Excerpt from The One Big Union: Will It Emancipate the Worker?

The much prophesied and apparently inevitable war being over, we are now faced in every country by a labour conflict. equally prophesied and equally inevitable. Whether it be true or not, as the German Professor Hauser argues, that a world-war between the big industrial nations had become an economic necessity, owing to the uncontrollable impetus of quantitative production, there is no doubt that the mighty struggle has precipitated a conflict between Capitalism and Labour, even in countries not directly engaged in the war.

The past four years have been equivalent to a century of social education for the workers. At an early stage they realized the weakness and waste of the capitalistic system, during the war they learned their own strength, before its close they experienced the futility of State socialism. In the welter of reconstruction, to which the State, the capitalists, and the workers are alike giving feverish attention, it is perhaps quite natural that the section which has the most to gain, and possesses a vast superiority in numbers, should be sorely tempted to try the shortest way to the millenium. In the effort of Capitalism to re-direct industrial production into the old channels, retaining where possible the advantages given to it by quasi-military organization, Labour secs an opportunity to outflank it. The opponents stand, as it were, on a Hindenburg Line. and each is searching for the vulnerable salient. The problem for the statesman is to bring about an equitable peace - to restore stability, while preserving the nation.

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