The swelling flood of historical materials in the twentieth century has created unprecedented problems of assimilation for the historian. Both specialized researchers and those simply trying to keep abreast of what has been published find themselves in ever greater need of abstracts, comprehensive surveys, and bibliographies. That portion of the literature not outfitted with such buoys seems destined to sink beneath the inundation of new materials, to pass out of the general view into murky, seldom-explored depths where it will lie unused, perhaps soon to be altogether forgotten, whatever its intrinsic value. The voluminous writings of the British historian G. D. H. Cole, as yet unprovided with the kind of aids in question, fall into this unfortunate category. This bibliographical list and commentary has been prepared in the hope of helping remove them from it.

In seinem Anfang 1914 erschienenen Buch über den politischen Massenstreik betont Karl Kautsky, daß die Parteimehrheit, die seit 1899 stets gegen die „staatsmännische Ungeduld” des rechten Flügels vorgehen mußte, sich seit dem Magdeburger Parteitag von 1910 fast ausschließlich gegen die „rebellische Ungeduld” der äußersten Linken zu wenden hatte. Damit liefert er ein bezeichnendes Stichwort der innerparteilichen Diskussion am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges. Die offizielle Ideologic der deutschen Vorkriegssozialdemokratie, die zu Recht mit dem Namen ihres Schöpfers Kautsky etikettiert wird, konnte sich zwar als Element der Integration einer heterogenen Massenpartei im taktischen, organisatorischen und psychologischen Bereich bis 1914 unbestritten behaupten. Insbesondere aber seit der preußischen Wahlrechtsbewegung hatte sie starke Belastungsproben zu bestehen, die von dem linken Parteiflügel ausgingen, der nun mit eigenständiger politischer Kraft und größerem Führungsanspruch auftrat. Der Attentismus des „marxistischen Zentrums”, das unter der theoretischen Führung Kautskys und der politischen Leitung Bebels das Bild der Gesamtpartei prägte, war für die in zahlreichen Nuancierungen sich herauskristallisierende Linke Anlaß zunehmender Unruhe und harter Angriffe. Die Debatten um die Marokkopolitik des Vorstandes dokumentieren dies eindrucksvoll. Die dazu parallel laufenden Bestrebungen eines Teils der Radikalen, die auf eine Reorganisierung der Parteileitung drängten, wurzelten im Boden derselben Kritik

The history of the Syndicat des Employés du Commerce et de l'Industrie is of interest both for its considerable success in organising clerical workers, who, in general, have been slow to recognise the value of trade unionism and on account of the dominant role it played in the history of the Christian trade-union movement in France. In 1920 the 30,000 clerical workers organised in the Fédération Française des Syndicats d'Employés Catholiques (which had developed from the SECI) accounted for nearly a third of the membership of the Confédération Française des Travailleurs Chrétiens. The SECI provided the new confederation with its chairman, Jules Zirnheld, its general secretary, Gaston Tessier and almost the whole of its secretariat; its principles, its attitudes, its methods exercised a powerful influence on the confederation until Tessier's retirement from the chairmanship in 1953. Although its action developed in the context of a growing body of official Catholic doctrine on social and industrial questions, from the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891 onwards, its approach was determined essentially by the pressure of the needs of its members; “practical organisation has always attracted it more than ideology” wrote its general secretary, Charles Viennet, in 1914. In serving these needs it was deflected neither by the traditionalism of René de la Tour du Pin and Albert de Mun, who envisaged a corporate organisation of masters and men which would recreate the mediaeval guilds, nor by the democracv of Marc Sanpriier. which, involving acceotance of the Revolution as well as the Republic, looked forward to a trade-union movement „strictly concerned with trade and industrial questions, democratic to the core and deeply respectful of all moral convictions” and therefore implied membership of a broadly-based, democratic Confédération Générale du Travail. Nevertheless, in solving its problems as they arose the SECI evolved, and in so doing it gave to the Christian confederation a tradition of evolution, which led it finally, in 1964, to the abandonment of its specifically religious character.