Britain’s Place in the Great Plan

Now of Great Britain, I ask: What is her place in the Plan? Great Britain has a possibility before her, and a power of accomplishing that possibility, which are not so great in any other Nation in the world. I will tell you exactly what I mean. When I was here in 1919 it was just in the crash of the Russian Revolution, and I ventured to say to a great body of Trade Unionists and working men that Britain was the one country in the world, I believed, where by training and self-discipline and the power of combination in the unions, and the learning in the unions of discipline, there was good hope that this tremendous transformation might be made without revolution or violence. Things are not as hopeful to-day as they were then; and largely because the sense of duty, and of discipline and loyalty to leaders is lacking; these things have broken down very much amongst those who were the most splendid examples of them a few years ago; and that because a class is taking the place of the Nation and the power of the class-what they are pleased to call 44the dictation of the proletariat-is striving to compel the Nation. There is no class, autocratic or democratic or proletariat or monarchic, that has the right to dictate tothe Nation and say what it should do. It is not because they are many that they have the right to kill Liberty. Not because they are strong and can starve the Nation into submission have they the right to tyrannise. I protested against it when employers tried to starve the workmen into breaking unionism; and I protest against it as much to-day, when the strong by numbers try to starve the country, because they are engaged in quarrels with their employers. I believe it is possible that these dangers can be overcome, and I want to put to you as my last point that the tendencies everywhere are not only towards Union within the Nation, but of Union of larger and larger Nations as we go on in evolution. In the past those larger Unions have always been made by military force, by power, by trampling on the weaker Nations and incorporating them with the stronger by annexation of other peoples’ countries. That they call annexation rather than robbery, because it is a prettier word and covers over what really has occurred. They have been made by aggressive war, which is murder on a vaster scale, which is the outcome of hatred, and therefore destructive and demoralising; and by diplomacy, which is too often only a many-syllabled word for untruth and intrigue