October 2, 1915. 
L A iN IJ A ^ U VV A J i: U 
worker is unable to protect himself by dianj^ing his 
employer to increase his wages. Under the Munitions 
Act men are as firmly fixed to the service of one emploxcr 
as if they had been branded as serfs. 'Ihis bondage, let 
the reader bear in mind, is imposed on working people 
by an Act of Parliament which specially allows i!ie 
profits of the employer to be increased in this time oi 
war to the amount of 20 per cent, on his pre-war prolits. 
But there are other considerations also arising out of the 
Munitions Act which are disturbing the mind of ilie 
worker just now^ and making him discontented. The 
protecting safeguards of his wages, which in times past 
have been maintained at the cost of many a strike, are 
being swept away. Emplo}ers are allowed by law to 
employ unskilled labour (so-called) to do work on whicli 
skilled workmen were previously employed. Rules and 
customs which have maintained a relatively high rate of 
payment for certain industrial operations are being 
steadily and quietly set aside. Is'o record of these 
changes are being kept by emplo3'ers, and the Govern- 
ment is taking no action to ensure the existence of such 
records for use when the war is over. In these circum- 
stances is it likely that the workers concerned can place 
any confidence in the promise of the Government that 
the old conditions w ill be restored ? 
When the war is over and employers are competing 
with each other f(jr ordinary business, the temptation to 
cheaper production will be great and labour disputes are 
certain to be numerous. The huge war contracts will 
no longer reliexe the labour market of surplus labour, 
and large nimibers of the unemployed will be men and 
women who in war time have been taught to do part 
of the work which used to be done entirely by skilled 
workmen. What the workmen are sa\ing is that the 
Government should have taken over the munition estab- 
lishments and should have associated the workers' re- 
presentatives in the responsibility of controlling and 
managing tiiem. Rules and regulations made necessary 
bv the clash of interests between workers and their cm- 
pioyers would have been freely abandoned then, for the 
future w(juld be less uncertain, and whilst war conditions 
still prevail, men would know that they work for the 
nation and not for the private profit of individuals. 
The old practice of trusting to individuals who are 
in business for protit to supply all the goods and services 
required bv the nation has shown up bailly during this 
war. It has put extra profits into the pockets of specu- 
lators and enabled a small section of the community to 
hold up the nation to ransom. The working-class 
population is paying heavily in consequence in the form 
of increased prices, and the feeling among workers 
generally, as well as among mimition workers, 
is that they are being made to pay unnecessarily. 
Munition workers who are being treated as serfs feel 
their position more acutel)' than other workers, and they 
are showing it. 
This war has been the means of throwing consider- 
able light on questions affecting the production and ex- 
change of goods and services. The nation's require- 
ments are clearly ascertainable, and the short and effec- 
tive way of supplying them is for the Government to 
take the machinery, plant, and raw material available 
and apply the whole of it to the service of the nation. 
By neglecting to do this at the very beginning and per- 
sisting in its mistaken course, the Government has 
allowed the profiteer and the moneylender to take 
advantage of the nation's needs for their own private 
profit. This is the idea that the workers are getting into 
their minds, and the trouble among munition workers 
is due to this and to the senseless and useless tvrannv. 
which is being put upon them by the .Munitions Act, 
aggravated by wild and reckless charges made against 
munition workers, and which are regarded bv them ys 
insults added to injury. 
BOOKS THAT EXCEL. 
A LITERARY REVIEW. 
" Victor)." R} Jns:ph Cenrad. (Melhuen and Co.) 68. 
A new Conrad book is an event, not only in fiction. Liit; 
in literature, and tliis Conrad book, combining all llie wealth 
of imagination of tlie earlier Conrad with the subtle analytic 
quality that was so evident in " Western Eyes," will rank 
very high among iU author's works, though time alone tan 
declare whether it will take absolutely first place. 
In spits of the title — which, by the way, was decided on 
before war was even inimment — the book is in no way con- 
cerned with the present war. It is a story of the i^lands, of 
Axel Heyst, inscrutable adventurer, and of the girl Alma, 
member of a very third-rate touring musical company, whoiJi 
Heyst took away from her sordid surroundings to a certain 
island in mid-Pacific, renamed her "' Lena," and tiied to 
understand her. Meanwhile Lena, having found the one 
man in the woild. is busied in winning Heyst's love, the 
finer love of the s])irit that every woman worthy of the name 
desires. The way in which she accomplishes this is the 
" Victory " of the title, bat any reviewer who states the way 
in which she achieved her aim will be guilty of a crime against 
his craft, for no lover of good fiction ought to be deprived 
of the opportunity of reading this in the book itself. 
In certain small things Conrad himself stands out from 
his work. For instance: "One could not refuse him a 
measure of greatness [referring to Heyst's father], for he 
was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls." And 
again: " Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which 
does not stand close investigation." These as passing 
glimpses of the author; but for the most part we forget the 
author in the book, which is as it should be. In reading, we 
are taken out into the pulsing atmosj>here of the islands, 
with their little intrigues and strong passions, and in the 
colour and warmth of tropic sunlight and tropic darkness we 
watch the unfolding of a half-dozen characters, this done 
in the finely analytic manner of the later Conrad, and the 
main characters led through such a whirling blaze of action 
£8 made " Typhoon " a book of note. 
In all the four hundred-odd pages there is not a word 
too much— the book is a fine work of art from a lit':rary point 
of view. The outstanding character is Lena, niagMificfr\itIy 
drawn, and inspiring not only sympathy but love: while 
Heyst, groping toward understanding of the first woman he 
has taken into liis life, compels interest from beginning to 
end. Space alone forbids detailed mention of the remaining 
half-dozen diaimttix pnftnui, of whom it may be said that 
each is a conscientious study on the part of the author. So 
far as fiction is concerned, it may safely be said that this is 
the book of the year. 
" The Research .Majiniricent.' By H. 0. Wells. (Macmilian and Co.) 6s. 
" In this world cue may wake in the night and resolve to 
be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king." This 
sentence, spoken bj' Henham to his wife, seems to crystalliss 
Benham, hero of Thi Rtx'tinh Mnfinifirmt. He believed 'n 
the new aristocracy, the need for rulers of mankind who can 
rule; he set out to fit himself for rule, and in that quest 
he died. 
Taking Beidiam seriously, the quest was magnificent — as 
was the charge at Balaclava. Neither, however, was prac- 
tical. That the quest involved, almost necessarih', leaving 
his wife to her infidelity: that it involved a large carelessness 
of the details of life, are side issues so long as one ta.k.?s 
Benham seriously. He began life, the book confesses, with — 
from the conjnion|)lace point of view — a lack of balance: he 
married, hastily and foolishly, a woman who needed from her 
husband the ultimate of companionship and sympathy, and: 
then he left her to bear her child while he set off on a tour 
in the East that should give him realisation of the problems 
of rule. Throughout his life he was a theorist, neglecting 
practical things; lacking in some of the essential attributes 
of a man, lie set out to be no less than a god, a i>erfect luler, 
and in that he became, as the first page of the book confesses, 
ridiculous. The claim that he came near to the sublime is not 
justified by the context. 
His own musings, toward the end of his quest, told him : 
" There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a iKaii liko 
you may lay hold upon." It was an inevitable but wroni; 
conclusion, "and it seems that since the day of r<)no- 
19 
