catastrophe, if not the death, in Europe, of civilization itself, at any
rate the culmination and collapse of a distinctive industrial civiliza-
tion, which the workers will not seek to reconstruct. At such times
of crisis it is easier to slip into ruin than to progress into higher
forms of organization. That is the problem as it presents itself to
the Labour Party today.

What this war is consuming is not merely the security, the homes,
the livelihood and the lives of millions of innocent families, and an
enormous proportion of all the accumulated wealth of the world,
but also the very basis of the peculiar social order in which it has
arisen. The individualist system of capitalist production, based on
the private ownership and competitive administration of land and
capital, with its reckless "profiteering" and wage-slavery; with
its glorification of the unhampered struggle for the means of life and
its hypocritical pretence of the "survival of the fittest"; with the
monstrous inequality of circumstances which it produces and the
degradation and brutalization, both moral and spiritual, resulting
therefrom, may, we hope, indeed have received a death-blow. With
it must go the political system and ideas in which it naturally found
expression. We of the Labour Party, whether in opposition or in
due time called upon to form an Administration, will certainly lend
no hand to its revival. On the contrary, we shall do our utmost to
we that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death. If
we in Britain are to escape from the decay of civilization itself, which
the Japanese statesman foresees, we must ensure that what is pres-
ently to be built up is a new social order, based not on fighting, but
on fraternity -- not on the competitive struggle for the means of
bare life, but on a deliberately planned co-operation in production
and distribution for the benefit of all who participate by hand or by
brain -- not on the utmost possible inequality of riches, but on a
systematic approach towards a healthy equality of material circum-
stances for every person born into the world -- not on an enforced
dominion over subject nations, subject races, subject Colonies, subject
classes or a subject sex, but, in industry as well as in government,
on that equal freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and
that widest possible participation in power, both economic and po-
litical, which is characteristic of Democracy. We do not, of course
pretend that it is possible, even after the drastic clearing away that
is now going on, to build society anew, in a year or two of feverish
"Reconstruction." What the Labour Party intends to satisfy itself
about is that each brick that it helps to lay shall go to erect the
structure that it intends, and no other.

We need not here recapitulate, one by one, the different items in
the Labour Party's programme, which successive Party Conferences
have adopted. These proposals, some of them in various publica-
tions worked out in practical detail, are often carelessely derided as
impracticable, even by the politicians who steal them piecemeal from
us! The members of the Labour Party, themselves actually working

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