have submitted to have our letters, our telegrams, our newspapers
censored, our dividends delayed, our trains cut off, our horses and even
our houses commandeered, our streets darkened, our restaurants closed,
and ourselves shot dead on the public highways if we were slow to
realize that some excited person bawling in the distance was a sentry
challenging us. But that we are to be politically gagged and enslaved as
well; that the able-bodied soldier in the trenches, who depends on the
able-minded civilian at home to guard the liberties of his country and
protect him from carelesness or abuse of power by the authorities whom
he must blindly and dumbly obey, is to be betrayed the moment his back
is turned to his fellow-citizens and his face to the foe, is not
patriotism: it is the paralysis of mortal funk: it is the worst kind of
cowardice in the face of the enemy. Let us hear no more of it, but
contest our elections like men, and regain the ancient political
prestige of England at home as our expeditionary force has regained it
abroad.

The Labour Party, then, need have no hesitation in raising all the
standing controversies between Democracy and Junkerism in their acutest
form, and taking advantage of the war emergency to press them to a
series of parliamentary victories for Labour, whether in negotiations
with the Government whips, in divisions on the floor of the House, or in
strenuously contested bye-elections. No doubt our Junkers will try to
disarm their opponents by representing that it would be in the last
degree unfair, un-English, and ungentlemanly on the part of the Labour
members to seize any tactical advantage in parliamentary warfare, and
most treacherous and unpatriotic to attack their country (meaning the
Junker Party) when it is at war. Some Labour members will be easily
enough gulled in this way: it would be laughable, if the consequences
were not so tragic, to see how our parliamentary beginners from the