and as long as nations are in economic conflict in times of peace there will be danger of war. They would say that to talk of a United States of Europe without aiming at the removal of these economic conflicts would be to serve the military and nationalist parties by directing attention away from the true causes of war. An international tribunal, international police, and a political federation of nations, they hold are to be secured only when stronger economic bonds than at present hold the nations together and fewer economic conflicts exist to drive them apart.

THE "NEW STATESMAN" VS. THE I. L. P. PROGRAMME

While not directed specifically against the I. L. P. programme, an important editorial in the New Statesman attacks some of its main points:

There are some excellently-intentioned people, for example, who, having laid it down that the terms of peace should provide for (1) disarmament, (2) the abolition of secret diplomacy, and (3) the reconstruction of the map of Europe by plebiscites in all doubtful areas, appear to consider that they have solved the whole problem. But, so far from amounting to a solution, it is not clear that these suggestions are likely to help us at all. As for disarmament, it is, as we have pointed out before, inconceivable that it should come about as an immediate result of this war. After the lesson that we have had during the past five months there will certainly be no little navy school in British politics for a very long time to come; and if we are not prepared to abandon our policy of maintaining an overwhelming navy, how can we propose that other nations should abandon their policies of maintaining as large armies as they can afford? We may hope, of course, as a result of the war, to be able to effect an absolute reduction-though not a reduction relatively to other Powers-in our expenditure upon dreadnoughts; and, similarly, the Continental Powers may be able to reduce the scale of their military armaments. If, indeed, the settlement

does not make such reductions eventually possible it will have been proved a failure. But the reductions will come about, not as part of the settlement, but as one of its ultimate beneficial results. As for the abolition of "secret diplomacy," there is little, we fear, to be hoped from it if the reform is to be applied in this country alone-and we certainly cannot insist on its application elsewhere. Moreover, the present war has revealed no great divergencies between governments and peoples. More parliamentary control of the Foreign Office would be a good thing in itself, but it would not have prevented the war, or even our joining in it. As Mr. Bernard Shaw pointed out in his manifesto:

"Had the Foreign Office been the International Socialist Bureau, had Sir Edward Grey been Jaurès, had Mr. Ramsay MacDonald been Prime Minister, had Russia been Germany's ally instead of ours, the result would still have been the same: we must have drawn the sword to save France and smash Potsdam as we smashed, and always must smash, Philip, Louis Napoleon, et hoc genus omne.”

The plebiscite seems to us a still less hopeful and pertinent suggestion. How anyone, indeed, who followed the Ulster controversy six months ago can remain a serious advocate of the plebiscite as a method of settling frontiers we cannot understand. For, inevitably, as we saw in Ulster, a dilemma is presented. If the vote be taken over a large area polled as a single unit its result can be quite easily manipulated, in fact, settled in advance, by those who define the boundaries of the area to be polled. If, on the other hand, the area is divided into a number of small and fairly homogeneous districts, each of which is polled separately, the results will certainly give a true idea of the wishes of the populations concerned, but they will also in all probability point to a quite impossibly complex frontier, or rather series of frontiers. In a recently published pamphlet Mr. Lowes Dickinson, after referring to the fact that Austria-Hungary contains a large proportion of Slavs whose wishes must be considered in the ultimate settlement, writes:

"The true solution would be a referendum to the Slav peoples included in the Austrian Empire on the point whether they wish to remain under Austria or to join Servia or to come as a separate unit into a Balkan federation."

The Slavs of the Austrian Empire include large numbers

of Poles, Ruthenes, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. Are they all to be polled together or separately? And what is to happen in districts where these races are mixed with others? Probably Mr. Dickinson had only the southern Slavs in mind-but even so, the problem with its mixture of religions, Catholic, Orthodox, and Moslem, is infinitely more complex than the problem of Ulster. It may be suggested that it would be possible to divide up the country for the purpose of the plebiscite into districts which would be substantially of one mind. That no doubt is so, but the authority who arranged the division would also arrange the destination of each area and the holding of the plebiscites would be an unnecessary formality.

But there is another objection that seems to us even more fatal to the procedure which Mr. Dickinson suggests. Suppose the results of the plebiscites were a series of demands for complete independence, which is quite possible-Europe would then be faced with the choice of either ignoring the mandates it had invoked or else creating conditions infinitely less stable than those which existed before the war. With an independent Poland, an independent Bohemia, an independent Hungary, and perhaps even an independent Ruthenia and an independent Croatia, owing no allegiance to any Great Power, yet free to coquette with all, we should have the problem of southeastern Europe magnified tenfold and there would be no sense of international security, no slackening of the preparations for war, until the map had once more been recast. That is not the sort of solution Great Britain is fighting for.

Many Socialists both of the nationalistic and the internationalistic tendency agree largely with these criticisms. Bauer, of Austria, in his Imperialismus und die Nationalitaetenfrage, has dealt fully with the complexities of the nationality question in Austria and has also admitted that the conflict of immediate economic interests throws the peoples themselves into antagonisms (see above, Chapter II), so that the abolition of secret diplomacy, desirable as it may be, would reach none of

the deeper issues. Both Kautsky and Bauer favor the earliest possible steps toward disarmament. If Kautsky expects an important move in this direction as the result of the war, however, it is not due to any of the illusions of the "bourgeois pacifists," now shared by the I. L. P., that an international agreement is possible. He is ready to have a partial disarmament forced on one side by the other as a beginning in the right direction. The New Statesman's leaning in the opposite direction is so marked that it expects no limitation either of the Continental armies or of the British Navy as a part of the settlement." It seems to feel that a sort of military balance of power must result and it relies only on voluntary and international agreement-as do the pacifists against whom the article is directed.

THE NEW INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY PROGRAMME OF

APRIL 5TH (1915)

At its Congress on April 5th the I. L. P. adopted a programme similar to the one above quoted, except that points (1) and (2) were dropped and the following appeared in their place:

That the people concerned shall give their consent before there is transfer of territory.

That is, the Congress dropped altogether its demands on behalf of subject peoples, whose territory is not claimed by a government not now in possession, abandoned the demand for plebiscites, and took no stand as to the independence desired by certain subject races.

What was the cause of this change? There is only one plausible explanation. The new formulation corresponds to the position of the German Socialists on this question as published in the Labor Leader on April 1st immediately before the I. L. P. Congress. The German

pro-peace group, feeling the military position of its government to be impregnable, and desiring immediate peace, did not dare to ask for more, and so was ready to sacrifice the small nationalities. The British immediate-peace faction followed.

MORRIS HILLQUIT

The two American Socialists who have dealt with the peace problem at greatest length and whose voices have the greatest weight (among those who have spoken) are Morris Hillquit and Charles Edward Russell. Hillquit's first utterances on peace were in New York in November. As previous quotations have already indicated, his position differs radically from the internationalism of Kautsky. He wants no annexation on a large scale and no colossal indemnities, which is Bernstein's position. Unlike Bernstein, however, who wishes a German victory (though not necessarily on both fronts), or Kautsky, who hopes to see great changes brought about by the war, Hillquit believes that a good time to end it would be either immediately (see Chapter XXVII) or when it is a "draw."

CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL

Russell's views are to be found in the New Review for January, and in Pearson's Magazine for February and March (1915). The first article, a very short one, we reproduce in its entirety. He does not want peace until Germany is sufficiently beaten to ensure respect for treaties and the rights of small nations in the future or until her aggressive military party and absolute form of government have received a blow that will bring about their overthrow:

If the present commercial and social system is to remain unimpaired, the end of the war will probably see the terms