no traditions of expenditure. In the period of exercise to gain some experience capital would be wasted; it might be gambled away or spent in hours of idle self-indulgence. Where, then, would Labour be? Doubtless starving. Ignorant but ambitious leaders, to please their followers whom they have coerced, would advocate a purely class and selfish policy which might lead to civil war, of all wars the one which is certainly soul-killing. When brothers fall out and set to kill each other, where is Fraternity, where is the human family, private as well as public, concentrated or extended? It is lost! A nation is but a family on an enlarged scale.

In the concluding years of the 18th century France groaned under civil war, and came very near ruin. What followed upon the French Revolution? Autocratic government under Napoleon! It was the only way out of a grievous mess of anarchy, rapine and chaos. Most of the authors of the Revolution sooner or later suffered as they had made others suffer, under the guillotine. The most prominent agitators fell as victims to their cruelties and misdeeds. The people sacrificed those who were once their adored leaders. They suffered the death penalty from the very people that had inflamed the party of disorder. Anarchy never succeeds. Its leaders always suffer in the end, and by the hands of their dupes whom they pretended to benefit; justice invariably follows injustice; that is a law as certain as that to-morrow succeeds to-day.