Everything that was helpful during the strike was done in
the Palace of Westminster ; everything that was important was said there. Beyond any challenge Parlia- r went remains the focus of the nation with all the high lights turned .upon it. It is pleasant to believe that, despite themselves, the most vehement and undisciplined Labour members supported the established scheme of things. For if they were to be heard at all they could be heard only in the House of Commons. Another thing which has been proved beyond dispute is that the British people, strikers and non-strikers, have no aptitude for flying into a revolutionary frenzy. Some thinkers have regarded revolution as a disease or contagion which, suffering no intellectual control, spreads of its own accord ; and no doubt that annus mirabilis of revolution, 1848, when hardly a country in Europe was unaffected by the political influenza of the time, supplies evidence for the fatalistic view. But even in that year the English Chartists were not revolutionaries ; we smile now to think that they were described as such merely because they demanded that all the benefits of the Constitution= which they have since got—should be extended to them.
