Philip’s other letter was much slenderer and had been posted only one day after its precursor¹. It opened with his amazed account of the collapse² of the General Strike. “Everything has happened as Uncle Robert foretold³, and so far I am proved a fool,” it began.

He went on to express a quite extravagant⁴ contempt for the leaders of the Labour Party who had “neither the grit⁵ to prevent the General Strike nor the grit to keep on with it.” It was clear that he had a little lost his equanimity⁶ over the struggle and that his criticisms of selfish toryism had tilted⁷ him heavily towards the side of the strikers in the struggle. And he was intensely annoyed to find his uncle’s estimate of the situation so completely confirmed. The time had come to call out the second line, stop light and power and food distribution and bring matters to a crisis, and there was little reason to suppose that most of the men of the second line would not have stood by their unions.

But it would have meant the beginning of real violence and a grimmer phase of the struggle and the trade union leaders were tired, frightened and consciously second-rate men. They were far more terrified by the possibilities of victory than by the certainty of defeat. They had snatched at the opportunity offered by a new memorandum⁸ by “that Kosher Liberal, Herbert Samuel”—“Tut tut!” said Mrs. Rylands; “but this is real bad temper, Philip!"— which nobody had accepted or promised to stand by, and unconditionally⁹, trusting the whole future of the men they stood for, to a government that could publish the British Gazette, they had called the strike off. They had given in and

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