The accuracy of this indictment will commend itself to men who like myself are not of Pope Benedict’s communion.

I trust that I have already shown that the challenge to authority is universal and is not confined to that of the political state.  Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering.  Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt.  If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among the most enlightened peoples, the underground rumblings of revolution may be heard.

The Government of Italy has been preserved from overthrow, not alone by its constituted authorities, but by a band of resolute men, called the “fascisti,” who have taken the law into their own hands, as did the vigilance committees in western mining camps, to put down worse disorders.

Even England, the mother of democracies, and the most stable of all Governments in the maintenance of law, has been shaken to its very foundations in the last three years, when powerful groups of men attempted to seize the State by the throat and compel submission to their demands by threatening to starve the community.  This would be serious enough if it were only the world-old struggle between capital and labour and had only involved the conditions of manual toil.  But the insurrection against the political state in England was more political than it was economic.  It marked, on the part of millions of men, a portentous decay of belief in representative government and its chosen organ—­the ballot box.  Great and powerful groups had suddenly discovered—­and it may be the most portentous political discovery of the twentieth century—­that the power involved in their control over the necessaries of life, as compared with the power of the voting franchise, was as a forty-two centimetre cannon to the bow and arrow.  The end sought to be attained, namely the nationalization of the basic industries, and even the control of the foreign policy of Great Britain, vindicated the truth of the British Prime Minister’s statement that these great strikes involved something more than a mere struggle over the conditions of labour, and that they were essentially seditious attempts against the life of the State.[5]

[Footnote 5:  I am here speaking of the conditions of 1920.  I appreciate the great improvement, which seems to me to justify the Lincoln-like patience of Lloyd George.]

Nor were they altogether unsuccessful; for, when the armies of Lenin and Trotsky were at the gates of Warsaw, in the summer of 1920, the attempts of the Governments of England and Belgium to afford assistance to the embattled Poles were paralysed by the labour groups of both countries, who threatened a general strike if those two nations joined with France in aiding Poland to resist a possibly greater menace to Western civilization than has occurred since Attila and his Huns stood on the banks of the Marne.