It is a national characteristic of us English to fight new ideas and institutions in principle abroad, while, in practice, we introduce them at home under different names. This has worked well on the whole. While reaction is occupied with damning and downing the novelty as an absurdity and atrocity introduced by the brutal and barbarous foreigner, _real-politik_ finds that the same novelty, under some new name, helps production at home. Thus, while we fight the _Soviets_ with military expeditions and poison gas, and the milder _Räte-Republics_ of Germany with military missions and diplomatic notes, we work away at our Guild Socialism and our Shop Stewards' Committees, extend Whitley Councils to the Civil Service and Welfare Committees to the Navy, and even admit employés to joint control of our railways.
There is an English revolution not only impending, but in progress, and those to whom revolution means barricades and "Bolshevism" will be relieved to hear that the course of events, both in Germany and Russia, suggests that our British revolution is so well advanced that these stimulants of a revolution, that has stiffened and stagnated, will not be required. England, not being wholly, at all events for long, run by London clubs and political cliques, manages to achieve its political revolution by way of economic reconstruction, and it is doing this on the same principles as Germany, though by a different procedure. That is why it was as foolish for the British to try to upset the Council movement of the Berliners as it was for the Berliners to upset it among the Brunswickers and Bavarians.
Moreover, if the Councils can still be killed, the Germans themselves will eventually kill them by diddling concessions or by diplomatic compromises. For such compromises as those already put forward in Germany show a fatal ignorance of, or indifference to, the fundamental facts of this revolutionary movement. I much doubt whether the German revolutionary workmen and their political leaders, whether Independent or Communist, can ever be got to accept the Labour Chamber (_Arbeitskammer_) with its parity of representation between employers and employed; at all events, until the employer is represented by the State. And such "nationalisation "is only valued by the German workman as a preliminary to "socialisation." The workers are attached to the Council idea largely because it attacks the capitalist, and gives the workmen protection against him in a way the Union cannot. If the Councils are to be widened into a democracy including all classes, the power of private capital must first be broken or brought in bounds.