THE WORLD REVOLUTION 37 



industry, representing no function that can be 

 expressed in terms of social utility. So the pro- 

 paganda becomes an appeal for the votes of the 

 proletariat to sweep the whole system away. And 

 the argument, as we have seen, has come in the last 

 resort to envisage without hesitation the ultimate 

 conditions of force and to be consciously addressed 

 to armed men as themselves the ultimate units of 

 civilization. 



All these profound movements in the West in 

 which we see the foundations of society being 

 challenged proceed with the same spirit moving 

 through them. We appear to be everywhere 

 witnessing a retreat upon the first principles of war. 

 The Westminster Gazette, speaking at the centre of 

 British politics, recently recorded a change in 

 political conditions in Great Britain which a genera- 

 tion ago would have been unthinkable. The 

 journal noted a peculiar fact of our time to consist 

 in the substitution of a condition of uncompromising 

 war resting on violence for a condition of free 

 discussion in all the principal institutions on which 

 popular government rests. The inevitable result, 

 the journal went on to say, is that in parliamentary 

 government the proceedings are becoming " battles 

 rather than deliberations, and that the whole pro- 

 cedure has to be organized on the basis of war . . . 



