Page:James Ramsay MacDonald - Socialism To-day (1909).djvu/8

The question we have to answer is: How are we to organise ourselves? How is Socialism to come? What is to be our relation to national questions that are not on our programme? Are we to accept the aims and methods of democratic government? Hitherto, we have been a little too content with answering those questions by words and phrases, the meanings of which have not always been specific or definite. We have, for instance, declaimed against Party Government whilst doing our very best to form a new Party with a written Constitution. At one moment, we have proclaimed the eternal justice of majority rule; at another, we have demanded that a Socialist and Labour minority should determine the work of the House of Commons. Many criticised the action of the Labour Party on the Licensing Bill without having spent an hour in considering how, except by some such Bill, the Socialist principle that all monopolies should belong to the State and contribute directly to State income, could be applied to the licensed trade.

Even our great watchword "Independence" has not always been sufficiently well defined. Whilst we were concerned merely with running candidates, it laid down the very clear principle that we ran therm irrespective of the convenience of other parties, and, so far, it was admirable. It has been one of the secrets of our success. But we seem to have been rather averse to discuss "Independence" as a method of Parliamentary action, and under Parliamentary conditions. If, for instance, we held the balance of power between two parties, how would we use it? Would we turn one out in preference to the other, or would we turn out first the one and then the other, and make government impossible until we ourselves were wiped out for the time being by a series of General Elections that were regarded by the country as being nothing but a great nuisance?

These are not hypothetical questions at all. They have arisen in practically every country in the world where there is a Socialist and Labour Party in Parliament. In France, we get them in one form; in Belgium, in another; in Germany, in another; in Italy, in another. In the Commonwealth of Australia, one experiment was tried when Mr. Deakin was in power and Mr. Watson leader of the Labour Partv; in South Australia, a totally different experiment was tried under the Coalition Ministry of which Mr. Price the leader of the Labour Party is the head. Mr. Deakin was the leader of the Party third in numerical strength in the Commonwealth Parlia-
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