V. I.

Lenin

Dealing in Put Pravdy No. 34 with the interesting events in Ireland, we spoke of the policy of the British Liberals, who
allowed themselves to be scared by the
Conservatives. [1]

Since those lines were written, new events have occurred which have
transformed that particular conflict (between the Liberals and
Conservatives) over the question of Home Rule for Ireland into a general
constitutional crisis in Britain.

As the Conservatives threatened a Protestant “rebellion” in Ulster
against Home Rule for Ireland, the Liberal Government set part of its
troops into motion in order to compel respect for the will of Parliament.

But what happened?

Generals and other British Army officers mutinied!

They declared that they would not fight against Protestant Ulster as
that would run counter to their “patriotism”, and that they would resign.

The Liberal Government were absolutely stunned by this revolt of the
landowners standing at the head of the army. The Liberals have been
accustomed to console themselves with constitutional illusions and phrases
about the rule of law, and clo se their eyes to the real relation of forces, to the class struggle. And this real relation
of forces has been such that, owing to the cowardice of the bourgeoisie, a
number of pre-bourgeois, medieval institutions and privileges of the landed
gentry have been preserved in Britain.

To suppress the revolt of the aristocratic officers, the Liberal
Government should have appealed to the people, to the masses, to the
proletariat, but that was something the “enlightened” Liberal bourgeois gentlemen feared more than anything
else. The government actually made concessions to the mutinous
officers, persuaded them to withdraw their resignations, and gave them
written assurances that troops would not be used against Ulster.

Efforts were made to conceal from the people the disgraceful fact that
such written assurances had been given (March 21, new style), and the
Liberal leaders, Asquith, Morley and others, lied in the most incredible
and shameless manner in their official statements. However, the truth came
out. The fact that written promises had been given to the officers was not
denied. Apparently, “pressure” was brought to bear by the King. The
resignation of Secretary for War Seely, the assumption of his portfolio by
Asquith “himself”, the re-election of Asquith, the circular to the troops
about respect for law—all this was nothing but sheer official
hypocrisy. The fact remains that the Liberals yielded to the landowners,
who had flouted the constitution.

Stormy scenes ensued in Parliament. The Conservatives heaped
well-deserved ridicule and scorn upon the Liberal Government, while the
Labour M. P., Ramsay MacDonald, one of the most moderate of the
liberal-labour politicians, protested in the strongest terms against the
reactionaries’ conduct. He said that these people were always ready to
fulminate against strikers, but when it came to Ulster they refused to do
their duty because the Irish Home Rule Bill affected their class prejudices
and interests. (The landowners in Ireland are English, and Home Rule for
Ireland, which would mean Home Rule for the Irish bourgeoisie and peasants,
threatens to somewhat curtail the voracious appetites of the noble lords.)
These people, Ramsay MacDonald continued, thought only of fighting the
workers, but when it came to compelling the rich and the property-owners to
respect the law, they refused to do their duty.

This revolt of the landowners against the British Parliament, the
“all-powerful” Parliament (as the Liberal dullards, especially the
Liberal pundits, have thought and said millions of times), is of tremendous
significance. March 21 (March 8, old style), 1914, will be an epoch-making
turning-point, the day when the noble landowners of Britain tore the British constitution and British law to shreds and gave an
excellent lesson of the class struggle.

This lesson stemmed from the impossibility of blunting the sharp
antagonisms between the proletariat and bourgeoisie of Britain by means of
the half-hearted, hypocritical, sham-reformist policy of the Liberals. This
lesson will not be lost upon the British labour movement; the working class
will now quickly proceed to shake off its philistine faith in the scrap of
paper called the British law and constitution, which the British
aristocrats have torn up before the eyes of the whole people.

These aristocrats behaved like revolutionaries of the right
and thereby shattered all conventions, tore aside the veil that prevented
the people from seeing the unpleasant but undoubtedly real class
struggle. All saw what the bourgeoisie and the Liberals have been
hypocritically concealing (they are hypocrites everywhere, but nowhere,
perhaps, such consummate hypocrites as in Britain). All saw that the
conspiracy to break the will of Parliament had been prepared long ago. Real
class rule lay and still lies outside of Parliament. The
above-mentioned medieval institutions, which for long had been inoperative
(or rather seemed to be inoperative), quickly came into operation and
proved to be stronger than Parliament. And Britain’s petty-bourgeois Liberals, with their speeches about reforms and the might
of Parliament designed to lull the workers, proved in fact to be straw men,
dummies, put up to bamboozle the people. They were quickly “ shut up ” by the aristocracy, the men in power .

How many books have been written, especially by German and Russian
liberals, in praise of law and social peace in Britain! Everybody knows
that the historical mission of the German and Russian liberals is to show
servile admiration for what the class struggle has produced in Britain and
in France, and to proclaim the results of that struggle as the “truths of
science”, a science that stands “ above classes ”. In reality,
however, “law and social peace” in Britain were merely a brief result of
the torpor the British proletariat was in approximately between the 1850’s
and 1900’s.

Britain’s monopoly has come to an end. World competition has
sharpened. The cost of living has gone up. Associations of big capitalists have crushed the small and medium businessmen and come
down with their full weight upon the workers. Once more the British
proletariat has awakened after the close of the eighteenth century, after
the Chartist movement of the 1830’s and 1840’s.

The constitutional crisis of 1914 will mark another important stage in
the history of this awakening.

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Notes:
[1]
See pp. 148–51 of this volume.— Ed .