PDF-file (The same edition. Another cover. 2.2 Mb)

A League of Nations 653pressing, immediate insistency and menace which touches withits close foreshadowing finger the very life of any new internationalsystem and that is the approaching struggle for supremacybetween Capital and Labour. This is a far other matter thanthe clash of conflicting imperialisms in the broad spaces or thewrangle of quarrelsome nationalisms snarling at each other’sheels or tearing each other in the narrower ways of the Earth;for those are questions at most of division of power, territoryand economic opportunity on the present basis of society, butthis means a questioning of that basis and a shaking of thevery foundations of the European world-order. This League is aleague of governments, and all these governments are bourgeoismonarchies or republics, instruments of a capitalistic systemassailed by the tides of socialism. Their policy is to compromise,to concede in detail, but to prolong their own principle so thatthey may survive and capitalism be still the dominant power of anew mixed semi-socialistic order, very much as the governmentswhich formed the Holy Alliance sought to save the dominanceof the old idea of aristocratic monarchy by a compromise withthe growing spirit of democracy. What they offer is better andmore human conditions for the labourer, even a certain associationin the government of the society, but still a second andnot a primary place in the scale. This was indeed all to whichLabour itself formerly aspired, and it is all to which the rearof its army still looks forward, but it is already ceasing to bethe significance of the Labour movement; a new idea has arisen,the dominance, the rule of labour, and it has already formulateditself and captured a great portion of the forces of socialism.It has even established for a while in Russia a new kind ofgovernment, a dictatorship of the proletariate, which aspires toeffect a rapid transition to another order of society.Against this novel idea and its force the existing governmentsare compelled by the very principle of their being to declarewar and to struggle against its coming with all the strengthat their disposal and strive to mobilise against it whatever faithin existing things still remains in the mind of the peoples. Theold order has still no doubt strength enough to crush out of