Toward Collectivism

Abstract

In July 1914, Andrew Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative party, repeated his pledge to back Ulster to civil war if necessary and to disrupt the workings of the British Parliament to prevent the implementation of Irish home rule. Sir Henry Wilson, the chief of military operations, publicly sided with mutinous army officers on the same issue. One month before the fighting broke out in the First World War, British parliamentary government was collapsing, and civil war seemed imminent, and not merely in Ireland. Increasingly bitter class war in England reached a peak as ever more workers turned to strikes instead of seeking parliamentary redress. Feminism reached its most frenzied stage with incendiarism in post boxes, suicide under the hoofs of the King’s horse at the Derby, “Votes for Women” etched with acid on golf-course putting greens, and an attempt to blow up the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey.