dedicating their gifts to the common weal, organizing and directing vast
enterprises for their governments. In short, all useful citizens who
make worthy contributions--as distinguished from parasites, profiteers,
and drones, are invited to be members; there is no class distinction
here. The fortunes of such a party are, of course, dependent upon the
military success of the allied armies and navies. But it has defined the
kind of democracy the Allies are fighting for, and thus has brought about
an unqualified endorsement of the war by those elements of the population
which hitherto have felt the issue to be imperialistic and vague rather
than democratic and clear cut. President Wilson's international program
is approved of and elaborated.

The Report on Reconstruction of the new British Labour Party is perhaps
the most important political document presented to the world since the
Declaration of Independence. And like the Declaration, it is written in
the pure English that alone gives the high emotional quality of
sincerity. The phrases in which it tersely describes its objects are
admirable. "What is to be reconstructed after the war is over is not
this or that government department, this or that piece of social
machinery, but Society itself." There is to be a systematic approach
towards a "healthy equality of material circumstance for every person
born into the world, and not an enforced dominion over subject nations,
subject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex." In industry as
well as in government the social order is to be based "on that equal
freedom, that general consciousness of consent, and that widest
participation in power, both economic and political, which is
characteristic of democracy." But all this, it should be noted, is not
to be achieved in a year or two of "feverish reconstruction"; "each brick
that the Labour Party helps to lay shall go to erect the structure it
intends and no other."