I. The Provisional Council
THE Socialist League was founded on December 30th, 1884. “Fellow Citizens”, began the splendid Manifesto which Morris had drafted,
“We come before you as a body advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is we seek a change in the basis of Society—a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities.”
A Provisional Council was formed, whose members added their names to the Manifesto. And the new party was launched—“Earth’s newest planet wheeling through the night”.
How fitted was the Provisional Council for its responsibility? Of the signatories to the Manifesto, several were to play only a minor part in the League, and need only be mentioned in passing—W. Bridges Adams, W.J. Clark, J. Cooper, W. Hudson, James Mavor of Glasgow and Edward Watson. E.T. Craig, by reason of his age, and Faulkner (Oxford), Maguire (Leeds) and Scheu (Edinburgh), by reason of their distance from London, were unable to take part in regular Council meetings. Even with these names subtracted, the Council appears as an able and determined group.
Heading the list were Edward and Eleanor Aveling. Dr. Aveling was one of the most brilliant of the younger intellectuals who joined the movement. In 1880 he was the rising star of the Secularists, a brilliant scientist with a Fellowship at University College, London, and a member of the London School Board, for Westminster. Born in 1851, he was in 1883 already the author of nearly a score of books and pamphlets on Secularism and Darwinism. When he became converted to Socialism by studying Capital early in 1884, he accepted Marxism as being in the strictest sense a science. Darwin and Marx became his twin masters, the one master in biological, the other in social, science. His understanding was schematic rather than creative. Marxism he regarded as a set of irrefutable factual discoveries in the field of economics, rather than as an historical method of analysis. But this tendency towards inflexibility was a less serious hindrance to the early movement than his notoriously erractic moral conduct. The facts of this unhappy matter are difficult to establish. But one important fact cannot be burked. Aveling acquired a reputation in the movement so unsavoury that not only the man himself, but also the principles which he espoused were brought under suspicion.
George Bernard Shaw later wrote of Aveling as an “agreeable rascal”:
“He was quite a pleasant fellow who would have gone to the stake for Socialism or Atheism, but with absolutely no conscience in his private life. He seduced every woman he met, and borrowed from every man.”
Shaw drew from him the character of Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Edouard Bernstein, the German Social-Democrat, who was on close terms with the Avelings during these years, said that the portrait, though “somewhat retouched”, was close to life.1 “Nearly everyone who had dealings with him,” said Henry Salt, who also knew him in the early days, “even those who were on the friendliest of terms, found themselves victimized, sooner or later, by his fraudulence in money matters.” In revolt against all bourgeois conventions, Aveling did not replace them by any new moral concern, but simply filled the vacuum with his own egotism: and, like other “agreeable rascals” of the same sort, he ended his life as a disagreeable rogue.
“It is easy to set him down as a scoundrel”, wrote Salt,
“but in truth he was an odd mixture of fine qualities and bad; a double-dealer, yet his duplicities were the result less of a calculated dishonesty than of a nature in which there was an excess of the emotional and artistic nature, with an almost complete lack of the moral.”1
When he had left university, he had become the manager of a company of strolling players. Later, he became established as a dramatic critic (under the name, “Alec Nelson”), and he wrote several “curtain-raisers” and one-act plays. He and Eleanor were among the small circle in the late 1880s who first perceived the importance of Ibsen, and encouraged the first stirrings of the “new drama” in England. There is no doubt that Aveling included within his contradictory personality exceptional ability, a good measure of courage and of artistic perception. It is likely that his personal weaknesses were exaggerated in the malicious gossip of political enemies; and the working-class leader who knew him best, Will Thorne, wrote of his part in the early movement with admiration, despite his own close knowledge of the tragic circumstances of the Avelings’ last years.2 “How said has life been all these years”, Eleanor wrote shortly before her suicide in 1898:
“I realize… more and more, that wrong behaviour is simply a moral sickness, and that the morally healthy… are not qualified to judge the condition of the morally sick… There are people who lack a certain moral sense just as others are deaf or short-sighted or are in other ways afflicted. And I begin to realize the fact that one is as little justified in blaming them for the one sort of disorder as for the other. We must strive to cure them, and if no cure is possible, we must do our best. I have learnt to perceive this through long suffering—suffering whose details I could not tell even to you—but I have learned it, and so I am endeavouring to bear all these trials as well as I can.”1
No apology need be made for the role in the English Socialist movement of Eleanor Marx herself. In 1880, when Edouard Bernstein first met her, she was “a blooming young maiden of twenty-four”,
“with the black hair and black eyes of her father, and an exceptionally musical voice. She was unusually vivacious, and took part, in her sensitive and emotional manner, in our discussions of party matters. With much greater devotion than her two elder sisters, Tussy, as Eleanor was called by her friends and her family, had dedicated herself to the Socialist movement.”2
In her early twenties, Eleanor had a consuming desire to be an actress, which she strove to hide from her father, who was already ailing and in need of attention. After her father’s death she was forced to abandon her dramatic career, and took a post in a boarding-school. She was soon active in the young movement, writing International Notes for To-day, helping Engels with her father’s papers, and (in 1884) going on the Council of the S.D.F. She was drawn towards Aveling, it seems, by their common work in “the Cause”, their shared interest in drama, his sensitive, intelligent and unconventional manners. Since Aveling was already married (although long separated from his wife) she decided to proclaim openly their free marriage. “Our union cannot. . be a legal one”, she wrote to the young Scottish engineer, J.L. Mahon, as yet unknown to her, in order to forestall the slander of enemies:
“It is a true and real one none the less. We are doing no human being the smallest wrong… We have both felt that we were justified in setting aside all the false & really immoral bourgeois conventionalities, & I am happy to say we have received—the only thing we care about—the approbation of our friends and fellow socialists.”1
“My London is a little Paris”, Engels wrote to Bernstein,2 and among those who approved and defended the unorthodox arrangement from Hyndman’s criticisms was William Morris.
It was largely through the Avelings that Engels maintained contact with the English movement. Engels, now living in his house in Regent’s Park Road, was (in the eyes of one young English Socialist) “a tall, bearded, vigorous, bright-eyed and genial septuagenarian… hospitable, fond of good living, and blessed with a sense of humour”.3 He had little time to take part in English affairs. The death of Marx, in March, 1883, had thrown upon him tremendous responsibilities, and he ordered his life by strict routine. “Every day, every post”—Aveling recalled after his death—“brought to his house newspapers and letters in every European language, and it was astonishing how he found time, with all his other work, to look through, keep in order, and remember the chief contents of them all.”4 Correspondence and polemical writings, new editions or translations of his own or Marx’s books, above all, work on Marx’s papers—every day these kept him busy until the small hours, with only a break for a stroll through Regent’s Park after lunch, and an hour or two with a friend after his evening meal. Only on his famous Sunday evenings was his house thrown open to his friends—refugees from Germany, Russia, Austria, visitors from America and France. Bax was a frequent visitor at Engels’s house, and entertained the table with his solemn paradoxes. Aveling, as the husband of “Tussy”, was naturally another close friend. Engels seems, in the 1880s, to have taken little notice of Aveling’s reputation in private life. Whatever rumours of Aveling’s behaviour reached his ears, he seems to have passed over as youthful vagaries. Eleanor he regarded almost as his own daughter, and if Aveling was her choice, he was prepared to support her against the criticisms of society.
This problem of personal relationship had a part in the complex of factors confusing the Socialist movement of the 1880s. “On account of Aveling”, Bernstein recorded, “many people kept away from Engels’s house.”1 Whether Morris was among these it is not clear. It is, on the face of it, unlikely. Morris and Engels had discussions before the “Split”, and they met on more than one occasion afterwards. Both men always spoke of each other with respect, and Engels regarded Morris’s medievalism “with good-humoured toleration”.2 Both time and temperamental differences prevented their becoming intimate, and Morris did not attend Engels’s Sunday evenings simply because this was his own busiest evening—either lecturing up and down the country, or at the head of his own circle at the Hammersmith Branch.
One point, however, should be made clear. The charge thrown at Engels by Hyndman—that the “Grand Lama of Regent’s Park Road” was ceaselessly intriguing in the English movement—cannot be sustained. He did not pretend to be leading any section of the movement, or to have his own party within it. For a moment, in 1885, it is true that by writing in Commonweal he publicly identified himself with the Socialist League. But as soon as dissension appeared within the League he withdrew into the background again, taking the attitude that until the movement had become clarified and the men had become sorted out, his own intervention would only add to the conflict. If he was approached for advice, no matter if the enquirer was Bax or Morris or Mahon, he was prepared to give it. In his letters to the comrades abroad (and especially his personal friends) he gave his opinions on the development of the movement, and recounted sympathetically the actions of the Avelings, who were most closely in his confidence. But (inescapable as was the situation in which he was placed) it was without doubt a disaster that Aveling was so close to him, and that he should have gained the reputation of being the “leader” whom (in Bax’s words) Engels wished to “foist” upon the English movement.
However, the tragedy of 1898’(when the marriage ended in Eleanor’s suicide) should not be read back into the events of the 1880s. Until 1887 Morris valued the Avelings as among the best comrades in the leadership of the League. Month by month Eleanor contributed her record of the International movement to Commonweal, her own contacts and those of Engels being drawn upon to the full. Aveling shared the editorship of the paper with Morris for the first year, and Morris admired his command of Scientific Socialism, both as a lecturer and writer. The Avelings took part in the struggle for free speech at Dod Street, and it was Morris’s protest at the rough-housing of Eleanor which led to his own arrest. Political issues rather than personal matters may account for the coldness growing up between Morris and the Avelings in 1887: although it cannot account for Morris’s angry reference to Aveling, in September, 1887, as a “disreputable dog”.
Two others of the Provisional Council were frequent visitors at Engels’s house—old Frederic Lessner, the survivor of 1848 and E. Belfort Bax. Bax’s introduction to the Socialist movement has already been described. From his pen came the first serious critiques by an English Marxist of a score of problems in religion, ethics, and social morality: in the years between 1885 and 1895 he published The Religion of Socialism, The Ethics of Socialism, Outlooks From the New Standpoint and Outspoken Essays, as well as some studies in the French Revolution and half a hundred articles in Socialist periodicals. In particular, all the work he did in collaboration with Morris was of a high order, especially the series of articles in Commonweal, “Socialism From the Root Up”. May Morris has given a warm picture of Bax and her father at work together on their editorial duties in the study at Kelmscott House:
“Bax with his fine regular features and bushy moustache… tall and thin, in his black velveteen coat, sitting in a comfortable armchairby the fire, smoking, with perhaps a glass at his elbow: my Father… short and square and blue-clad, sitting at the writing-table, his splendid head bent over the paper, with perhaps a dry grin on his face at a vagary of Bax’s—it was thus they did… the Commonweal make-up…”1
But there was something funny about Belfort Bax. The truth is that he was an owl. There was a good deal in him of the music-hall professor—the sudden fits of utter abstraction, the completely unpractical cast of mind, the essential lack of proportion which revealed itself in a blank absence of the sense of humour. His best work was done when Morris was at his elbow to bring him down to earth with a bang out of his naive ruminations. Bax alone of the early Marxists (if we except Morris) seemed to have a really flexible understanding of the historical method of Marxism. But, time and again, his pronouncements seem to be strangely off the point. The real bull’s-eye of his target was the Victorian middle-class family. His articles on imperialism kept on plunging off after the spectacle of hypocrisy, rather than the fact of exploitation. When the Trafalgar Square Riots took place Morris—on the front page of Commonweal—was wrestling with the essential political implications of the outbreak, while in the inner pages Bax was having the time of his life using the incident as a text for a long and triumphant article on the importance of the event as an “exposure of the abject cowardice of the English middle-classes en bloc”. The opening paragraph will serve as a fairly good example of the difficulties of his style:
“Nothing strikes the Bourgeois mind with a keener sense of horror than the ‘lamentable’, (as he calls it) destruction of property. Misery and starvation in times like the present, are part of the natural order of things, very unfortunate, very deplorable, perhaps, but inevitable, and even useful as affording the well-to-do classes an opportunity of posing as the charitable benefactors of the distressed. Besides, is not the traditional founder of that religion which is often described as one of the bulwarks of our ‘social order’, reported to have given utterance to the dictum, ‘the poor ye have always with you’? But the fracture of plate-glass windows, the destruction or alienation of respectable tradesmen’s stock, and in a wholesale manner too, no this verily is not in the bond which knits society together; this is entirely out of the nature of Bourgeois law and order, and hence to be bewailed as a calamity.”1
This lack of proportion in Bax’s outlook sometimes took ludicrous forms. Where Morris could suggest his disgust of the philistinism and joylessness of the middle class in a few savage strokes of the pen, the subject had for Bax a peculiar sort of fascination. He inspected bourgeois conventions in the light of a solemn and literal child-like reason, as if he were analysing the habit of some species of slug. He took up an attitude to the “Woman Question” which Morris and most of his contemporary Socialists could only find laughable. “Looked at from the ordinary point of view”, he said,
“It is quite clear that considering the fact that the female population of England is in excess of the male by about a million, female suffrage, in spite of its apparent embodiment of the principle of equality, really means, if it means anything at all (which may be doubtful) the handing over of the complete control of the state to one sex.”2
In repeated writings and conversations he rode this hobbyhorse of the Bourgeois raising “the female sex into a quasi-privileged class”, commiserating the working man,
“whose wife, to all intents and purposes, now has him completely in her power. If dissolute or drunken, she can sell up his goods or break up his home at pleasure, and still compel him to keep her and live with her to her life’s end. There is no law to protect him. On the other hand, let him but raise a finger in a moment of exasperation against this precious representative of the sacred principle of ‘womanhood’, and straightway he is consigned to the treadmill…”1
Of the other members of the Provisional Council, there is less to be recorded. John Lincoln Mahon and Joseph Lane have already been introduced. Sam Mainwaring, an engineer with a “quiet, dignified bearing”, was an early member of the L.E.L. “He was full-bearded, like Morris”, recalled Tom Mann. “After attending propagandist meetings William Morris frequently walked back with Mainwaring, and it was said of them that they looked like the skipper and the first mate of a ship.”2 Charles Mowbray, who was imprisoned in 1887 after an unemployed demonstration at Norwich, and, later, came to play a dubious role on the Anarchist wing of the movement, seems to have left little record of his own introduction to Socialism. Thomas Binning was a London compositor, and a trade unionist of twenty years’ standing in 1885. He became employed full-time by the League on the publication of Commonweal, and, later, he was Father of the Chapel at the Kelmscott Press. In 1885 and 1886 he was the League’s foremost propagandist on trade union questions.
Frank Kitz was even more of a “veteran” of the movement than was Joseph Lane: indeed, in the early 1870s, he was once accused of being “the only Socialist in London”.3 He was (recalled Glasier) “a rebel by temperament rather than Anarchist by philosophy”. A dyer, who was sometimes employed at Morris’s Merton Abbey Works, a bold and humorous open-air speaker—“a bluff, breezy chap, fond of his beer and jolly company”.1 As the only English member of the Rose Street Club with a fluent command of German, he had been in the thick of this strange atmosphere of international conspiracy at the end of the 1870s. According to one account, in the early 1880s he had formed a small circle for the making of explosives. In the first years of the League, Kitz was ebullient and impetuous, “a fine burly figure, with a mass of light brown curly hair, blue eyes, rather heavy features, a pleasant, jolly smile.”2 His occasional contributions to the Commonweal are full of wrath against the capitalist class, and equally full of detailed knowledge of the real misery of the people of East London. More than one of his articles, detailing the iniquities of the system, ends with an open cry for vengeance.3 “I have made Kitz’s acquaintance lately”, Morris wrote to Joynes early in 1885:
“Like most of our East-enders, he is certainly somewhat tinged with anarchism or perhaps one may say destructivism; but I like him very much: I called on the poor chap at the place where he lived, and it fairly gave me the horrors to see how wretchedly off he was; so it isn’t much to wonder at that he takes the lines he does.”4
This “destructivist” tinge to the views of Kitz, Lane and their following in the Labour Emancipation League, was to prove of increasing importance within the Socialist League. Extreme individualism—the desire to dispense with party discipline and serious forms of organization—they inherited in part from the ultra-Jacobin tradition. The workers’ struggle against the machinery of the bourgeois State had passed, among some of Bronterre O’Brien’s followers, into a struggle against the State itself—the police, law courts, Parliament—as instruments of coercion and class rule. In the late 1870s the apathetic misery of the East End had made the methods of the Nihilists in Russia, and the threats uttered by Most over the bar at the Rose Street Club, seem an effective-even a realistic—way of striking at capitalism. Such men as Kitz hoped that agitation in the slums and among the unemployed might provoke a revolutionary uprising as overwhelming as their visions of the Paris Commune.
The presence of some of these attitudes in the minds of such men as Lane and Kitz helps to explain why the League was later to become a nursing-ground for Anarchism. It helps to explain why the League was launched with a marked list to the Left, in contrast to Hyndman’s list to the opportunism of the Right: why, when Morris shifted his weight towards the Anarchist side, the list at once became dangerous: and why, when he removed his influence altogether, the acrobatics of the rest of the crew soon had the craft capsized. But, while several of the Leaguers had a slight knowledge of Anarchist theory,1 it would be wrong to think of the “Anarchists” within the League in 1885 and 1886 as the conscious advocates of certain theoretical positions. They were class-conscious workers in revolt against intolerable conditions, hostile to Hyndman’s top hat and frock coat, earnest in their desire to get a real revolutionary propaganda afoot, and attracted to William Morris by his own enthusiasm and his evident hatred of the middle class. Years afterwards—despite the fact that Morris, in his last years, broke decisively with them—both Frank Kitz and Joseph Lane paid warm tributes to his memory. William Morris had “none of the meanness and bitterness which the horrible competitive system implants in all of us”, wrote Lane—with perhaps a self-critical glance at his own quarrelsome part in the early movement. “Morris was one of nature’s noblemen, and I never expect to see his like again.2
The weeks immediately following the “Split” were confused. The Provisional Council, installed in their new premises, found themselves without a membership—without even a list of the Secretaries of the Branches of the S.D.F. Within a few weeks firm affiliations could be recorded from several London branches, from the Labour Emancipation League, the Scottish (Edinburgh) Land and Labour League, and Branches at Leeds and Oxford. Several Council members urged the League to embark forthwith on a struggle to win over or destroy the remaining S.D.F. Branches. Scheu called for a Manifesto denouncing “the party of Jingoism and Boss-ship at Westminster”.1 Hyndman and the rump of the S.D.F. Executive issued a statement of their case, and from Leeds on January 11th, 1885, Tom Maguire sent a desperate plea for a “counterblast” from the League:
“Our work is at a standstill. The confidence of our members is necessarily growing weaker and the whole movement cannot be other than in a state of compromise. . A dignified silence just now counts for nothing against the Jesuitical activities of pronounced opponents.”2
In response to this pressure a dignified statement was issued on January 13th, over the names of the ten resigning members of the S.D.F. Executive.
The delay in issuing this statement was not only due to scruples against carrying on a public dog-fight within the movement. It was due, at least in part, to differences among the Provisional Council as to the actual questions of principle involved in the “Split” and as to the policy of the new body. Morris’s first public statement (in an interview with the Daily News, January 8th, 1885) would probably, it is true, have won the assent of all the Provisional Council. He stressed his view that the new party must be a party of cadres, with a high level of theoretical understanding, ready to play a leading part in any revolutionary movement of the masses. The occasion for the split, he said, was Hyndman’s “arbitrary rule” and tendency to “political opportunism tinctured with Jingoism”. The League took its stand for revolutionary and scientific Socialism, as opposed to this opportunism on the one hand, and to reformism on the other:
“There are many people who will admit the justice of the Socialist criticisms of the present state of society, and are prepared to do all they can for the working classes than can be done for the working classes and not by them.”
Hyndman’s methods—he implied—would bring about a “mechanical revolution”. By contrast with this—
“I want an educated movement. Discontent is not enough, though it is natural and inevitable. The discontented must know what they are aiming at… My belief is that the old order can only be overthrown by force; and for that reason it is all the more necessary that the revolution… should be, not an ignorant, but an intelligent revolution. What I should like to have now, far more than anything else, would be a body of able, high-minded, competent men, who should act as instructors of the masses and as their leaders during critical periods of the movement. It goes without saying that a great proportion of these instructors and organizers should be working men… I should like to see 2,000 men of that stamp engaged in explaining the principles of rational, scientific Socialism all over the kingdom.”
“The whole movement here is only a phantom”, Engels was to write to Sorge in January, 1886, “but if it is possible to draw into the Socialist League a kernel of people who have a good theoretical understanding, much will be gained for a genuine mass movement, which will not be long in coming.” Morris would have assented to this judgement.
On the other hand, in the statement issued by the seceding members of the S.D.F. Executive on January 13th, several phrases foreshadow future differences within the League. The occasion for the “Split” is described in the same terms—Hyndman’s arbitrary rule, political opportunism and jingoism—but the conclusion drawn is sharper than in previous statements. The tendency to opportunism is denounced on the grounds that it “would have involved us in alliances, however temporary, with one or other of the political factions, and would have weakened our propagandist force by driving us into electioneering”, which might, in turn, have deprived the movement of some of their leaders, “by sending them to our sham parliament, there to become either nonentities, or perhaps our masters, and it may be our betrayers”.1 The educational role of the propaganda is stressed, the importance of building up a party of cadres, but—once again—in sharper terms:
“Our view is that such a body in the present state of things has no function but to educate the people in the principles of Socialism, and to organize such as it can get hold of to take their due places, when the crisis shall come which will force action on us.”
This phrasing, increasingly to be repeated in Morris’s writings, is worth some attention. The revolutionary movement is looked upon from two aspects: a small educated propaganda on the one hand, a spontaneous rising provoked by misery on the other: in the final event “the crisis” arises—one sharply-defined revolutionary moment (like the Commune)—when the Socialist cadres will master the spontaneous mass movement and steer it through to Socialism.
Shortly after the “Split”, the Provisional Council adopted a draft Constitution, which almost certainly was brought forward by the Avelings and represented Engels’s view as to the correct policy of the League:
“1. Forming and helping other Socialist bodies to form a National and International Socialist Labour Party.
“2. Striving to conquer political power by promoting the election of Socialists to Local Governments, School Boards, and other administrative bodies.
“3. Helping Trade-Unionism, Go-operation, and every genuine movement for the good of the workers.
“4. Promoting a scheme for the National and International Federation of Labour.”
The rejection of this Constitution1 is an indication of the defeat of the Avelings on the Provisional Council, and the complete conversion of William Morris to the “purist” and anti-parliamentary position. As early as February, 1885, J.L. Mahon, as Secretary of the League, informed the Leeds Branch that joining the League involved renouncing “the political opportunism and State Socialism of the S.D.F.”,2 and, it was implied, the renunciation of parliamentary or local electioneering. In July, 1885, Morris defined his own position in Commonweal:
“I should like our friend to understand whither the whole system of palliation tends—namely, to the creation of a new middle class to act as a buffer between the proletariat and their direct and obvious masters; the only hope of the bourgeois for retarding the advance of Socialism lies in this device. Let our friend think of a society thus held together. Let him consider how sheepishly the well-to-do workers to-day offer themselves to the shearer; and are we to help our masters to keep on creating fresh and fresh flocks of sheep? What a society that would be, the main support of which would be capitalists masquerading as working men! Shall the ultimate end of civilization be the perpetual widening of the middle classes? I think if our friend knew as well as I do the terrible mental degradation of our middle classes, their hypocrisy, their cowardice, their joylessness, it would scare him from attempting to use their beloved instrument of amelioration—Parliament.
“It is a new Society that we are working to realise, not a cleaning up of our present tyrannical muddle into an improved smoothly-working form of that same “order”, a mass of dull and useless people organized into classes, amidst which the antagonism should be moderated and veiled so that they should act as checks on each other for the insurance of the stability of the system.
“The real business of Socialists is to impress on the workers the fact that they are a class, whereas they ought to be Society; if we mix ourselves up with Parliament we shall confuse and dull this fact in people’s minds instead of making it clear and intensifying it. The work that lies before us at present is to make Socialists, to cover the country with a network of associations composed of men who feel their antagonism to the dominant classes, and have no temptation to waste their time in the thousand follies of party politics. If by chance any good is to be got out of the legislation of the ruling classes, the necessary concessions are much more likely to be wrung out of them by fear of such a body, than they are to be wheedled and coaxed out of them by the continual life of compromise which ‘Parliamentary Socialists’ would be compelled to live, and which is deadly to that feeling of exalted hope and brotherhood that alone can hold a revolutionary party together.”1
III. Fighting Imperialism
Morris possessed to the full his own share of the historical sense, which he called “the new sense of modern times”.2 His Socialist poems were consciously the poems of the pioneers of a new world. He knew that the trivial or serious episodes of the early Socialists would at some time be a subject of history. And towards the end of 1887 he sat down some hurried “Notes on Propaganda” as a guide to the future historian. It is interesting to see the events which he singled out as important:
“The propaganda went on briskly”, the sheet of notes begins. “On the First of February 1885 appeared the first number of the Commonweal… In the March number appeared an admirable article by F. Engels—which attracted much attention… The wretched commercial-piratical war in the Soudan drew our attention somewhat at this time… A series of lessons on Socialism explaining the works of Carl Marx were given during these months.”1
The first number of the Commonweal was indeed an event of importance. In contrast to Justice, the paper was declared to be “The Official Organ of the Socialist League”, the Editor and Sub-Editor (Morris and Aveling) acting “as delegates of the Socialist League, and under its direct control”. The first number carried the Manifesto, articles by Bax, Aveling, Lane, and Craig, Eleanor Aveling’s “Record of the International Movement”, news of the movement in Britain, and Morris’s “March of the Workers”:
“Hark the rolling of the thunder!
Lo the sun! and lo, thereunder
Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder,
And the host comes marching on.”
The second number, in March, must surely have been one of the most remarkable issues of any British Socialist periodical. An Editorial by Morris, articles by Bax, Stepniak, George Bernard Shaw, Paul Lafargue, Frank Kitz and Aveling were capped by three outstanding items: Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s “Record” included messages greeting the formation of the League from Bebel, Liebknecht, Vaillant, Lafargue, Leo Frankel, Kautsky, Pierre Lavroff, Stepniak and Domela Nieuwenhuis: Morris contributed his “Message of the March Wind”, which was to serve as the prelude to The Pilgrims of Hope: and Engels contributed his remarkable article, “England in 1845 and in 1885”, which was later included in his Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
It is unfortunate that Engels was not able to contribute more frequently to Commonweal Certainly, this article had a very marked influence upon Morris, as his references to it, and the echoes of it in his articles and lectures of 1885 and 1886 reveal. In his article Engels traced the causes of the decline of Chartism and Socialist organization in England to the supremacy of British capitalism in the world market between 1850 and 1875, showed how these conditions gave birth to a skilled aristocracy of labour protected by strong Trade Unions, while leaving the East End as “an ever-spreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work”. Even the masses of the workers, Engels argued, had benefited in limited and temporary ways from Britain’s industrial monopoly: “with the breakdown of that monopoly the English working-class will lose that privileged position”, the article concluded. “And that is the reason why there will be Socialism again in England.”
“War in the world abroad a thousand leagues away,
While custom’s wheel goes round and day devoureth day.
Peace at home!—what peace, while the rich man’s mill is strife,
And the poor is the grist that he grindeth, and life devoureth life?”1
so wrote Morris. And in many articles and lectures Bax and Morris drew the implications from these facts, and pointed clearly to the new character of British imperialism. Lecturing at Oldham in July, 1885, on “The Depression of Trade”, Morris based his argument upon Engels’ article:
“We have said, ‘Buy this or—take a bayonet in your belly!’ People don’t want the goods we offer them, but they are poor and have to buy something which serve their turn anyhow, so they accept… Their own goods, made slowly and at a greater cost, are driven out of the market, and the metamorphosis begins which ends in turning fairly happy barbarians into very miserable half-civilized people surrounded by a fringe of exploiters and middle-men varied in nation but of one religion—‘Take care of Number One.’ “1
Bax had written for the first number of Commonweal one of his very best (and briefest) articles—on “Imperialism v. Socialism”, underlining the words of the League’s own Manifesto: “The markets of the world are being competed for with an eagerness never before known.” Pointing to the numerous colonial wars in Asia, North and Central Africa, and Polynesia, he declared:
“Such wars must necessarily increase in proportion to the concentration of capital in private hands, i.e. in proportion as the commercial activity of the world is intensified, and the need for markets becomes more pressing. Markets, markets, markets! Who shall deny that this is the drone-bass ever welling up from beneath the shrill bawling of ‘pioneers of civilization’, ‘avengers of national honour’, ‘purveyors of gospel light’, ‘restorers of order’…”
Morris, in his lecture on “Commercial War” delivered a few months later, went even further, and pointed to a change in the character and intensity of the imperialist rivalry of his time. The wars against backward peoples, he said,
“are by no means a new manifestation of this decade… but there is something in the way in which it is set about, which to my mind shows… that the great commercial system is shaking… You cannot fail to have noted the frequency and persistency and bare-faced cynicism of these wars of exploitation of barbarous countries amongst all European nations these last few years; and next as far as we are concerned we are not contented with safe little wars against savage tribes with whom no one but ourselves wanted to meddle, but will even risk wars which may or indeed must in the long run embroil us with nations who have huge armies who no more lack the ‘resources of civilization’ than ourselves.”2
In February, 1885, the skirmishes and intrigues in Egypt and the Soudan culminated in the fall of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon, and the Press turned on its floods of emotion, lamentations over the death of the “Christian Hero” and cries for vengeance, “ready-made from the great vats in Fleet Street and Printinghouse Square”.1 The Provisional Council threw itself athwart the current of Jingoism, distributing in London a thousand copies of a defiant Manifesto: “Citizens, if you have any sense of justice, any manliness left in you, join us in our protest against the wicked and infamous act of brigandage now being perpetrated for the interest solely of the ‘privileged’ classes of this country…” It is typical of the early propaganda that the Leaguers sought less to make common cause with other opponents of the war, than to expose their half-heartedness and to draw the lesson of the character of imperialism from the events. On February 24th a meeting was convened by the Peace Society in the Memorial Hall, with Thomas Burt in the chair. “The promoters of the meeting were half-hearted in their speeches”, Mahon reported in Commonweal, “and seemed afraid to say anything that would hurt the Government, while the market-hunters, who instigated the war, were allowed to go unscathed.” In consequence a Socialist League rider was proposed to the general peace solution, declaring:
“That this meeting, consisting mainly of working men, is convinced that the war in the Soudan was prompted by the capitalist class, with a view to the extension of their fields of exploitation. And we admit that the victory gained by the Soudanese was a triumph of right over wrong won by a people struggling for their freedom.”
The rider was carried with enthusiasm.2 The same rider was proposed and carried at further meetings, although with more difficulty. On April 2nd a really large peace meeting was held at St. James’s Hall, with Bradlaugh in the Chair, and Professors Beesly and Thorold Rogers among the speakers. Once again the speakers, with the exception of Thorold Rogers, were lukewarm, and avoided any discussion of the underlying causes of the war: once again the League put forward a rider, to which Morris and Mowbray were delegated to speak:
“And that this meeting believes that the invasion of the Soudan has been prompted solely by the desire to exploit the country in the interests of capitalists and stock-jobbers; and warns the working classes that such wars will always take place until they (the workers) unite throughout the civilized world, and take their own affairs into their own hands.”
Bradlaugh announced that he would allow the mover and seconder of the rider five minutes each, and (according to the Daily News) William Morris then rose and said:
“He was convinced that no war had ever been undertaken by the English people that had been more unpopular with the English people than the war in the Soudan. [Cheers.] That was rather a strange thing. The whole English people made the war, and the whole English people condemned it. Why was that? Because they were forced into the war. And who forced them into it? The masters of the English people. And who were their masters? Those capitalists and stock-jobbers of whom he had just spoken, and who could not exist as a class without this exploitation of foreign nations to get new markets…”
At this point Morris was called to time by the Chairman, and a lively altercation took place. Morris protested that he had only been allowed two minutes, and Bradlaugh refused to let him continue unless he spoke in the seconder’s time. Morris was finally forced to withdraw, and after Mowbray had seconded, Annie Besant had opposed and John Burns had tried to fight his way to the platform, the rider was rejected.1 Three weeks later the League held their own “well-attended” meeting at the South Place Institute with Morris in the chair. Edward and Eleanor Aveling, Joseph Lane, E.T. Craig, Frank Kitz, Mow-bray and Scheu, together with John Burns and H.H. Champion of the S.D. F. were among the speakers. “Comrade Shaw”, billed to speak, was not present, finding some objection to the resolutions, and also because “I am G. Bernard Shaw, of the Fabian Society, member of an individualist state, and therefore nobody’s comrade.”1
In the agitation for Irish Home Rule which swept England from 1885 to 1887 the Socialist League took its place side by side with the Radical agitation against the Coercion Bill of the Liberal Government, but took pains to make it clear that it was marching to a different step. “To the Irish”, wrote Morris in Commonweal, “as to all other nations, whatever their name and race, we Socialists say, Your revolutionary struggles will be abortive or lead to mere disappointment unless you accept as your watchword, WAGE-WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!”2 “The Socialist League”, Morris noted, “has taken part in all the demonstrations organized by the Irish party, pointing out at the same time that the only real hope of the Irish workmen was that of all workmen throughout the world: Socialism.”3 But, to the ordinary Radical, the League’s emphasis must have seemed to have been only upon the second point. In January, 1886, a leaflet was produced, “Home Rule and Humbug”, supporting the demand for Irish independence, but turning the whole issue to the Socialist demand, “You must be free from RENT!” Morris went to lecture in Dublin, and wrote in Commonweal: “It is a matter of course that until the Irish get Home Rule they will listen to nothing else”:
“I fear it seems likely that they will have to go through the dismal road of peasant proprietorship before they get to anything like Socialism; and that road in a country so isolated and so peculiar as Ireland, may be a long one…”4
In July, 1886, in his regular Commonweal “Notes” Morris was analysing (with his usual close eye for detail) the results of the Home Rule Election in which Gladstone had suffered defeat (“To investigate the chances of the elections in detail is rather the business of an election-agent than a human being…”). After his customary attack on the “shuffling and intriguing self-seekers” who made up the parliamentary candidates, and on the voters who “consider that when they have voted for the candidate provided for them they have fulfilled all the duties of citizenship”, he prophesied that the victors would make a fresh attempt to divide the Irish into “moderates and irreconcilables”:
“… The Irish will be divided indeed, like the familiar demon in the old fable, cut by his unhappy employer into two unmanageable devils; and the more unmanageable will not be asking for a mere Dublin parliament, but will be claiming his right to do something with the country of Ireland itself, which will make it a fit dwelling-place for reasonable and happy people.”
Imperialism—this was understood from the very first by Morris and the Leaguers to be the deadliest enemy to internationalism and to the cause of the people at home. The facts of imperialist oppression were ever-present in Morris’s mind, and it was from the instruments of this oppression that he once drew one of his most striking images of the reality of the class-struggle underlying the apparent peace of capitalist society. “Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our plutocratic society”, he warned:
“It fares with it as it does with the older forms of war, that there is an outside look of quite wonderful order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of the regiment; how quiet and respectable the sergeants look; how clean the polished cannon; neat as a new pin are the storehouses of murder; the books of the adjutant and sergeant as innocent-looking as may be; nay, the very orders for destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precision which seems the very token of a good conscience; this is the mask that lies before the ruined cornfield and the burning cottage, the mangled bodies, the untimely death of worthy men, the desolated home.”1
IV. The Membership and Commonweal
The fight against Imperialism was taken up with enthusiasm by the Leaguers. But they felt their most serious work to lie elsewhere—in maintaining the propaganda, by means of open-air and public meetings, the sale of Commonweal, the distribution of leaflets and sale of pamphlets. William Morris and J.L. Mahon wrote hundreds of letters, from the office of the League, to inquirers and possible contacts of the movement. The message of Socialism was spread from Farringdon Road as far as Lerwick in the Shetlands, while from outlying villages occasional letters of encouragement were received. “I shall go heartily in to support its principles”, wrote an agricultural worker from a village in North Berwick,
“and hope we shall be at a level with the aristocracy before the close of this century… This is an agricultural district, & I think if the people had time to consider what Socialists went in for there could be a strong branch formed in this district. But the people are working from 5 in the morning till 7 at night & have not much time to consider much…”1
The message was sometimes spread by unusual means. A “travelling musician”, Joseph Williamson, distributed thirty leaflets a day on his tramps through the Midlands. Charlie Faulkner claimed to have converted the Norwegian Captain and Second Mate of his ship on a trip to Sweden in August, 1885. He also won over a Radical Club in Oxford to the League. “It makes me feel fresh again”, he wrote, “to be aiming at something in which I can feel an interest after the miserable, dreary twaddle of university life.”2 Among the letters were several expressing “unbounded admiration 8c esteem” for William Morris. Fred Pickles, the author of one, and a pioneer of the Bradford Branch of the League, wrote in terms which well express the sympathies and outlook of many of those who were to become prominent in the League:
“I am what Mr. Morris would term a ‘slave of the Desk’ for a firm of Machine Makers (bitterly opposed even to Trade Unions) & I am certain that if they had any idea I sympathized with Socialism I should very soon… be unemployed.
“I am a lover of Art, Poetry & Nature, but the major portion of my days have to be spent on a stool, writing ‘To Goods’, ‘By Cash’, without end. Outside the Office window I can see nothing but smokey chimneys & ugliness almost unbearable 8c six yards from my seat is a horribly smelling stream literally blacker than the ink I am now writing with.”1
From Leicester there came an order for Commonweal signed, “Thomas Barclay, Wage Slave”. “I will do my best to push it among my class. But it is hard. They are ignorant, selfish, apathetic…”2 So the letters poured in—from exceptional manual and agricultural workers, from “slaves of the Desk”, from old Owenites and young intellectuals: only the active trade unionists and co-operators were conspicuous by their absence.
The Commonweal was the main medium of communication with this variegated membership. It was, indeed, a remarkable paper. Appearing as a monthly (with supplements) from February, 1885, to May 1st, 1886, it then commenced as a weekly: and shortly after this Bax replaced Aveling as subeditor. Almost every issue included at least one major contribution from Morris. During 1885 The Pilgrims of Hope appeared in monthly instalments: during 1886 and 1887 his series of articles with Bax, “Socialism from the Root Up”, appeared side by side with A Dream of John Ball. From Morris’s pen also came articles on art, labour and occasional careful analyses of the political situation and the aims of the Socialists; while in the greater number of issues he contributed the “Signs of the Times”, “Notes”, or Editorial, which commented in detail upon the political and social scene. Even without Morris’s contributions, the paper would rank among the best of Socialist journals at least until 1888 or 1889. Articles by Bax, the Avelings, Scheu, Sketchley and a score of others were of a high quality.
On the other hand, as a Socialist paper it had serious weaknesses. It never seemed to reconcile the twin tasks of a theoretical journal and a popular propaganda weekly. In fact, Morris seems to have hoped to make it serve both functions. As early as July, 1885, the paper came under criticism as being too difficult and theoretical for general sale. Morris seems to have been worried by the criticism, since he declared at the end of the Annual Conference that “he was very anxious that the literary character of the paper should be maintained. He, for one, could not offer to the workers what he did not himself think good. The journal must be Socialistic.”1 It was the change to the weekly paper which made the dual functions no longer easily compatible. To fill eight solid pages of print a week, more and more long articles were commissioned or accepted: moreover, a great number of these were on interesting side-issues—material far more useful for a monthly journal than for propagandist sales.
Whatever weaknesses there were in this early Socialist propaganda, it was slowly but certainly taking effect. The presence of a Socialist movement was being advertised: it was being noticed in the Press: the ideas of the “share-and-share-alike crowd” were being discussed in the workshops and the Radical clubs. Tom Mann in his engineering shop in 1885 felt that “something was buzzing”. For the movement to get out of its infant stage, it was necessary for the Socialists to make contact, not with a few exceptional workers (the authors of the packages of poetry which poured into the Commonweal office), but with wider sections of the working class. This is the reason why it was so important that the Socialists took to the streets and the parks. This is also the reason why the authorities felt it was important to drive them back into the private rooms and lecture halls from which they had come. And this is the reason why the Socialists, if they were to become a force, had no alternative but to defy the police and stay in the streets in the face of intimidation. The resulting struggles, which continued in London and the provinces until the end of the decade, were the most important form of advertisement for Socialism at this stage of the propaganda.
V. The Fight for Free Speech
The Socialist pioneers took to the street corners with enthusiasm. In 1885 and 1886 Morris led the League into a friendly rivalry with the S.D.F. as to which could keep open the greatest number of open-air pitches in London. Even in the depth of winter, a few of the stands were kept going. The audience did not, of course, gather of its own accord. Regularity, persistence, good speakers, the attention of the police, hecklers in the crowd—all or some of these conditions were necessary before a really good open-air pitch could be established. Often branches were discouraged by disappointing results on a first or second attempt, and had to wind up their courage anew -before beginning again. Sometimes it took months before a really suitable site could be found. For all these reasons, Morris—although by no means a gifted outdoor speaker1 —felt that it was his duty to take a lead in the work by personal example: and to the end of his life it was the outdoor stand which seemed to him the real platform of the propaganda.
Morris would go with a few members of the League, James Tochatti or Bernard Shaw (one of the most brilliant of the open-air propagandists, and the best at handling the hecklers) to the stands of the Hammersmith Branch, at Walham Green or Hammersmith Bridge, where audiences of up to 500 were sometimes won. His long-established Sunday breakfasts with the Burne-Joneses were now cut short, and Morris would set off for his duty with a “simplicity which… was fine to see”. “I am not over inclined for my morning preachment at Walham Green”, he wrote once to Georgie,
“but go I must, as also to Victoria Park in the afternoon. I had a sort of dastardly hope that it might rain. Mind you, I don’t pretend to say I don’t like it in some way or other; like it when I am on my legs, if I flow.”1
like it or not, he drove himself on with it: in his provincial lecturing tours he was not only ready to fit in open-air meetings, but insisted that the comrades should arrange to hold them. “Next time I come it had better be later in the year when the weather is more possible”, he wrote to Glasier in Glasgow in 1888. “I had a good deal of time on my hands which I might have used for open-air work.”2
The first serious attack by the police was upon the International Club, in Stephen’s Mews, on May 9th, 1885.3 Very soon the weary round of prosecutions for “obstruction” began in earnest. The centre of interest shifted to Dod Street in Limehouse, where the S.D.F. were using a long-established open-air site of Radical and religious bodies. Several cases of “obstruction” were brought against S.D.F. speakers, and Jack Williams, refusing to pay his fine, was sentenced to a month’s hard labour. The League formally offered its help to the S.D.F.—an offer which was warmly accepted. Support among the London Radical Clubs was aroused, and the Defence Committee was transformed into a Vigilance Committee with the powerful backing of the East London United Radical Club, as well as of the Fabian Society (whose delegate was Annie Besant) and various smaller societies.1 On Sunday, September 20th, 1885, a great crowd was drawn to Dod Street, and addressed by Hyndman and John Mathias (a prominent Radical) from one end of the street, and by Mahon and Kitz from the other. A resolution was moved protesting against the recent prosecutions. It was only after the meetings had been declared closed, and the crowd was dispersing, that the police suddenly struck, arresting two banner-bearers with some brutality, and seizing others in the crowd.
The scene next day in the Thames Police Court, presided over by a magistrate named Saunders, later became notorious in the Socialist movement. Eight members of the crowd were accused of resisting the police or of obstruction, including Mowbray, Kitz, Mahon and Lewis Lyons, a tailoring worker. Their attitude was defiant. Mahon declared:
“He went along with others with the distinct intention of holding a meeting there, and, of course, going to prison if he were arrested and charged, and thousands went and would go again with the same intention.”2
The attitude of Saunders, the magistrate, was scandalous throughout. When Aveling gave evidence on behalf of the accused, Saunders told him that he had broken the law by attending and speaking at the meeting himself, since any such meeting was an “obstruction”:
“DR. AVELING [said] he spoke himself, as he should do again next Sunday.
“MR. SAUNDERS: I advise you not to, or else you will find yourself locked up.
“DR. AVELING: I shall speak there each Sunday till I am locked up.”
Eleanor followed suit. The police singled out Lyons for their special favours, at least one of them (as was incontestably shown upon his later appeal) perjuring himself right, left and centre. Saunders capped the whole with a vindictive summing-up, followed by a sentence of two months’ hard labour upon Lyons, and 40s. or one month upon the remainder. The sentence called forth cries of “Shame” from the spectators, who included Morris, and “a rush of police was made at those in court”. According to Aveling’s account, the police—among whom the perjured constable was prominent—“commenced an assault upon all and sundry”, and in particular upon Eleanor. “William Morris, remonstrating at the hustling and thumping, became at once the chief thumpee. There has rarely been seen anything more brutal than the way in which two or three able-bodied young men fell upon the author of what one of the newspapers called the ‘Paradise League’.” Morris threatened to summons the police, and promptly found himself under arrest.1
The sequel took place two hours later, when the author of The Earthly Paradise, “who had been arrested for alleged disorderly conduct was placed at the bar.” A constable declared that after the sentence was passed he—
“was endeavouring to restore quiet when the prisoner, who had called out ‘Shame’, hissed, became very violent, and struck him on the chest and broke the strap of his helmet…
“MR. MORRIS: I give a direct negative to that. I certainly did not hit him.
“MR. SAUNDERS: Have you any witnesses?…
“MR. MORRIS: I do not know whether there is any one here who saw it… I quite confess that when I heard the sentences passed on the prisoners my feelings got the better of me, and I did call out ‘Shame’… Then this policeman came and distinctly hustled me. When you are pushed you naturally push again, but that is not resisting the police, I turned round and remonstrated with the policeman, but I distinctly assert that I never raised my hands. He was very rough, and I am quite prepared to bring a charge of assault against him.
“PRISONER: I am an artist, and a literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe.
“MR. SAUNDERS: I suppose you did not intend to do this?
“PRISONER: I never struck him at all.
“MR. SAUNDERS: Well, I will let you go.
“PRISONER: But I have not done anything.
“MR. SAUNDERS: Well, you can stay if you like.
“PRISONER: I don’t want to stay.
“He was then liberated, and on getting into the street was loudly cheered by the crowd who had gathered there.”1
It was indeed an unlucky moment for the police when they singled out Morris for arrest. The scene, of course, was a three days’ wonder. No amount of editorials taxing Morris with his “indiscretion” or worse could hide the fact that the police persecution was both unjust and inequal. Funny Folks carried a cartoon of the police blacking Morris’s boots. The dovecots of literature were thrown into a flutter. “Do you see the report of the row the Socialists have had with the police in the East End?” George Gissing wrote to his brother:
“Think of William Morris being hauled into the box for assaulting a policeman! And the magistrate said to him: ‘What are you?’ Great Heavens!… Alas, what the devil is such a man doing in that galley? It is painful to me beyond expression. Why cannot he write poetry in the shade? He will inevitably coarsen himself in the company of ruffians.
“Keep apart, keep apart, and preserve one’s soul alive—that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within the world.”2
“The man who wrote ‘Daphne’! Oh, it is monstrous!”
The police attack at Dod Street, and the incident of Morris in the Thames Police Court, together did a power of good. The first enraged the feeling of Radicals and Socialists alike. “I am prepared to come armed [next week], and should I be arrested and abused to defend myself as best I can”, wrote Robert Banner from Woolwich.1 The second tickled people’s sense of humour, and helped to bring more Radicals behind the Vigilance Committee. Between 30,000 and 50,000 turned up the next Sunday at Dod Street, and Aveling fulfilled his pledge, addressing the crowd together with Hyndman, Shaw, John Burns and leading Radicals. The police, for fear of alienating the whole Radical movement, kept at a discreet distance.
Repercussions of the Thames Police Court incident were felt even as far afield as America, one correspondent writing:
“The news of Morris’s arrest has reached us, and we take that to be the best thing that has happened for a long time. That very day an attempt to suppress free speech was made here, and a League for its defence promptly formed.”2
Morris’s comments on this “best thing” are not recorded. Certainly he saw its humorous side:
“There was a funny scene in the police station where they charged me, the inspector and the constable gravely discussing whether the damage done to the helmet was 2d. or 1½d.”3
In public he made no comment, but set about the defence of Lyons, making use of attacks upon himself in the Press as an excuse for sending letters on Lyons’s case. In private he loathed the notoriety of the whole business. On another occasion, says Shaw,
“when he had been desperately uncomfortable at a police court, going bail for some of the comrades, I found him rubbing it all off by reading The Three Musketeers for the hundredth time or so. On one such occasion his co-bailsman was Bradlaugh, and he envied the assurance with which that platform athlete ordered everyone about and dominated the police staff as if he had been the Home Secretary. He was nothing of a bully in spite of his pathological temper, and when physical courage came under discussion said: “I am a funkster; but I have one good blow in me.”1
If the Socialists had hoped that the Dod Street affair would settle the matter, they were disappointed. “This summer”, Morris noted for 1886,
“we were much annoyed by the police who persisted in interfering with our open-air meetings… in the course of the legal proceedings… it was made clear that the law could so be wrested as to make impossible any meeting on public ground not specially set apart… Our open-air meetings nevertheless went on briskly: the stations being very numerous.”2
The persecution was active in the provinces as well, and was certainly part of a national campaign of intimidation.3 Morris was throughout prominent in the struggle, as bailsman, witness, speaker, and propagandist in the Commonweal. The unemployed riots of February, 1886, preluded a fresh bout of prosecutions. Arrests were almost a weekly occurrence, and bail was in constant demand. Sam Mainwaring recalled a prosecution of Kitz in the early days:
“I went to the office of the S.L. in Faringdon Road, and informed the members—who were having a social evening at the hall—of the arrest, and that we wanted bail. Carruthers and Morris left at once with me, and when we arrived at West Ham Police Station I introduced them to the inspector on duty as the sureties for Kitz’s appearance on the following Monday.
“The officer put the question: ‘What is your name?’ Our comrade answered, ‘William Morris’.
“ ‘What are you?’ queried the officer. But before Morris could reply to this question, Carruthers stepped up to the desk, and in a vehement manner said: ‘Don’t you know? Why, this is the author of The Earthly Paradise.’
“Morris turned to his friend with an astonished look and said: ‘Good heavens, Carruthers! You don’t expect a policeman to know anything about The Earthly Paradise, do you?’ And, turning to the inspector, said: ‘I am a shopkeeper, carrying on business in Oxford Street.’ “1
Morris knew that his presence embarrassed the police, and made them a little hesitant in their attentions. Consequently, he made a point of taking the platform in the danger-spots himself. Probably the most serious contest in London in 1886 was at Bell Street, Edgware Road, where for nearly two years the Marylebone comrades had been keeping open a pitch. The police seemed determined to make a test case. They chose a site which, unlike Dod Street, was not in the heart of the East End, and where they could get various chemists, publicans and respectable tradesmen to issue complaints. Although the Socialists kept the pavements clear of crowds, plain-clothes men and police agents stood in the footway and refused to move when requested by the speakers. One man, the Socialists alleged in open court, was actually paid by the police to issue complaints. Everything indicated that the police were out for a real “kill”: and when, after the first court case, Mainwaring of the League and Jack Williams, the fearless champion of free speech of the S.D.F., addressed a large meeting on July 11th, twenty or thirty mounted police were stationed conspicuously in surrounding streets. Both men were summoned and—instead of being fined summarily by the magistrate—they were committed for trial at the Middlesex Sessions. Sam Mainwaring later recalled with admiration Morris’s part in the ensuing struggle:
“When we all thought that a long term of imprisonment would be the result, he volunteered to speak in the interval between the committal and trial; and, when reminded of the general impression that imprisonment would be the result, he simply said, ‘Well, it will be another experience, and we must not allow the fear of consequences to interfere with our duty.’ “1
Accordingly, he took the stand at Bell Street the next Sunday, and delivered a characteristic speech:
“After adjuring the people to keep quiet and orderly in the event of the police interfering, he said that he had come to Marylebone to maintain the right of the Socialists to speak in the streets in the same way that people holding other opinions were allowed to do… He was impelled to talk to them that morning because the present condition of things was a bad one. He had been asked by a lady the other day why he did not talk to the middle-class. Well, the middle-class had their books with plenty of leisure to read them; the working-classes had no leisure, no books. [At this point Chief Inspector Shephard appeared outside the crowd, and said that he could not get in. This was false, however, and the inspector was immediately made way for by the people, who groaned him heartily as he approached the speaker. Having come to Morris he told him to desist, which Morris refused to do, on which the inspector took his name and address…] The middle and upper classes were enabled to live in luxury and idleness on the poverty and degradation of the workers. There was only one way in which this state of things could be altered—society must be turned downside up. A true society meant to every one the right to live, the right to labour, and the right to enjoy the fruits of his labour. The useless class must disappear, and the two classes now forming society must dissolve into one whole useful class, and the labour class become society. In conclusion, he appealed to them to do all they could for the Cause; to educate themselves, to discuss the social question with their fellows, and prepare themselves for the great social revolution.”2
The speech lasted half an hour, and was heartily cheered, and a summons for obstruction was duly issued.
There is no doubt that Morris’s intervention embarrassed the magistrate. Mainwaring, who—while still under a writ for the previous case—had officiated for a minute or two at Morris’s meeting, came before the court on the same day (July 24th) and his case (like that of Williams) was sent up to the Sessions. But Morris, the magistrate said, “as a gentleman would at once see, when it was pointed out to him, that such meetings were a nuisance, and… would desist from taking part in them.” He thought a fine would meet the case—Is.I In the event, both Williams and Mainwaring were fined £20, plus a surety for good behaviour of £50; and Williams, as in his previous case, refused to pay and was imprisoned for two months. “The Judge was abhominable”, Morris wrote to his daughter. “You would have thought that our friends had at least committed a murder under aggravated circumstances—so bitter an advocate he was against them.”1 The Radicals, alarmed by the February riots, were far slower to come to the defence of the Socialists than at the time of Dod Street, and Morris took them to task. “This is their [the ‘reactionists’] revenge for Dod Street”, he warned: “their counter-stroke in the war for the free expression of opinion.” He pointed to the tendency of the middle classes to take offence at all “unseemly” behaviour in the streets, irrespective of opinion:
“I have noted of late years a growing impatience on the part of the more luxurious portion of society of the amusements and habits of the workers, when they in any way interfere with the calm of their luxury; or to put it in plainer language a tendency to arrogant petty tyranny in these matters. They would, if they could, clear the streets of everything that may injure their delicate susceptibilities… They would clear the streets of costermongers, organs, processions, and lecturers of all kinds, and make them a sort of decent prison corridors, with people just trudging to and from their work.”2
Temporarily—and as far as London was concerned—the battle for the street corners and the parks was won. It was won, not by abstract legal decisions or the “liberal tradition”, but by the fearlessness of the comrades who came before the courts. It was won, even more, by the persistence of the Socialists. The meetings simply went on, irrespective of the cases. Despite the Bell Street decision, the Marylebone Branch resumed their meetings on a new site at once. Morris himself was busy in August keeping the propaganda going:
“I had a brisk day yesterday… though no policeman’s hand touched my sacred collar. I went from the Grange to Walham Green where we had a good little meeting attentive and peaceable, back then to the Grange & dinner and then away Eastward Ho to Victoria Park rather sulky at having to turn out so soon after dinner. Though Victoria Park is rather a pretty place (dirty though) and lots of trees. Had a good meeting there also—spoke for nearly an hour altogether in a place made noisy by other meetings near, also a band…”1
The police had certainly not thrown in their hand. 1887 was to see a frontal attack on the right of meeting in Trafalgar Square. But they were more cautious in their petty local provocations. And there is no doubt that Morris’s part in the fight for free speech was an important influence in winning popular sympathy to the Socialist side.
VI. The S.D.F. and the Unemployed Riots
Throughout 1885 and 1886 relations between the S.D.F. and the League were in a fluid state. Apart from the unity of Dod Street relations between the Councils of the two bodies were never good. In May, 1885, the S.D.F. were spreading the tale that the Socialist League,
“was composed entirely of middle-class men, who had no real interest in the workers; that they were not Socialists at all, but anarchists and revolutionists; and that they were all at loggerheads with each other, and were only held together by the influence of William Morris.”2
Scheu, Bax, Lane and others, for their part, were equally bitter in their hostility to Hyndman. Morris used his influence to prevent public attacks on the S.D.F. in Commonweal: while John Burns and Jack Williams, on their side, were always ready to co-operate with the Leaguers in the fight for free speech, and remained on friendly terms with Morris. Much of the propagandist work done by both bodies was of the same kind, and outside London it was often a toss-up whether provincial bodies affiliated to the S.D.F. or League, or, like the societies in Manchester and Sheffield, remained independent of both. Indeed, there was little reason why the membership of both bodies should not have been drawn into even closer relations if it had not been for the election scandal of November, 1885.
The S.D.F. had put up two propaganda candidates in this first election under the new Reform Act—Jack Williams and Fielding in Hampstead and Kennington. They polled twenty-seven and thirty-two votes respectively. This was bad enough—but worse followed. It leaked out (and was admitted by the Federation) that the candidatures had been backed by “Tory gold”: moreover, Hyndman visited Joseph Chamberlain and threatened him with more Socialist candidatures in opposition to the Liberals if he did not promise to support the Eight Hours Bill in the next session. Every word in the statement of the seceders from the Federation seemed to be justified.
The scandal destroyed at a blow the goodwill established between the Socialists and Radicals in the Dod Street affair. Moreover, it exposed the puny strength behind Hyndman’s grandiose phrases. Several of the League’s Council were filled with “gratified spite”,1 and sought to profit from the S.D.F.’s discomfiture. Scheu became convinced that Hyndman was “a paid agent of the Tories (or liberal-reactionists) for the purpose of bringing Socialism into discredit with the masses”.2 Bax drafted a resolution, against which Morris protested in vain,1 viewing “with indignation the action of certain members” of the S.D.F. in “trafficking with the honour of the Socialist party”, and expressing sympathy with those members who “repudiate the tactics of the disreputable clique concerned in the recent nefarious proceedings”.2 Beyond this, no comment was made in Commonweal
The League’s own part in the General Election was confined to the distribution of a new leaflet, For Whom Shall We Vote? The leaflet was drafted by Morris,3 and became adopted for standard use in subsequent elections, since—whatever the issue of the election—the League’s policy was the same: “DO NOT VOTE AT ALL!”
“When those who govern you see the number of votes cast at each election growing less and less, and note at the same time the growth of Socialist bodies… terror will fill their souls, and they must… either use violence against you, which you will learn how to repel, or quail before you and sit helpless… until the time will come when you… will step in and claim your place, and become the new-born Society of the world.”
Here, it is clear, is one reason why the majority of those who resigned from the S.D.F. in disgust at Hyndman’s intrigues did not throw in their lot with the League. And here, also, are grounds for Engels’s complaint to Liebknecht early in 1886:
“Bax… and Morris are strongly under the influence of the anarchists. These men must pass through this in corpore vile. They will get out of it somehow, but it is certainly fortunate that these children’s ailments are passing before the masses come into the movement. But so far they are obstinately refusing to come in… You will not bring the numerous working class as a whole into the movement by sermons…”4
But—in the meantime—the S.D.F. had taken part in something a good deal more arresting than “sermons”. Champion, Burns, Tom Mann and others had for some time been conducting an agitation among the unemployed in the East End. A meeting called in Trafalgar Square for February 8th, 1886, by a curious gang of “Tory Fair Traders” was the occasion for a counter-demonstration of the unemployed called by the S.D.F. Both bodies met in the Square, and a part of the crowd was addressed by Burns, Williams, Champion, Hyndman and Sparling of the League—all of them with a touch of revolutionary bluster which both Morris and Engels thought overdone. In the sequel, the Socialists led the crowds up Pall Mall for a further meeting in Hyde Park. There was some jeering from the clubs. The unemployed retaliated with stones and window-smashing, and then a good deal of indiscriminate damage and looting took place, in which Morris’s own shop was lucky to escape.
The next two days of dark, foggy weather were full of monstrous rumours. “If MESSRS. BURNS and HYNDMAN are not arrested already, they ought to be arrested this morning”, thundered The Times editorial the next day. “No misplaced fear of making martyrs of them ought to stand in the way of their punishment.” Its news column for the 10th began: “In the West End yesterday there was something little short of panic…” Its editorial declared: “There has been nothing like a panic…” Its news column for the following day: “London was yesterday thrown into a state of utter panic…” Rumours flew round that the East End was marching through the fog towards the West. All the submerged class-fears and hatred of the bourgeoisie suffered nearly a week of naked exposure.1 The tradesmen put up their shutters as far afield as Hammersmith and Kilburn. Queen Victoria wrote furious letters to her Home Secretary. 1848 was mentioned in solemn tones. “Sir”, one gentleman who had had the misfortune of getting his eye-glasses and carriage windows smashed in the rioting, wrote to The Times:
“I am a subscriber to various charities and hospitals, which I shall discontinue. I have always advocated the cause of the people. I shall do so no more.”1
But those whose eye-glasses and windows were still intact took a different view. The Mansion House Fund for the unemployed rocketed overnight. Fresh fuel was added to the flames by unemployed demonstrations in Birmingham, Norwich and other centres, and rioting in Leicester. The authorities in Glasgow found work for 895 unemployed in one day when the news of the Trafalgar Square riots came through. The middle and upper classes throughout the country reacted as if they had suddenly discovered a foreign army camping in their midst. Charity organizations were thrown up like defence works. “Princess Christian”, reported The Times on February 12th,
“in view of the extent of the distress in Windsor, is very anxious to organize some cheap dinners for children, and has invited several ladies to assist in carrying out this benevolent object.”
The denunciation of the Socialists was unmeasured, even Thomas Hughes (a one-time “Christian Socialist”) contributing a shameful letter to The Times in which he called them indiscriminately “notorious ruffians”, and demanded “a year or two’s oakum picking” for “Messrs. Hyndman & Co.”2 By the time his letter was published, summonses had already been served on Hyndman, Champion, Williams and Burns.
The Socialists, indeed, were partly fooled themselves into thinking that they were seeing (in Morris’ words) “the first skirmish of the revolution”.3 Hyndman and Champion gave an interview to the Pall Mall Gazette in which they spoke of disappearing for six months, and then reappearing “in a much more serious fashion.”4 The state of tension remained at a critical point for several weeks. The police, as if to revenge their failure of the 8th, repeatedly attacked peaceful meetings. At a monster demonstration in Hyde Park called by the S.D.F. on February 21st the police (according to The Times report) “were compelled to draw their batons and use them without mercy on all who encountered them.” One man ridden down by a mounted policeman “received shocking injuries to his face, but it is probable that the rioters will not seek medical assistance… for fear of detection.”1
The Trafalgar Square riots were a sudden test of Morris’s ability as a Socialist leader, and also of the sincerity of his revolutionary opinions. Scarcely a month before, the Leaguers had denounced Hyndman & Co. as a “disreputable clique”. Moreover, Morris disliked Hyndman’s attitude to the unemployed agitation, suspecting that he exploited their misery in an opportunist manner, and put forward unrealistic demands for relief which could only raise false hopes. With the hysteria of the Press, the alarm of middle-class friends,2 and waverings within the ranks of the Socialist League, it might have been easy for him to dissociate the League from the events of February 8th, and stand aside from the line of fire. A garbled account of a speech at the Hammersmith Liberal Association, which appeared in the Daily News on February 11th, and which suggested that he thought the S.D.F. a “dangerous” body and was himself shocked by the riots, provided him with this opportunity. He rejected it with contempt, writing to the News to contradict its report, and adding:
“Under present circumstances I am very loath to be misunderstood: especially… when members of the Social Democratic Federation are threatened with prosecution for accidents that accompanied their performance of a duty which I myself have frequently to perform…”3
On the previous day he had written at greater length to reassure the Rev. John Glasse at Edinburgh:
“As to Monday’s riot, of course I look at it as a mistake to go in for a policy of riot, all the more as I feel pretty certain that the Socialists will one day have to fight seriously because though it is quite true that if labour could organize itself properly the enemy could not even dream of resisting, yet that organization could not possibly keep pace with the spread of discontent which will accompany the break-up of the old system… Yet I do not agree with you that Monday’s affair will hurt the movement. I think it will be of service: any opposition to law and order in the streets is of use to us, if the price of it is not too high… For the rest an English mob is always brutal at any rate until it rises to heroism. Altogether taken I think we must look upon this affair as an incident of the Revolution, and so far encouraging: the shop wrecking was partly a grotesque practical joke (quite in the English manner) at the expense of the upper classes…”1
The riots marked for him a break in the docility of the London workers since the Reform demonstrations of 1866—“the surprise of people in finding that the British workmen will not stand everything is extreme.”2 The Council of the League expressed “heartiest sympathy” with the members of the S.D.F. facing prosecution, and Morris himself went bail for Williams and John Burns. That action was in itself sufficient to declare his position.
In the March number of Commonweal he made a careful assessment of the situation. His initial analysis was much the same as in his letter to Glasse:
“What was the meaning of it? At bottom misery, illuminated by a faint glimmer of hope, raised by the magic word SOCIALISM, the only hope of these days of confusion. That was what the crowd represented, whatever other elements were mingled with it.”
Some “palliative measures” would, he thought, come of it. Also, “We may be suppressed; practically at least, if not formally”:
“Now I should like to say a few words with the utmost seriousness to our comrades and supporters, on the policy of the Socialist League. I have said that we have been overtaken unprepared, by a revolutionary incident, but that incident was practically aimless. This kind of thing is what many of us have dreaded from the first, and we may be sure that it will happen again and again while the industrial outlook is what it is… It is above all things our business to guard against the possible consequences of these surprises. At the risk of being misunderstood by hot-heads, I say that our business is more than ever Education…
“It is too much to hope that the whole working class can be educated in the aims of Socialism in due time, before other surprises take place. But we must hope that a strong party can be so educated. Educated in economics, in organization, and in administration. To such a body of men all the aspirations and vague opinion of the oppressed multitudes would drift, and little by little they would be educated by them, if the march of events would give us time; or if not, even half-educated they would follow them in any action which it was necessary to take.
“To forge this head of the spear which is to pierce the armour of Capitalism is our business, in which we must not fail.”
In the absence of such a party, a spontaneous revolt (he continued) would—even if it carried a small Socialist group to power—soon succumb to the counter-revolution:
“The educational process, therefore, the forming a rallying point for definite aims is necessary to our success; but I must guard against misunderstanding. We must be no mere debating club, or philosophical society; we must take part in all really popular movements when we can make our own views on them unmistakeably clear; that is a most important part of the education in organization.
“Education towards Revolution seems to me to express in three words what our policy should be…”
Morris fully understood that the tactics of Hyndman were premature. But however “purist” he might be in his theoretical leanings, he viewed events as a revolutionary must do, as they were, and not as he would have liked them to be. “The rudest and most unsuccessful attempts at revolution are better”, he wrote two months later, than “the periods of quietude” when the workers “learn a dull contentment with their lot”:
“With all genuine revolutionary attempts… we must sympathize and must at the least express that sympathy, whatever risks its expression may subject us to; and it is little indeed if we can do no more than that.”1
To Georgie Burne-Jones he privately expressed the hope that the “ferment” would sink down again:
“I have often thought that we should be overtaken by the course of events—overtaken unprepared, I mean. It will happen again and again: and some of us will cut sorry figures in the confusion… Things industrial are bad—I wish they would better: their doing so would not interfere with our propaganda, and would give us some chance of getting at working men with intelligence and some share of leisure. Yet if that will not come about, and the dominating classes will push revolution on us, let it be! the upshot must be good in the end. If you had only suffered as I have from the apathy of the English lower classes (woe’s me how low!) you would rejoice at their awakening, however ugly the forms it took. As to my capacity for leadership in this turmoil, believe me, I feel as humble as could be wished; yet after all it is my life, and the work of it, and I must do my best.”2
This feeling of his personal inadequacy was always with him:
“I wish I were not so damned old. If I were but twenty years younger. But then you know there would be the Female complication somewhere. Best as it is after all.”3
The League’s support for the S.D.F. in this moment of crisis, the common fight of the two bodies for the freedom of the streets during the summer, co-operation in the annual meeting for the celebration of the Commune—all these augured well for joint action in the future. But Hyndman and the old guard of the L.E.L. were irreconcilable. Morris approached the S.D.F. with the suggestion that the Trafalgar Square meeting on August 29th, 1886, to greet Jack Williams on his release from prison after the Bell Street incident should be a joint affair. From his Olympian heights Hyndman replied in aggrieved tones. Morris himself would be welcome as a speaker at the S.D.F. meeting (this was one of several attempts by the S.D.F. to “capture” Morris from the League):
“Any ill-feeling that may have existed—as of course I thought not unjustifiable—on my partis quite at an end. The reasons our people have for declining joint action with the Socialist League are however sufficient…
“At Dod Street there was a distinct breach of faith, and much mischief was made. Then your body passed a resolution and published it in all the capitalist press denouncing us as a ‘disreputable gang’. We nevertheless took part in the Commune affair at South Place when every effort was made by Lane the Chairman to snub our men and we were prevented as far as possible from selling our paper in the Hall. After our trial at the Old Bailey one of the men who came up with you the other night—who is always very careful to keep himself out of danger, I notice—denounced Burns, Champion, Williams and myself as ‘cowards’ in your own rooms. This statement was received with cheers… Wherever it has been at all possible your people have tried, as at Hull, Croydon, Hackney, Paddington, and now at Clerkenwell, to break up our Branches… Some of these attempts, of which I am sure you are not cognisant, have been of the meanest and dirtiest character.
“All this while, too, two at least of your members, Mahon, now at Leeds, and Aveling, have never lost a chance of vilifying members of our body in the American and other foreign Press… How… can we make common cause with people who are perpetually calling us all liars, rogues, intriguers, etc.? From first to last we have refrained from attacking the League in any way…”
The letter then embraced Hyndman’s grievances against the Fabians, and Fitzgerald’s Socialist Union, and concluded:
“If men act altogether in an anti-Socialist sense surely the mere fact that they call themselves Socialists does not render it incumbent upon other Socialists, who have been throughout the injured party, to run the risk of further insult.”1
Humph! No mention of the fact that the two comrades Williams and Mainwaring had spoken together at Bell Street, been tried together, and that Morris and Hyndman had together gone to give witness on their behalf. The differences seemed to Morris “preposterously petty”, Hyndman “stiff and stately, playing the big man, and complaining of being ill-treated by us, which was a Wolf and Lamb business”. “Well, I think I have done with that lot. Why will people quarrel when they have a serious end in view?”2 In Glasgow, too, the old friction continued, and Morris wrote wearily to Glasier: “I’m sorry to hear about the S.D.F. I thought some of those I saw were good sort of chaps. However, you must take their place now.”3 A comrade in Farnham wrote to Commonweal early in 1887:
“We Socialists in small towns or villages… feel especially the need of unity and good-feeling, [and] cannot but deplore and feel ashamed of this bad-blooded rivalry, which makes the Cause look ridiculous, and gives occasion to the common enemy to laugh in his sleeve at us… It must be comic… to witness the complacent swagger of Justice, and the occasional mutter of the Commonweal, as of some sulky boy who has been teased by his fellows.”4
What, in fact, had the League achieved in its first two years?
In terms of membership, a slow but gradual increase was to be recorded. Starting with a handful of supporters in January, 1885, it had climbed by the Annual Conference in July to a membership of about 230, with branches at Hammersmith, Bloomsbury, Merton Abbey, Stratford, North London, Leeds, Bradford, Oxford, and a central branch for the unattached. The Labour Emancipation League was still affiliated, but its Mile End and Stratford branches merged in the League, and only its branch at Hoxton remained independent. The Scottish Land and Labour League had branches at Glasgow and Edinburgh. Of the first number of Commonweal 5,000 copies had been sold, but thereafter the circulation dropped to a regular average fluctuating between 2,000 and 3,000.1 During the next twelve months new branches were opened at Manchester, Oldham, Leicester, Marylebone, Mile End, South London, Dublin, Birmingham, Croydon, Norwich, Hackney and Clerkenwell. At the Annual Conference in June, 1886, nineteen of these branches were represented, and of the five which sent no delegates, only one, Stratford, appears to have been inactive. Not one branch had totally lapsed: moreover, the Scottish Land and Labour League appeared now to be maintaining an existence alongside League branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow. No figures were published of the total membership of the League, but Engels (who was well informed) told Bebel in April, 1886, “at the very most the two organizations [S.D.F. and S.L.] have not 2,000 paying members between them nor their papers 5,000 readers”.2 The League could claim half of this readership, and perhaps 600 or 700 of the members.3
In July, 1886, Mahon brought the Hull members of the S.D.F. into the League: and, before the end of the year, further branches were opened at Ipswich, Bingley, Fulham, Hamilton (in the Lanarkshire mining area), Mitcham, and Lancaster. Until the Annual Conference of May, 1887, the League’s membership was climbing, and—on the basis of delegation at the Conference—it would seem to have come near to the 1,000 mark. At this Conference new branches were represented from Walsall and North Shields, but those at Stratford, Oldham, Manchester, Marylebone, Mile End, South London, Dublin, Birmingham and Fulham seem either to have merged into other branches or to have lapsed. By the second half of 1886 the League was certainly being outstripped in membership by the S.D.F. in London, the Midlands and Lancashire, and only in Norwich, West Yorkshire and Scotland was it holding or gaining ground. In London at the end of 1886 Hyndman was crowing over the dead body of the League, provoking an unusually angry response from Morris in a private letter to Glasier:
“As to what he says about the League in London, that be damned! As a party of principle, we are not likely to number as many members as an opportunist body; but we have several solid and increasing branches here. A good South London branch… we Hammersmith chaps have formed a Fulham one now flourishing; Hackney is not bad; Hoxton is good; Mile End is being reorganised: North London is much improved; Bloomsbury is very much so; Mitcham has been set on its legs by Kitz; Croydon is sound, though somewhat sleepy. Of course we ought to do much more, but we are suffering from the lack of energetic initiative men, who are not overburdened with work and responsibilities.”1
The reluctance of “energetic initiative men” to join the League in 1886 and 1887 can be traced to a number of causes. The leadership of the League was lacking in unity, vigour and organizational ability. The Council was torn by dissension, not only on important political issues, but also upon the most trivial questions of personality. Resignations took place almost monthly. In November, 1885, Joseph Lane resigned “from the Council of the League called Socialist” because an offer by a friend to put up a brass plate outside the League’s offices had been negatived.1 In the same month Henry Charles, J.L. Mahon and two others resigned (with better grounds) because Council meetings were “a sheer waste of time”, and in protest at “the unwarranted and extravagant expenditure of money by the Council”, defrayed chiefly by Morris.2 At the same time, useful Council members like Frank Kitz and Robert Banner were prevented from attending “owing to want of work, and of course want of money.” 3 Finally, in June, 1886, Thomas Binning, in a notable letter of resignation, brought a serious list of accusations against the Council and its proceedings. Meetings, he declared, were disorderly and inconclusive. The League was without either discipline or serious organization. Its affairs were largely dominated by a London faction:
“I earnestly hope the League is not going to degenerate into a mere Quixotic debating society for the discussion of philosophical fads. I care not how angelic may be the theories of Anarchists or Anarchist-Communists. I contend that the real solid basis of the Revolutionary movement is the economic question… If the League means business let it not waste time in metaphysical subtleties such as the precise shade of difference between ‘Rules’ and ‘Arrangements’, etc.”4
If the centre was indeed as weak as this, there is no cause for wonder that progress was slow.
It should be recalled, however, that Morris held control over Commonweal, and into its pages none of these squabbles were allowed to enter. The paper served as a link with a genuine movement both in London and the provinces which deserved a much better leadership than it got. Moreover, it would be an error to pass judgement on the League on the evidence of the proceedings of its London Council alone. The dramatic events of these two years were taking place, not in 75 Farringdon Road, but at the open-air pitches and in the small rooms where Socialist ideas were first reaching the workers. In Leeds, for example, the propaganda was driven forward by Tom Maguire, who was scarcely twenty years old.
This highly gifted young worker picked up a copy of The Christian Socialist from the Secular Hall bookstall in 1883. In 1884 Maguire formed a small branch of the S.D.F., arid soon made his influence felt. On friendly terms with J.L. Mahon, and a warm admirer of Morris, he brought the eight or ten Leeds Socialists across to the League in January, 1885. Every Sunday open-air meetings were held, at which Maguire was pursued with the “utmost spite” by a section of the Irish Catholics. “We shall live their narrow fury down”,1 he wrote confidently to the Council in September, 1885: and nothing could drive Maguire and his comrades from the streets. Numbering twenty at the most early in 1886, the branch was a centre of propaganda which extended to many points in the West Riding: twice a month four or five of the branch would mix propaganda and pleasure, tramping through the South Yorkshire coalfield or the Dales, holding meetings and selling literature on the way.
Similar ardour was to be found in the early days of the branch at Norwich. The leading spirit here was Fred Slaughter, a young man with a small income which enabled him to run a cafe as a centre for the movement. Early in 1885 he promoted “The Norwich Pioneer Class for the discussion of Socialism”, from which eleven members were drawn to found a branch of the League. A visit from Morris, a correspondence in the Press, and the accession of two able speakers, C.W. Mowbray (from London) and the young Fred Henderson (from Bradford), brought additional support. As at Leeds, the Norwich Leaguers carried their propaganda to the countryside,
“and on Friday nights our members have tramped the six miles along a bad road in all kinds of weather, always sure of finding the room filled with men anxious to hear the new gospel…”
in the village of St. Faith’s.1 The Norwich Leaguers drove hard for working-class support and headed the unemployed agitation. By Easter, 1886, the branch was drawing audiences of 1,000 to its open-air meetings in the Market Place. From this time onwards, for the next twelve months, its membership rose rapidly.
Leeds and Norwich were among the most successful branches. In other centres, enthusiastic propaganda gave way under the pressure of poverty, apathy or victimization. Edinburgh, which started early in 1885 with a meeting over 500 strong, and a nominal membership of fifty, was reduced to five or six active members in December of the same year. Two if its best speakers, Scheu and A.K. Donald, had left the city. The Secretary was complaining of the apathy of “the mob”, and of Edinburgh as the “home of Whiggery and orthodoxy”. The branch was crippled by lack of money, and urgently requested another visit from “Mr. Morris, from whose last appearance here we profited to the extent of about 30.”2 At Glasgow the story was more hopeful, and Edinburgh was to see a great improvement in 1887. But at Leicester, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, a similar tale of set-backs was reported: “We, the officers… have done all we could to get meetings & members… but have got nothing but debts for our pains.”1 Money due to the League for Commonweals could not be sent in, since the branch had local debts which must be settled first, so that its enemies “could not taunt us with that matter”. From Nottingham came a cancellation of an order for the paper: “we are not in a position to bear any loss, being all working men and many out of work.”2 At Huntingdon several workmen “would become members of the League, only they are afraid of their employers. Men in Huntingdon dare not express their honest opinion, in such a hot-bed of Toryism.”3
It was, however, the political weakness of the League which was the prime factor in discouraging its own membership. What did the Leaguers do? The answer is only the propaganda of meetings and the written word. The occasions when the League came into real prominence in 1886 were the result, not so much of its own propaganda, as of the oppression of the police or the agitation of the S.D.F. There was a constant danger of degeneration of several kinds. In the proletarian branches of the East End, “purism” could easily pass into anarchism and bloodthirsty phrase-mongering. Morris was puzzled by these groups. “On Sunday I went a-preaching Stepney way”, he wrote to Geòrgie Burne-Jones in May, 1885. The visit “intensely depressed” him, lecturing to twenty people in a small and dirty room among “the vast mass of utter shabbiness and uneventfulness”:
“It took the fire out of my fine periods, I can tell you: it is a great drawback that I can’t talk to them roughly and unaffectedly. Also I would like to know what amount of real feeling underlies their bombastic revolutionary talk when they get to that. I don’t seem to have got at them yet—you see this great class gulf lies between us…”4
Morris’s fight against reformism and opportunism could easily overbalance into the “bombastic talk” satirized by Gissing in Demos:
“Half measures… can only result in delaying the Revolution… Away with these palliatives; let us rejoice when we see working men starving and ill-clad, for in that way their eyes will be opened. The brute who gets the uttermost farthing out of the toil of his wage-slaves is more a friend to us and our cause than any namby-pamby Socialist…”
This satire was by no means wide of the mark where Kitz and some of the growing anarchist section were concerned. Moreover it found a counterpart among friends of Morris, like Charlie Faulkner of Oxford (dubbed by the Oxford Magazine an “alehouse anarchist”) who wrote to Lane on behalf of the Oxford Branch in May, 1887, that they had—
“refused to have anything to do with Parliamentary action… The opinion was almost unanimous against having anything less than Revolution. The very idea of mere reform is to keep the present institutions going. For my own part I think all such movements as ‘8-hours a day’ are just as reactionary as allotment schemes. The passing of such measures would, I dare say, take off the immediate pressure and so far would of course have the effect of checking the socialistic movement. It is the Tories who, if they had any brains, would promote such halfhearted legislation…”1
Branches of the League were also weakened simply by boredom. Again and again they were formed with enthusiasm: sallied out into the streets and sold the Commonweal: and then, caught in the endless round of open-air pitch, Commonweal sales, lectures, with no prospect of any change until the “Revolution”, members began to drop out. Where the branches kept a continually expanding propaganda combined with social activities, they held their membership and were held together by a really remarkable spirit of comradeship. “Our business”, related Alf Mattison, “was to make Socialists: to go on making ’em until we had roped in all the human race. In some old way or other our ideal Common-wealth would then come about…’1 But even the finest enthusiasm was bound to flag, especially in London where propaganda outings to the East End had little charm.
Morris’s own branch at Hammersmith provides an example of the difficulties imposed on the League by its own purism. From its formation (as a branch of the Democratic Federation) in June, 1884, until the end of 1886, no fewer than 117 members were posted, and of these one only resigned formally. Yet, in August, 1886, only forty members were paid up and in “good standing”, while its Annual Meeting in March, 1887, had to be adjourned because only twelve were in attendance—and when it was resumed in April the attendance was nine.2 But at the same time, the open-air propaganda was going briskly, with audiences of 200 and more at Walham Green in the worst winter months, and good sales of Commonweal, while the regular Sunday evening lectures in the Hammersmith clubroom were well attended.
Since the propaganda was largely “educational” (and it was clear that the “Revolution” was not imminent) the League seemed rather safer to some of the timid than the S.D.F. Discussions tended to become abstract and detached from events. Moreover, when a lecture was to be held every week, it could not deal with the same fundamental principles again and again. Between October, 1886, and October, 1887, there was a marked tendency for the Hammersmith branch to include more cultural subjects among their lectures, and to fetch in outsiders more frequently.3 Gissing (an unfriendly observer) who was visiting branches of the League for “copy” in 1886, noted the tendency in Hammersmith:
“The people who occupied the benches were obviously of a different stamp from those… at the Hoxton meeting place. There were perhaps a dozen artisans of intensely sober appearance, and the rest were men and women who certainly had never wrought with their hands… Of the men other than the artisans the majority were young, and showed the countenance which bespeaks meritorious intelligence rather than ardour of heart or brain… It needed but a glance over this assembly to understand how very theoretical were the convictions that had brought its members together.”1
Engels wrote to Bebel in August, 1886: “Still practically nothing doing”,
“… as many sects as heads… The S.D.F. has at any rate a programme and a certain discipline, but it has absolutely no support among the masses… The League is passing through a crisis. Morris… has fallen headlong over the phrase ‘revolution’ and become a victim of the anarchists. Bax is very talented and understands something—but after the fashion of philosophers has concocted his own form of socialism which he takes for the true Marxist theory and does a lot of damage with it. However, this is an infantile disease in his case and will pass, it is only a pity that this process is being gone through in public. Aveling is forced to work so hard for his daily bread that he also is not able to do much studying; he is the only one I meet regularly.”2
At the end of November, 1886, Engels wrote to Sorge that “the labour movement is beginning here, and no mistake”, but the Socialist League “has embarked on a dogfight with the anarchists and has no time to take an interest in the living movement going on under its very nose”. That dogfight was to go on for two years. And when it was finished with, the League was to all intents and purposes a dying organization.
VIII. William Morris, Agitator
One fact stands beyond question in these two years of propaganda—the personal example of William Morris. In October 1886 he wrote to Geòrgie Burne-Jones, in a humorous reference to Lane and his party, who rejected all leadership on principle:
“In spite of all the self-denying ordinances of us semi-anarchists, I grieve to have to say that some sort of leadership is required, and that in our section I unfortunately supply that want.”1
His official position was that of Treasurer (until his place was taken by Philip Webb) and Editor of Commonweal. The League had no Chairman, and the paid full-time Secretary was an executive officer. If anyone was to keep a constant check on all decisions, give advice to branches, and shape a consistent policy, it had to be Morris.
He did it without complaint. It is absolutely impossible to understand how he found time for all his activities, at the same time keeping some supervision over the Firm, and (before the end of 1886) launching on a translation of Homer. In these two years he wrote The Pilgrims of Hope, A Dream of John Ball, and the first part of Socialism From the Root Up: articles, notes and editorials for Commonweal: he delivered something like 120 lectures, about fifteen of which (at the least) were written out in long-hand and are permanent contributions to Socialist theory: he attended the weekly Executive Council meeting of the League, the Ways and Means Committee, and goodness knows how many other meetings besides: he made tours of the provinces, breaking new ground, and consolidating old branches—Dublin, Scotland, Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Potteries, East Anglia and a dozen other centres. He was present at sixty out of the ninety-nine meetings of the Committee of the Hammersmith Branch, at some of which only two or three others troubled to attend: and in addition was often in the Chair at the Sunday evening lectures—if he was not lecturing elsewhere himself. He spoke at scores of open-air meetings, chaired them, carried the banner, sold literature, took round the hat for collections. He acted as a sandwichman, between placards advertising Commonweal He gave a hand with the smallest mechanical details of office or branch organization, and wrote basketfuls of correspondence. He edited Commonweal He attended the police-courts. He drew up balance-sheets, and subsidized the movement with his money. He helped with social evenings, gave readings of his own work or wrote special poems, entertained speakers, and made personal contacts with people sympathetic to the movement.
“ ‘Tis all meeting and lecture, lecture & meeting with a little writing interspersed”, he wrote to his daughter Jenny.1 Successive biographers have lamented this waste of Morris’s energies. They need not have troubled. Morris himself gave the answer to them, when, lying on his back crippled with gout after the Dod Street affair, Geòrgie Burne-Jones tried to persuade him to give up his active propagandist work:
“You see, having joined a movement, I must do what I can while I last, that is a matter of duty… All this work I have pulled upon my own head, and though in detail much of it is repulsive to the last degree, I still hold that I did not do so without due consideration. Anyhow, it seems to me that I can be of use, therefore I am impelled to make myself useful…
“You see, my dear, I can’t help it. The ideas which have taken hold of me will not let me rest: nor can I see anything else worth thinking of. How can it be otherwise, when to me society, which to many seems an orderly arrangement for allowing decent people to get through their lives creditably and with some pleasure, seems mere cannibalism; nay worse… is grown so corrupt, so steeped in hypocrisy and lies, that one turns from one stratum of it to another with hopeless loathing. One must turn to hope, and only in one direction do I see it—on the road to Revolution: everything else is gone now…”2
He did not make the mistake of identifying his own efforts in the League with the outcome of history. “Even such things as this”, he wrote of one quarrel, “the army setting off to conquer all the world turning back to burn Jack’s pigstye, and tumbling drunk into the fire—even this don’t shake me: means one must use the best one can get: but one thing I won’t do, wait for ever till perfect means are made for very imperfect me to work with.”1
He knew perfectly well that there was an easier alternative, with little obvious compromise:
“I do not love contention; I even shrink from it with indifferent persons. Indeed I know that all my faults lie on the other side: love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy good-nature, are what I chiefly accuse myself of. All these would not have been hurt by my being a ‘moderate Socialist’; nor need I have forgone a good share of the satisfaction of vainglory: for in such a party I could easily have been a leader, nay, perhaps the leader, whereas amidst our rough work I can scarcely be a leader at all and certainly do not care to be. I say this because I feel that a very little self-deception would have landed me among the moderates. But self-deception it would have been.”2
And so John Ball is made to muse in prison:
“Hadst thou kept thy tongue between thy teeth thou mightest have been something, if it had been but a parson of a town, and comfortable to many a poor man; and then mightest thou have clad here and there the naked back, and filled the empty belly, and holpen many, and men would have spoken well of thee, and of thyself thou hadst thought well; and all this hast thou lost for lack of a word here and there to some great man, and a little winking of the eyes amidst murder and wrong and unruth.”
This temptation Morris, too, had felt. It was perhaps the strongest action of his life when he thrust it aside. By his sacrifices for “the Cause”, the stature of “the Cause” was made to grow. And whatever he gave was given back to him tenfold in his new joy. “As to my ‘not looking round’ “, he wrote in gentle rebuke to Geòrgie Burne-Jones—“Why it seems to me that no hour of the day passes that the whole world does not show itself to me.”1
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1 My Years of Exile, p. 162: “Shaw gave Dubedat nearly all the characteristic attributes of Edward Aveling: his passion for having everything of the best; the assured and shameless manner in which he borrowed, in order to pay for his pleasures, the scanty cash of even the poorest of his acquaintances; his gift of fascinating the ingenuous, and, in particular, women, by his lyrical and aesthetic affectations and flirtations… these are the characteristic features of the man for whom Eleanor Marx sacrificed herself as completely in real life as Mrs. Dubedat sacrificed herself for her husband in the play. And the deliberate blindness and deafness of Mrs. Dubedat in respect of all that was said to the detriment of her husband is precisely the counter-part of the obstinacy with which Eleanor Aveling, despite all her painful experience of her chosen comrade, continued to believe in him…”
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1 H.S. Salt, Seventy Years Savages, p. 80.
2 Will Thorne, My Life’s Battles (1925).
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1 Bernstein, op. cit, p. 164.
2 Ibid., p. 159.
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1 See first edition, p. 860.
2 Bernstein, op. cit., p. 162.
3 W.S. Sanders, Early Socialist Days, p. 80.
4 “Engels at Home”, in the Labour Prophet, September, 1895.
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1 Bernstein, op. cit, p. 202.
2 Labour Prophet, September, 1895. See also Bernstein, op. cit., p. 206.
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1 May Morris, II, p. 173.
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1 Commonweal, March, 1886, “Looting, Scientific and Unscientific.”
2 The Religion of Socialism, p. 117.
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1 The Religion of Socialism, p. 116. When a woman fell off Clifton Suspension Bridge without breaking her neck, Bax (to Morris’s delight) pointed out in all seriousness that this proved that woman was a lower organism; man would have been killed (May Morris, II, p. 174)
2 Tom Mann, op. cit, p. 47.
3 Commonweal, August Supplement, 1885.
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1 Glasier, op. cit, p. 128.
2 Obituary notice signed “J.M.” (probably J.L. Mahon) in Justice, January 20th, 1923.
3 e.g. Kitz’s article, “Bastille, Bourgeoisie, and Bumble”, in Commonweal, November, 1885.
4 Morris to Joynes, February 3rd, 1885, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45345.
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1 In the recollection of the late Mr. Ambrose Barker, Joseph Lane and his circle were aware of the writings of Kropotkin, Bakunin, and of Benjamin Tucker, in America, as early as 1885.
2 Lane to Ambrose Barker, 1912, Nettlau Collection, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 Scheu to Provisional Council, January 4th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
2 Tom Maguire to Secretary, S.L., January 11th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 The Statement, published as a leaflet, is reprinted in full in Tom Mann, op. cit, pp. 45–6.
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1 This Constitution, provisionally adopted after the Split, was dropped from the revised Constitution adopted at the First Annual Conference. Later, it reappears in the North of England Socialist Federation (see p. 464) and the Hoxton Labour Emancipation League in 1888. A copy is preserved in the British Library of Political and Economic Science.
2 Report of J.L. Mahon to the Provisional Council, February 8th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 “Socialism and Politics”, July Supplement, 1885.
2 From Morris’s Preface to Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore (1893) (reprinted in May Morris, I, pp. 286–9).
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 46345.
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1 Pilgrims of Hope, Section 3.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45333.
2 Ibid.
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1 Manifesto of the Socialist League on the Soudan War, four-page leaflet, 1885.
2 Commonweal, April, 1885. Notes by J.L. Mahon, League Secretary.
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1 Daily News, April 3rd, 1885: Commonweal, May, 1885, Monthly Report (signed W.M.)
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1 G.B. Shaw to Secretary, S.L., April 13th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc Hist. For the full letter, see J.O. Baylen, “G.B. Shaw and the Socialist League”, International Review Social History, VII (1962), p. 431.
2 Commonweal, October, 1885.
3 “Notes on Propaganda”, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 46345.
4 Commonweal, May 8th, 1886, “Socialism in Dublin and Yorkshire”.
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1 Works, Vol. XXIII, p. 186, “Art under Plutocracy” (November, 1883).
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1 S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
2 Ibid, CJ. Faulkner to Secretary, S.L., February 1st, 1885.
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1 S.L. Correspondence, Fred Pickles to Secretary, S.L., February 16th, 1885.
2 Ibid., Thomas Barclay to Secretary, S.L., June 25th, 1885.
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1 Commonweal August Supplement, 1885.
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1 Most accounts agree that Morris was an indifferent outdoor speaker. “Anyone can be a public speaker if he only pegs away sufficiently at it”, Morris said himself (Compton-Rickett, op. cit., p. 233). Bernstein voices the general opinion on his speaking, indoor and outdoor, when he says: “He could express his ideas, in a very arresting manner, but this when speaking to a comparatively small. circle in an unconstrained gossiping tone. Rhetoric was… not natural to him; his whole nature was… anti-rhetorical” (My Years of Exile, p. 206).
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1 Letters, p. 194.
2 Glasier MSS., April 16th, 1888.
3 See Commonweal, June, 1885.
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1 Circular among S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
2 Daily News, September 22nd, 1885.
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1 Commonweal, October, 1885.
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1 Daily News, September 22nd, 1885.
2 To Algernon Gissing, September 22nd, 1885 (Letters of George Gissing to his Family).
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1 R. Banner to Secretary, S.L., September 21st, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc Hist.
2 Commonweal, November, 1885, Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s International Record.
3 Letters, p. 239.
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1 G.B. Shaw in the Observer, November 6th, 1949.
2 “Notes on Propaganda”, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 46345.
3 The Glasgow comrades commented on “the inordinate regard for the public convenience in the way of keeping vacant pieces of ground and spacious street corners free for the passage of hypothetical vehicles, which our presence invariably excites in the mind of the local policeman” (Annual Report of the Glasgow Branch of the Socialist League, May, 1887).
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1 Freedom, January, 1897.
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1 Freedom. See Morris to Carruthers, March 25th, 1886: “I rather expect to learn one more new craft—oakum-picking to wit; though I assure you I don’t want to—far from it” (Letters, p. 251).
2 Commonweal, July 24th, 1886.
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1 Letters, p. 257.
2 “Free Speech in the Streets Commonweal, July 31st, 1886.
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1 Letters, p. 258.
2 Thomas Ewing (Manchester Socialist Union) to William Morris, May 9th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 G.B. Shaw to Andreas Scheu, December 17th, 1885, Scheu Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc Hist.
2 Andreas Scheu to H.H. Sparling (Secretary, S.L.), December 13th, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 G.B. Shaw to Scheu, December 17th, 1885, Scheu Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
2 Commonweal, January 1st, 1886.
3 William Morris to Chairman, Council of S.L., November 9th, 1885, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
4 Engels to Sorge, April 29th, 1886, Labour Monthly, November, 1933.
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1 For a sensitive analysis of the significance of this moment, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971).
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1 The Times, February 10th, 1886.
2 The Times, February 17th, 1886.
3 Commonweal, March, 1886.
4 Pall Mall Gazette, February 22nd, 1886.
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1 The Times, February 22nd, 1886.
2 See his reassuring letter to Edward Burne-Jones, Letters, pp. 247–8.
3 Daily News, February 12th, 1886.
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1 Morris to Glasse, February 10th, 1886, Unpublished Letters, p.
2 Letters, p. 251. Morris himself had written to F.S. Ellis shortly before the riots (December 26th, 1885): “As to the British working man, to say truth—he could hardly be faster asleep than he is now… I sometimes fear he will die asleep, however hard the times grow, like people caught frozen” (Mackail Notebooks, Walthamstow MSS).
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1 Commonweal, May 1st, 1886. Editorial by Morris and Bax.
2 Letters, p. 248.
3 Morris to Edward Burne-Jones, ibid., p. 248.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45345.
2 Mackail, II, pp. 162–3.
3 Glasier MSS., February 3rd, 1887.
4 Commonweal, February 5th, 1887: this comrade was George Sturt, who was to write the great The Wheelwright’s Shop.
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1 Sales of Commonweal (Hammersmith Minutes) 2,400, March 21st, 1886; 2,600, July 25th, 1886; 2,600 (“a decrease”), August 7th, 1887.
2 Marx-Engels Sel Cor., p. 448.
3 See also H.M. Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, p. 47 (note). Dr. Pelling refers to “an undated statement ot the League signed by J.L. Mahon, and probably referring to summer 1886”, which gives the total membership as 393. But since Mahon was no longer Secretary in 1886, this statement must refer to some date in 1885. Membership of the League seems to have progressed from 230 in July, 1885; 393(?), autumn, 1885; 550, January, 1886, to 600 to 700 members in the summer of 1886; but, as Dr. Pelling points out, some of these members were not paid up, and branch membership quotas were not received regularly at Farringdon Road.
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1 Glasier, op. ext., p. 187.
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1 Joseph Lane to Council, S.L., November 2nd, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc Hist.
2 Ibid, J.L Mahon to Council, S.L., October 19th, 1885: R. Beckett (Secretary, North London Branch) to Council, December 28th, 1885, etc 3
3 Ibid, R. Banner to Secretary, S.L., April 23rd, 1885.
4 Ibid., T. Binning to Council, S.L., June 3rd, 1886.
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1 Tom Maguire: a Remembrance (1895), p. xiii.
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1 MS. Notes on the History of Norwich Socialist League, written about 1888, among Nettlau Collection, Int. Inst Soc. Hist.
2 J.A. Tait (Secretary, Edinburgh S.L.) to Secretary S.L., December 21st, 1885, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist. Tait states in this letter that the local Branch of the S.D.F. after a temporary success during the autumn during a visit from J. Hunter Watts was now also reduced to three, four, or six regulars.
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1 Ibid, Copeland to Secretary, S.L. (n.d.).
2 Ibid, J. Proctor Hardie (Secretary, Nottingham and District Social-Democratic League) to Secretary, S.L., March 5th, 1886.
3 Ibid, E. Boyle to Secretary, S.L., December 7th, 1886.
4 Letters, p. 237.
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1 C.J. Faulkner to Joseph Lane, May 18th, 1887, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 46345.
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1 Leeds Weekly Citizen, October 4th, 1929.
2 Hammersmith Minutes, passim.
3 Lecturers at Hammersmith over this period included G.B. Shaw (several times), Graham Wallas (Education), Sidney Webb (Economic Rent), Bax (The New Ethic), Walter Crane (The Architecture of Art), Ernest Rhys (The New Poetry), Mrs. Bland, Hubert Bland and Sidney Olivier, as well as League speakers on more immediate topics.
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1 G. Gissing, Demos, Ch. XVII.
2 Engels to Bebel, August 18th, 1886, Labour Monthly, December 1933.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 149.
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1 Letters, p. 255.
2 Ibid., pp. 241–2.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 151.
2 Ibid., p. 158.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 151.