I. “Staying power is what we want”
1887 and 1888 are the years of the confluence of the small clear-water stream of Socialist theory with the broad waters of the labour movement. Everywhere there were eddies, backwaters, cross-currents. Although Socialist opinion was spreading rapidly during these years, there was no comparable increase in the membership of either the S.D.F. or the Socialist League. Indeed, one consequence of the penetration by the Socialists of the mass movement was the disintegration of the two Socialist bodies themselves. One after another some of the most gifted propagandists—H.H. Champion, John Burns, the Avelings, Tom Mann, J.L. Mahon, Tom Maguire, and many others—were being forced by events to loosen their organizational ties with the Federation or the League in order to make contact with the working class in their own organizations. By contrast, the dogmatism of the S.D.F. and the anarchist-tinged purism of the League were increasingly forming a back-water aside from the direct currents of the mass movement. And William Morris, although one of the few men respected on nearly every side of the Socialist Movement, was finding himself reduced to being the prisoner of an Anarchist tail.
Already by the early months of 1887, some of Morris’s first fervour had spent itself, and he looked on the prospect ahead with foreboding. He did not abate the work of the propaganda. But he had come to realize more of the forces pitted against it. The “Revolution” seemed less and less likely to occur in his own life-time. Early in February he took a short holiday (“I don’t know what along one means”)1 at Rottingdean, and wrote an article, “Facing the Worst of It”, for Commonweal, which he felt to be somehow unsatisfactory.1 “Though we Socialists”, he wrote, have “full faith in the certainty of the great change coming about, it would be idle… to prophesy… the date… and it is well for us not to be too sanguine, since overweening hope is apt to give birth to despair if it meets with… disappointment”. Two forces, he said, were making for Socialism—first, the inner disintegration of capitalist society, which although it is now “sweeping onward to the sea of destruction… yet it may itself create checks—eddies… in which we now living may whirl round and round a long time”. At the same time,
“although commercial ruin must be the main stream of the force for the bringing about revolution, we must not forget the other stream, which is the conscious hope of the oppressed classes, forced into union…”
Most of the article was given up to an analysis of the ways in which “the onward course of capitalistic commerce to its annihilation” might be delayed, and he took a view more sober and far-seeing than most of his contemporaries. The three main possibilities he felt to be:
“1st. The lessening of stocks and consequent slight temporary recovery; 2nd, A great European war, perhaps lengthened out into a regular epoch of war; and 3rd, The realization of the hopes of important new markets, which hopes are the real causes of hostility between nations.”
Apart from these three—recurrent and temporary trade recovery, war, and the opening of fresh markets—Morris referred to “more speculative possibilities… which would lead to more ruin and suffering than even those…”
These three possibilities, Morris felt, were not without opportunities for the Socialist, if the other current, that of conscious and organized hope could be brought to hasten the downfall of capitalism.
A great European war would “give a great stimulus to trade while it lasted; just as if half London were burned down, the calamity would be of great service to those who were not burned out”. But, Morris reminded the comrades, “only the most short-sighted of the capitalists can pray for war in the times we are now in… because behind the brilliant ‘respectable’ war stands its shadow, revolution”.
“And yet though they may dread war, still that restless enemy of the commercial system, the demon which they have made, and is no longer their servant but their master, forces them into it in spite of them; because unless commerce can find new capacities for expansion it is all over… the one thing for which our thrice accursed civilization craves, as the stifling man for fresh air, is new markets; fresh countries must be conquered by it which are not manufacturing and are producers of raw material, so that ‘civilised’ manufactures can be forced upon them. All wars now waged, under whatever pretences, are really wars for the great prizes in the world market.”
From these three possibilities, Morris envisaged a fourth—a labour movement subsidized by the pickings of imperialism and war and content with limited reform. “The claims of non-Socialist workmen go little beyond the demand for a bigger ration, warmer coat, and better lodging for the slave; and even Socialist workmen, I think, are apt to put their claims too low.” The job of organized Socialists under all conditions, he urged, was to “aid the conscious attacks on the system by all those who feel themselves wronged by it”:
“It is possible that we may live to see times in which it will be easier than now for the labourer to live as a labourer and not as a man, and there is a kind of utilitarian sham Socialism which would be satisfied by such an outcome of times of prosperity. It is very much our business to meet this humbug by urging the workers to sustain steadily their due claim to that fullness and completeness of life which no class system can give them.”1
The article voiced a mood less apocalyptic than that of “The Day is Coming”. “I am glad to hear that you are getting solid up there”, Morris wrote to Glasier, of the Glasgow branch, in January, 1887. “Staying power is what we want, the job before us being so egregiously long.” “What I am on the lookout for is the staying qualities”, he re-emphasized in April, 1888, although he added: “I believe we shall yet make a good fist at it even while we live.”1 Faced with the long perspective of struggle ahead, Morris placed even more emphasis upon Socialist education—the formation of a band of comrades, proof against any seduction they might meet with on the way.
II. “Jonah’s View of the Whale”
“I am writing a diary”, Morris wrote early in 1887 to his daughter, Jenny, “which may one day be published as a kind of view of the Socialist movement seen from the inside, Jonah’s view of the whale, you know…”2 The diary runs from the end of January to April, 1887.3 Day by day Morris’s part in the movement is recorded—the round of lectures, open-air meetings, committees—and some of the reasons for his discouragement when he wrote “Facing the Worst of It” are made plain.
The diary opens on January 25th:
“I went down to lecture at Merton Abbey last Sunday: the little room was pretty full of men, mostly of the labourer class: anything attacking the upper classes directly moved their enthusiasm; of their discontent there could be no doubt or the sincerity of their class hatred; they have been very badly off there this winter, and there is little to wonder at in their discontent, but with a few exceptions they have not yet learned what Socialism means…”
Again and again the same note is struck. On January 27th he spoke at a meeting of the Hammersmith Radical Club called to condemn new evictions in the Highlands. The room was crowded and his speech was well received, but—he comments:
“I thought the applause rather hollow as the really radical part of the audience had clearly no ideas beyond the ordinary party shiboleths, and were quite touched by Socialism: they seemed to me a very discouraging set of men, but perhaps can be got at somehow: the frightful ignorance and want of impressibility of the average English workman floors me at times.”
On February 4th he was at another Radical Club, this time at Chiswick, where he was called upon to open a debate on the Class War before an audience of twenty, which swelled later to forty:
“The kind of men composing the audience is a matter worth noting, since the chief purpose of this diary is to record my impressions on the Socialist movement… The speakers were all either of the better-trade workmen or small tradesmen class… My Socialism was gravely listened to by the audience but taken with no enthusiasm; and in fact however simply one puts the case for Socialism one always rather puzzles an audience: the speakers… were muddled to the last degree; but clearly the most intelligent men did not speak… I was allowed a short reply in which I warmed them up somehow: this description of an audience may be taken for almost any other at a Radical Club… The sum of it all is that the men at present listen respectfully to Socialism, but are perfectly supine and not inclined to move except along the lines of radicalism and trades unionism…”
The same week the Hammersmith Branch re-started their open-air meetings:
“I spoke alone for about an hour, and a very fair audience (for the place which is out of the [way]) gathered curiously quickly; a comrade counted a hundred at most. This audience characteristic of small open-air meeting also quite mixed, from labourers on their Sunday lounge to ‘respectable’ people coming from Church: the latter inclined to grin: the working men listening attentively trying to understand, but mostly failing to do so: a fair cheer when I ended, of course led by the 3 or 4 branch members present. The meeting in the evening poor…”
On Saturday, February 12th, he notes: “I have been on League business every night this week till to-night.” On Monday he was at the weekly Council meeting of the League—“peaceable enough & dull”. On Tuesday he took the chair at a joint meeting of Socialists and Anarchists of various groups to protest at the threat of a European war. The Anarchist followers of Kropotkin refused to participate.
“on the grounds that Bourgeois peace is a war, which… is true enough: but of course the meeting was meant to be a protest against the Bourgeois whether in peace or war, and also to keep alive the idea of a revolt behind the bourgeois and Absolutist armies if a war did happen.”
On Wednesday he was lecturing at a schoolroom in Peckham High Street “for some goody-goody literary society or other”. However, the meeting of about 100 was “quite enthusiastic” and 305. were collected for the Commonweal printing-fund. On Thursday he was at the Ways and Means Committee of the League: “found them cheerful there on the prospects of Commonweal. I didn’t quite feel as cheerful as the others, but hope it may go on.” On Friday he returned to the Chiswick Radical Club, to conclude the debate opened on the previous Friday. Sunday he was once again at the open-air post, speaking in a very cold north-east wind to about sixty people: and in the evening was lecturing at the Hammersmith League Clubroom on “Medieval England”.
This is a typical week of his London propaganda, the days being spent in writing for and editing Commonweal, correspondence, the affairs of the Firm, and—as a stolen luxury—a spell of work on the Homer. Visits to the struggling League branches were rarely encouraging. On Sunday, February 13th, he visited the new Branch in Mitcham:
“Spoke extemporary to them at their club-room, a tumble-down shed opposite the grand new workhouse built by the Holborn Union: amongst the woeful hovels that make up the worse (and newer) part of Mitcham, which was once a pretty place with its old street and greens and lavendar fields. Except a German from Wimbledon (who was in the chair) and two others who looked like artisans of the painter or small builder type, the audience was all made up of labourers and their wives: they were very quiet and attentive except one man who was courageous from liquor, and interrupted sympathetically; but I doubt if most of them understood anything I said; though some few of them showed that they did by applauding the points. I wonder sometimes if people will remember in times to come to what a depth of degradation the ordinary English workman has been reduced; I felt very downcast amongst these poor people in their poor hutch whose opening I attended some three months back (and they were rather proud of it). There were but about 25 present: yet I felt as if I might be doing some good there: the branch is making way amongst a most wretched population.”
On Sunday, March 13th, he visited the Hoxton Branch (Labour Emancipation League), and “rather liked it”.
“A queer little no-shaped slip cut off from some workshop or other, neatly whitewashed, with some innocent decoration obviously by the decorator member of the branch: all very poor but showing signs of sticking to it: the room full of a new audience… all working men except a parson in the front row, and perhaps a clerk or two, the opposition represented by a fool of the debating club type; but our men glad of any opposition at all. I heard that our branch lecture was a wretched failure. The fact is our branch, which was very vigorous a little time ago, is sick now; the men want some little new thing to be doing or they get slack in attendance. I must try to push them together a bit…”
The next Tuesday week he was lecturing on “Feudal England” at the Hammersmith Radical Club: “9 people for audience! the fact is this is a slack time for lectures.” On Sunday, March 27th, he had a better audience, but still felt dissatisfied:
“I gave my ‘Monopoly’ at the Borough of Hackney Club, which was one of the first workmen’s clubs founded, if not the first; it is a big Club, numbering 1,600 members: a dirty wretched place enough, giving a sad idea of the artizan’s standard of comfort: the meeting was a full one, and I suppose I must say attentive, but the coming and going all the time, the pie-boy and the pot-boy was rather trying to my nerves: the audience was civil and enclined to agree, but I couldn’t flatter myself that they mostly understood me, simple as the lecture was. This was a morning lecture, over about 2 o’clock: I went afterwards… to the Hackney Branch as I had to speak at the ‘free-speech demonstration’ in Victoria Park: dined on the way off 3d. worth of shrimps that I bought in a shop & ate with bread & butter & ginger beer in a coffee shop, not as dirty as it looked from outside.”
It is a curious and moving situation. Morris was trying to fill the role of the active agitator, and yet his reputation as a poet and artist and his class background were standing in his way. To some degree he did not understand the people he most wanted to reach. Until he became a Socialist he had viewed the working class from a distance. His grasp of Socialist theory had led him to see the workers as the revolutionary force within society—the men who were Chartists, Communards, and from whom the Socialist Party must be built. But he was no romancer, and as he made these long journeys by underground and by horse-tram into the most depressed regions of the East End, the intellectual and spiritual deprivation of the workers weighed upon his senses. The impoverishment of the lives of the people of the East End evoked in him feelings, not of patronage, but of shame: “a sense of shame in one’s own better luck not possible to express—that the conditions under which they live and work make it difficult for them even to conceive the sort of life that a man should live.”1
He struggled hard to express his meaning in the simplest terms. Preparing a talk for the Mitcham branch (“a rather rough lot of honest poor people”), he commented: “I shall have to be as familiar and unliterary as I can.”2 If he caught himself parading his own knowledge, he was severely self-critical. But he preferred to regard his audiences as his intellectual equals rather than to suggest the least shade of condescension. His lectures were simple in expression, but his manner was to deal in broad historical generalizations, which were strange to the average Radical working-class audience.
As an agitator, Morris could not help but be an amateur. This does not mean that his profound and imaginative lectures were wasted. Born agitators like Tom Mann and John Burns, skilled open-air speakers like Maguire and Mahon, learned much of their Socialist theory, and gained something of their vision, from them. But the lectures were not suited for agitation among the masses. Morris’s ideas could only reach the broad working-class movement through the medium of translators.
III. The Northumberland Miners
The test of the League’s maturity came in its reaction to the industrial struggles in the first months of 1887—and, in particular, to the great miners’ strikes in Lanarkshire and in Northumberland. The Council of the League was not indifferent to industrial battles in the first two years of its existence: but it regarded them in the main as opportunities for general Socialist propaganda. In September, 1886, a Strike Committee was set up, and in its first eight months, 23,000 leaflets were distributed in strike centres. The strikers may, it is true, have sometimes been at a loss to decide whether they were being approached by enemies or friends. “Fellow Workers”, declared the League’s standard strike leaflet:1
“You are now on strike for higher wages or against a reduction in your already small wage. Now, if this strike is but to accomplish this object and nothing more, it will be useless as a means of permanently bettering your condition, and a waste of time and energy, and will entail a large amount of suffering on yourselves, your wives and families, in the meantime.
This must have seemed suspiciously like the bosses’ line. But the League had encouragement to offer as well:
“If, on the other hand, you intend to make this a starting-point for a complete emancipation of the labourers from the thraldom of the capitalists, by bringing about the solidarity of the workers—employed and unemployed, skilled and unskilled—if you intend to learn why we the wealth-producers are poor, and what is the remedy,—then we Socialists welcome you as comrades… But if you are looking for a small betterment of your own condition only—if you are content to attempt to fight this question with your sectional trades’ unions—then we feel that it is a duty that we owe to our class and to you to show you that it is a hopeless fight.”
The hopelessness of the fight was then explained for a good part of the leaflet, and a positive alternative suggested. This was the old recipe of the purists in the League: first, education in Socialism: second, the organization of a great federation of labour (national and international) in preparation for the Day:
“Then when the crisis comes they will be able to rise as one man and overthrow this system of exploitation, and all class-hatred will cease and men live federated together as brother workers the world over.”
“UNION among ALL workers” was becoming the slogan of the Leaguers, and the one aim set before all trades unionists was the General Strike for Socialism. To such mere incidents on the way to this goal as the bitterly-fought miners’ strikes in S. Wales, Scotland and Northumberland, many of the Leaguers gave only absent-minded sympathy. “You must incessantly aim at… common action among all workers”, the Glasgow Branch declared in a Manifesto at the time of the strike of the Lanarkshire miners:
”When the Miners resolve to demand an advance, let it be understood that, should it not be conceded, every riveter would lay down his hammer, every joiner his plane, every mason his trowel Let it be known that every railway guard, porter, signalman, and driver folded his arms; that every baker refused to make his dough, every cook refused to make dinner, and every maid refused to wait at table… One day, or at most two days, of this paralysis would bring the holders of capital and spoilers of labour to their senses and their knees. One general strike would be sufficient… This perfectly fair, impartial, and non-confiscatory policy should commend itself to all reasonable people.”
Having put forward this impartial, non-confiscatory policy for reasonable people to meditate upon, they advised the miners “not to lose either heart or head”, not to indulge in “deeds of aimless violence”, and asked them to recognize that their present struggle was “but a prelude” to the “great Revolution”.1
The irony of the situation lies in this: already in 1887 sections of the workers were showing marked signs of sympathy with the Socialists. In February, 1887, when the Glasgow Branch called a demonstration on the Green in support of the striking Lanarkshire miners, over 20,000 attended: the miners’ leaders spoke from the same platform as the Leaguers: a collection for the miners of £23 was taken. On a subsequent Sunday the Edinburgh League and S.D.F. followed suit, before an audience of 12,000.2 Further collections were made by the League in other parts of the country, and relations between the miners and the Socialists improved with great rapidity. But the League did not learn from its experience. The Glasgow demonstration was only a flash in the pan. The miners went back, and soon the League was back to its old exhortations—Utopian in form, but in actual effect and tone defeatist. A branch of the League had been formed with brilliant prospects in the mining town of Hamilton during the strike, forty miners enrolling at the first meeting: but when Morris visited it in April it was already in a dismal state:
“We went to Hamilton”, he noted in his diary, “the centre of the coal-mining district: the miners had gone in on a sort of compromise, but were beaten in point of fact: so it is hardly to be wondered at that this was a depressing affair: we met in an inn parlour some members of the Branch which seems to be moribund, and they would scarcely say a word and seemed in the last depths of depression: the hall, not a large one, was nothing like full: it was a matter of course that there was no dissent, but there was rather a chilly feeling over all.”
Among those present were the Secretary and President of the Hamilton miners, who actually moved and seconded the resolution in favour of Socialism which the meeting carried unanimously.1 Morris appears to have failed to realize either the importance of the possibilities opened up by this foothold in the coalfields or the gravity of the defeat.
It was the ambiguity of the League’s attitude to industrial matters which was decisive in causing its failure in 1887 and 1888 to organize the opinion in favour of Socialism which was spreading among the workers. The impossibility of preaching purism to workers engaged in bitter class struggles was illustrated clearly in the dilemma of the young agitator J. L. Mahon. After resigning from the Council at the end of 1885, Mahon was replaced as Secretary of the League by H. Halliday Sparling. Returning to Leeds and to Hull (where he swung the S.D.F. branch into the League), he was “systematically boycotted by the employers” and barred from his work as an engineer.2 In January, 1887, he started a tour of the Midlands and the North, still a convinced partisan of the “anti-parliamentary” side. The Socialists of Nottingham he ridiculed as “mere politicians… anxious to shine on School boards or town councils: with perhaps vague & distant dreams of parliament.” In the first fortnight of February he went on to Lancashire, held some successful propaganda meetings, and made friendly contact with local branches of the S.D.F.: the futility of carrying the London quarrel into the provinces began to work in his mind. His ready reception the next week from the chain-makers on strike at Cradley Heath and Walsall, and among the Derbyshire miners, strengthened his feeling that the movement outside London was on the eve of great advances.
“Socialism should be before the miners & iron workers now of all times. Durham or Northumberland are more important than 20 Londons… I suppose it will be too much to expect Londoners to see the importance of anything outside the area of their abominable fogs.”1
Meanwhile, a bitter strike of the Northumberland miners-provoked by lock-outs by the mine-owners in an attempt to enforce a 12½ A per cent, reduction in wages—was in progress. Early in March Mahon visited Newcastle, and he decided to stay. John Williams and J. Hunter Watts of the S.D.F. had arrived several days before, and the propagandists found they could work “quite harmoniously” together. Mahon reported that the miners were coming to Socialist meetings in “great crowds”, the smallest meetings being four or five hundred strong, the largest up to 2,000. “A county demonstration in favour of Socialism is being arranged”, he reported, and “steps for founding an organization in the northern counties are going rapidly forward.”2
“Next Sunday, a conference will be held in Newcastle, and miners from a number of collieries and towns of Northumberland and Durham will attend. As members of the Socialist League and Social Democratic Federation have worked equally hard in the district, it would be unwise to force one organization on to the exclusion of the other… My own opinion is that a local society, say the North of England Socialist Federation should be formed and issue its own rules, etc. That both London parties and papers should be treated exactly alike, while no official connection should be formed with either. When the reunion and consolidation of the Socialist movement takes place, the local body could join the reunited forces… In 1888 the United Socialists could hold their first conference in Newcastle-on-Tyne…”1
Mahon, hearing that Hyndman was coming up to speak at the miners’ county demonstration on Easter Monday, sent an urgent message requesting that Morris also should come. Morris was at the time conducting a propaganda tour of his own in Scotland, under the auspices of the Glasgow Branch, but he agreed reluctantly to break his journey at Newcastle on his return. His tour had been a fair success, with the exception of the damp reception by the dispirited miners at Hamilton, and he had himself made some contact with the rising mood of the people. He had had several good meetings in Glasgow, and useful ones in Dundee, Edinburgh and Paisley.2 On Saturday, April 9th, he took part in a propaganda outing to Coatbridge, speaking on a cinder-tip to an audience of about sixty miners and steel-workers to the accompaniment of a Salvation Army meeting and a cheap-jack selling linoleum and wall-papers: “all this we did by star and furnace light, which was strange and even dreadful”: but the meeting put him in good heart, from the earnest attention of some of the miners.3 The next day, before leaving for Newcastle, he spoke at a very successful open-air meeting on Glasgow Green, where Socialist and anti-coercion resolutions were passed before an audience of over 1,000. He noted in his diary:
“The audience quite enthusiastic. The Glasgow Branch is in good condition apparently, are working hard, & getting a good deal of support. There are some very nice fellows amongst them; they are a good deal made up of clerks, designers, & the like, and rather under the thumbs of their employers or they would be able to do more. Kropotkin’s visit has turned them a little in the Anarchist direction, which gives them an agreeable air of toleration, and they are at present quite innocent of any parliamentary designs. The feeling amongst the working men about is certainly in favour of Socialism; but they are slack in joining any organization as usual; still, the thing is taking hold.”
Morris arrived at Newcastle on Sunday, April 10th, and was met by Mahon and Donald: by chance they ran into Hyndman, “who I suspect was not over-pleased to see me, as the S.D.F. have been playing a rather mean game there”: “after seeming to agree that neither organization should press itself on the miners [the S.D.F.] has been trying to bag them after all”. The next morning they set off for the collieries: Morris and Donald were entertained in a miner’s cottage in Seghill, while Mahon—who had planned the demonstration with energy and skill—busied himself with preliminary arrangements. Morris was impressed by all he saw: by his host, “a tall strong man, his face wrecked by an accident which had blown out one eye and damaged the other”, a “kindly intelligent man”, talking with “that queer Northumbrian smack”; by his host’s description of the issues of the strike; by the good-temper and hospitality of the miner’s wife and daughter; by the house, “as clean and neat as a country cottage”, and by the other houses he passed which were equally so, although “they are most woful looking dwellings of man, and the whole district is just a miserable backyard to the collieries”. Leaving Seghill they went by train to Blyth, where a considerable crowd was awaiting them. Morris mounted a trolly and made an impromptu speech for about forty minutes. “Then we set off, rather a draggle-tailed lot because we couldn’t afford a paid band… as we plodded on through the dreary (O so dreary) villages, & that terrible waste of endless back-yard, we could see on our left hand a strip of the bright blue sea, for it was a beautiful sunny day.” After about three miles they joined another contingent with band and banner, and “soon swelled into a respectable company” of about 2,000 strong. After a six-mile march they reached the meeting-field and found two strong contingents already there, and “groups of men and women… streaming up the field from all about”. Soon the crowd was many thousands strong, with contingents from all the mining villages around. “It was a very good meeting”, Morris noted. “The audience listened intently and were heartily with us.” “We spoke from one waggon, Fielding of the S.D.F. in the Chair, then Mahon, then me, then Hyndman, then Donald.” The mood of the crowd was something new in Morris’s experience, “orderly & good-tempered”, but militant and swiftly responsive. When (at the opening of the meeting) the reporters in a waggon beside the speakers got out their notebooks, the miners threatened to “put them out… unless they promise to put all down!” “There were many women there”, Morris noted, “some of them very much excited: one (elderly) when any obnoxious person was named never failed to chorus it with ‘Put him out!’” The front ranks of the audience sat and squatted on the ground, to let the others see and hear, and the whole scene became deeply marked in Morris’s memory—the desolate “backyard” to the collieries, the earnest faces of the miners, “the bright blue sea forming a strange border to the misery of the land.”1
Morris, his enthusiasm set afire, made one of the best impromptu speeches of his life. Here at last he was speaking as he wanted to speak, as a leader of the Socialists addressing the workers—not as the distinguished curiosity and man of letters lecturing to an audience partly drawn by his artistic reputation. The speaker’s plank on the waggon was “rather perilous”: “I was for simply coming to the front without mounting on the plank but some of them sung out from the side, ‘If yon man does na stand on the top we canna hear him!’ “ Someone turned up a notice board on a pole for him to lean on. “It was very inspiriting to speak to such a crowd of eager & serious persons”, he noted. “I did pretty well and didn’t stumble at all.” The speech (as reported in the Newcastle Chronicle) may be quoted at length:1
“Mr. Wm. MORRIS, of London, [said]: Sometimes… when he was addressing meetings of his countrymen he was in doubt whether the whole of those whom he was addressing were discontented. He thought he need not have any particular doubt about the audience at that meeting. He hoped there was not a person on that ground who for one reason or another was not discontented with the life he or she lived. They were connected with a great struggle. Into the details of the strike he would not enter. He quite understood that they were at present in such a position that they could scarcely live at all. Their struggle was for a position in which they would be able to live a life which people called tolerable. (Hear, hear). He did not call the life of a working man, as things went, a tolerable life at all. When they had gained all that was possible under the present system, they still would not have the life which human beings ought to have. (Cheers). That was flat. What was their life at the best? They worked hard day in, day out, without any sort of hope whatever. Their work was to work to live, in order that they might live to work. (Hear, hear, and ‘Shame’.) That was not the life of men. That was the life of machines. That was the way in which capitalists regarded them… Even supposing he did not understand that there was a definite reason in economics, and that the whole system could be changed, he should still stand there in sympathy with the men present… If the thing could not be altered at all, he for one would be a rebel against it. (Cheers.)”
The miners had only one choice, Morris said. They must either rebel, or be slaves. When the workers were organized throughout the country, and demanded Socialism with one voice, the masters might give in peacefully:
“He admitted there was another thing they might do. If there was such a thing as a general strike, he thought it was possible that the masters of society would attack them violently—he meant with hot shot, cold steel, and the rest of it. But let them remember that they (the men) were many and the masters were few. It was not that the masters could attack them by themselves. It was only the masters with a certain instrument, and what was that instrument? A part of the working classes themselves.”
Here Morris caught sight of the four or five policemen who had been sent to the meeting (a strange contrast with the multitudes of police set on to pester the small open-air meetings in London), and began to “chaff [them] rather unmercifully”:
“Even those men that were dressed in blue with bright buttons upon them and white gloves”—Morris continued, to the accompainment of cries of “Out with them”—“and those other men dressed in red, and also sometimes with gloves on their fingers, what were they? Simply working men, very hard up, driven into a corner and compelled to put on the livery of a set of masters.” (Hear, hear, and prolonged hooting.) (Here the “blue-coats beat an undignified retreat” according to a Commonweal reporter.) “When these instruments, the soldiers, and sailors, came against them and saw that they were in earnest, and saw that they were many—they all knew the sufferings of the workers—what would happen? They would not dare obey their masters. The cannon would be turned round, the butts of the muskets would go up, and the swords and bayonets would be sheathed, and these men would say ‘Give us work: let us all be honest men like yourselves.’ ”
Then Morris, veering back to the old prescription of the League, told the miners that they must organize not for a partial victory, but a true victory:
“Not a little more wages here and leave to work six days instead of four. He wished they only worked two days and got the same wages or more. Six days a week for the work they had to do was a great deal too much for men of ordinary body and strength. What, he asked, was a life of real happiness? Work for everybody who would work. For him who would not they could not say that Society had rejected him: he had rejected Society. The masters had rejected Society. He wished that the men might have a life of refinement and education and all those things which made what some people called a gentleman, but what he called a man. (Cheers.) That was the victory he wished them. Nothing short of that would be victory. And yet every skirmish on the road and every attack on the position of the masters brought them nearer. They must go on until all the workers of the world were united in goodwill and peace upon earth. (Loud cheers.)”
Morris, Donald and Mahon hurried off from the meeting to catch the Newcastle train, had “a bite and a drop” in the station refreshment-room, and went on to Ryton Willows, a recreation ground by the side of the Tyne—“a piece of rough heathy ground… under the bank by which the railway runs: it is a pretty place and the evening was lovely”. “Being Easter Monday, there were lots of folks there with swings and cricket and dancing & the like.” Here, among the merry-go-rounds and the holiday-makers, another meeting was held:
“I thought it a queer place for a serious Socialist meeting, but we had a crowd about us in no time and I spoke, rather too long I fancy, till the stars came out and it grew dusk and the people stood and listened still, 8c when we were done they gave three cheers for the Socialists, & all was mighty friendly and pleasant: & so back we went to supper and bed, of which I for one was glad enough…”
“I guess I tried their patience”, Morris noted in his diary, “as I got ‘lectury’ and being excited went on & on…” The next morning he felt “very well 8c brisk”. “There is no doubt of the success (which may be temporary) which we have made in those northern mining districts.” He returned to London full of a new enthusiasm, and reached the weekly Council meeting in time to propose a Hyde Park meeting in aid of the Northumbrian miners. His proposal was accepted. But the return to London was like a dousing of cold water over his hopes. “Got to the Council in time to come in for one of the usual silly squabbles about nothing”, he noted in the privacy of his diary. “I spoke the next Sunday at Beadon Road and couldn’t help contrasting our Cockneys much to their disadvantage with the northerners…” In fact, the Socialist League was at the very moment when the masses were beginning to listen to its message entering a phase of savage internal dispute: and was becoming less and less competent to give leadership to the movement which it had played a part in setting in motion.
IV. The Third Annual Conference
From the time of the Second Annual Conference of the League in the summer of 1886, the Council had been divided on the issue of parliamentary action. In November, 1886, a sub-committee was appointed, comprising Mahon and Lane, from the “anti-parliamentary” side, and Bax and Binning, from the “parliamentary”, to draft an agreed policy statement. The sub-committee failed to agree (as might have been expected) both on the parliamentary issue, and on the League’s attitude to the Eight Hours agitation. By the end of 1886 there were “two separate parties” formed on the Council, and squabbles were continuous.
At first, Morris confided in his diary he had hoped to act the part of peacemaker:
“I may as well say here that my intention is if possible to prevent the quarrel coming to a head between the two sections, parliamentary and anti-parliamentary, which are pretty much commensurate with the Collectivists and Anarchists: and this because I believe there would be a good many who would join the Anarchist side who are not really Anarchists, and who would be useful to us: indeed I doubt if, except one or two Germans, etc., we have any real Anarchists amongst us: and I don’t want to see a lot of enthusiastic men who are not very deep in Socialist doctrines driven off for a fad of the more pedantic part of the Collectivist section…”
But his attempt to heal the split was unsuccessful. On March 21st, he noted:
“Council meeting short and confused: the two parties bitter but not inclined to do much since the Conference comes off so soon… I am certainly feeling discouraged about the League: between them they will break it up, I fear, and then the S.D.F. will be the only practical body here; which I don’t like the idea of, as its advertising tactics make it somewhat ridiculous. I shall move at the Conference that the question of parliament or non-parliament be deferred for a year. The Fabians… have issued their parliamentary league manifesto: I don’t mind this if they like to try it. But the S.L. going parliamentary would be a misfortune.”
After the next Council meeting, on March 28th, Morris’s despondency had deepened: “Whatever happens, I fear… that as an organization we shall come to nothing though personal feeling may hold us together.” When he left London for his Northern propaganda tour, Lane was planning to canvass the branches on the anti-parliamentary side, and the efforts to secure a genuine compromise seemed to have failed.
Lane fired his opening salvo by reading at a meeting of London members of the League his Anti-Statist, Communist Manifesto, which he claimed was a “minority report” from the sub-committee, and which (in Morris’s opinion) “turned out to be a long lecture not at all fit for its purpose, and which would have been damaging to us anti-parliamentarians if it had gone to the Branches… a vote was taken as to whether the Council should be advised to print it… and it was carried that it should not be. I voted in the majority.”
“We revolutionary socialists”—declared Lane—“desire to organize ourselves in such a manner as to render politics useless and the powers that be superfluous… We aim at the abolition of the State in every form and variety… We are Atheists in point of philosophy… Anti-Statists in point of politics… Communists as regards the economic development of human society… We are free communists as opposed to the state communists…”
The Manifesto also embraced free love:
“It is hardly necessary for us to add that we fight against (on the same principle of the abolition of private property), the institution of the family, such as it exists nowadays. Thoroughly convinced partisans of the free union of the sexes, we repell the thought of marriage…”
On the one hand, there were ultra-revolutionary phrases:
“We do not believe in the advent of the new order for which we are struggling by means of legal and pacific methods, and that is why we are revolutionary socialists. The study of history has taught us that the noblest conquests of man are written on a blood-stained book. To give birth to justice, humanity suffers a thousand tortures…”
On the other hand, Lane rejected both the Anarchist “propaganda by deed” and all methods of political and industrial struggle. “It appears hard”—he commented—“to call meetings of the unemployed, and tell them that they cannot be permanently benefited until the Revolution, and that they must starve in the meantime.” But still, this was the truth which the Anti-Statist Communist must tell them. Equally, the struggle for the Eight Hours’ Day was useless and delusive. The trade unions were “little better than Benefit Societies… helpless in the meshes of capitalism”:
“With the practical break-down of Trades Unions, Socialism springs forth and says the day for this unequal and losing battle between the bloated capitalist and the starving workman for a mere increase or to prevent a decrease of wage is past. Today and from henceforth, the battle is by the workers as a whole, for the destruction of monopoly and tyranny of every description…”
And for means, Lane had only one solution to offer-education.
The inner politics of the months before and after the Third Annual Conference of the League on May 29th, 1887, are confused in the extreme. One or two general comments may be made. Already the first signals could be seen of that reawakening of the masses which was soon to give birth to the New Unionism among the unskilled, and was to lead to the formation of the I.L.P. Indeed, as early as May, 1887, it seemed to Engels that there was “an immediate question of organizing an English Labour Party with an independent class programme”.1 It must have been as a result of his advice that, on the League’s policy sub-committee, Bax, Binning and, later, Mahon, were seeking to draw up a policy which might serve as the basis of such a Party. But Engels (while giving this advice) was too occupied to give time to considering the manner in which the theoretical battle should be fought. He did not think that he was directing the tactics of a Marxist group within the League. The leadership of this group was, in fact, in very inexperienced hands. Chief spokesman of the “parliamentarians” on the Council was A.K. Donald, a young Edinburgh intellectual, a man who appears to have inspired little confidence in the movement, and who had a knack of enraging both Morris and the “anti-parliamentary” group. Aveling’s reputation was—perhaps unknown to Engels—sinking fast in 1887.1 The weaknesses of Bax have already been discussed, and throughout the dispute he made no serious theoretical contribution to it. Indeed, not one piece of serious polemic came from the pen of any of the “parliamentary” group before the decisive vote at the Annual General Conference.
They were not alone in this. Morris’s most considered statement on the matter, “The Policy of Abstention”, was first delivered after the Conference, and Lane’s Manifesto was certainly not representative of the views of the “anti-parliamentary” group as a whole. In the result, the struggle cannot be regarded as a responsible political controversy, since more depended upon questions of personality and on juggling with the voting strength of the branches, than upon clear issues of conviction.
Bax’s branch, Croydon, opened the fight by tabling a motion for the Annual Conference, amending the Constitution to include the sentence: “Its objects shall be sought to be obtained by every available means, Parliamentary or otherwise.”2 Morris countered it with a resolution from Hammersmith:
“That whereas there is some difference of opinion among the members of the Socialist League as to whether it be right and expedient to put forward agitation in Parliament and through Parliamentary candidates as a means of Propaganda, and whereas the League has hitherto refrained from doing so; and also seeing that the principle work of the League must always be steadily educating the people in the principles of Socialism, the question of agitating for and by Parliamentary means be not considered at this Conference and be deferred for one year.”1
He wished this resolution to be regarded as a genuine attempt at the reconciliation of the two sections. But it is clear that the resolution begged the question in its phrasing. On May 19th he was writing to the Rev. John Glasse (of the Edinburgh Branch) that “the parliamentary people are looking like driving matters to extremity, which means driving me out of the League if they succeed. I am quite ready to let the matter rest if they will really leave it alone. . ”2 This is not as fair as it seems, since “leaving it alone” would mean leaving the purist position of the League unchanged. It seems that Glasse was by no means satisfied with Morris’s letter, and he drew from him a further and more considered one on May 23rd;
“My position as to Parliament and the dealings of Socialists with it, I will now state clearly. I believe that the Socialists will certainly send members to Parliament when they are strong enough to do so: in itself I see no harm in that, so long as it is understood that they go there as rebels, and not as members of the governing body prepared by passing palliative measures to keep ‘Society’ alive. But I fear that many of them will be drawn into that error by the corrupting influence of a body professedly hostile to Socialism: & therefore I dread the parliamentary period (clearly a long way ahead at present) of the progress of the party: and I think it will be necessary always to keep alive a body of Socialists of principle who will refuse responsibility for the action of the parliamentary portion of the party. Such a body now exists in the shape of the League, while germs of the parliamentary side exist in the S.D.F., Fabian, & Union…”
Those who wanted parliamentary action within the League would, he suggested, be better advised to join one of the other bodies, “for whom I for my part feel a complete tolerance, so long as they are not brought inside ours”. If the internal dispute continued, Morris felt, “the League will sooner or later be broken up”.
“All this has nothing to do with the question of Collectivism or Anarchism; I distinctly disagree with the Anarchist principle, much as I sympathize with many of the anarchists personally, and although I have an Englishman’s wholesome horror of government interference & centralization which some of our friends who are built on the German pattern are not quite enough afraid of, I think.”1
In the week before the Conference both sides were lobbying hard, and Morris was definitely lobbying with the anti-parliamentary group. In March he was looking to a compromise; in May for some reason the tactics of the parliamentary group had touched him to the raw. Mahon had declared for the parliamentary side, and was doing his utmost to swing the Scottish and Northern branches over. But it seems to have been the behaviour of A.K. Donald which most aroused Morris’s ill temper. Whatever the reasons, two days before the Conference he was writing urgently to Bruce Glasier as to the necessity of delegates being present from Glasgow to vote on the anti-parliamentary side:
“I apprehend that your people don’t understand the situation: if the parliamentary resolution is carried the League will come to an end: that is certain: & I shall invite you &: some few honest men to form a new organization. Between you and me the members of the parliamentary party are behaving so ill that I should feel it a relief to be no longer associated with them, though I can put up with a good deal.”2
Mahon, striving to form his North of England Socialist Federation, was being constantly asked by the Northumberland miners the difference between the outlook of the S.D.F. and the League. If the major tactical difference were in the attitude to Parliament, there is little doubt which organization the miners would prefer to join. The purisms which seemed reasonable in Farringdon Road, were irrelevant where a mass movement was already under way. It seemed to Mahon essential that the League should alter its policy without delay if it was to have any chance of gathering the fruits of its own propaganda. When the Annual Conference met it had before it not only the Croydon and Hammersmith resolutions, but also a long one from Mahon, which may well have been drafted with Engels’s assistance, and which at last really went to the root of the matter, presenting a positive new orientation of the whole League propaganda:
“Whereas the primary duty of the Socialist party is to educate the people in the principles of Socialism and to organize them to overthrow the capitalist system: This Conference lays down the following line of policy for the guidance of the executive and branches of the Socialist League:—That every effort be made to penetrate the existing political organizations with Socialism; that all possible help be given to such movements as trades’-unionism, co-operation, national and international labour federation, etc., by which the working classes are trying to better their condition; that Parliament, municipal and other local-government bodies, and the contests for the election of members to them, be taken advantage of for spreading the principles of Socialism and organizing the people into a Socialist Labour Party; that while we share the common aspirations of the wage-earners to win better terms from the capitalist, we steadily insist that their complete economical emancipation can only be effected by transforming the society of to-day into a co-operative commonwealth.”
On the afternoon of the Conference, Morris opened in conciliatory mood, withdrawing the Hammersmith resolution when it did not meet with unanimous approval. A further anti-parliamentary resolution (from Glasgow) was rejected, without any attempt on Morris’s part to give it support. Mahon, however, pressed his resolution forward, Bax withdrawing in his favour. Morris and Faulkner then moved an uncompromising anti-parliamentary amendment which, after prolonged discussion, won the day by seventeen votes to eleven.
Defeated in the voting, the parliamentary group declined to stand for the Council. As Engels pointed out to Sorge, in reality very little had been settled, and (perhaps less fairly)—
“the decisive circumstance was Morris’s threat to leave the League if any kind of parliamentary struggle be recognised in principle. And as Morris covers the weekly £4 deficit of the Commonweal, that outweighed all else by far.”
But the day after the Conference, the parliamentary group met in private and took further decisions. According to a circular issued later by their opponents, Edward Aveling occupied the Chair, and Eleanor Aveling, Mahon, Bax, Donald, Binning, Utley and others were present. An organized faction within the League was set up, and a Treasurer and Secretaries appointed. It was agreed that they should join the Labour Emancipation League (an affiliate of the League) and use it as an organizing centre for the parliamentary supporters.1 Engels’s emphasis (in a letter to Sorge) was slightly different: “Our people now want to organize the provinces, and after three or four months to call an extraordinary congress to overthrow the decision.”2
It was a curious reversal of the old positions. The Labour Emancipation League, formed by Lane and Kitz, and a breeding ground of the “leftists”, had now become absorbed into the Socialist League proper: but a branch still existed at Hoxton, and it had passed under the control of the parliamentarians. As an affiliated organization, the L.E.L. was only loosely controlled by the Council of the S.L., and yet had full voting powers at the Annual Conference. The plan appears to have been that the London parliamentarians should strengthen the L.E.L., while in the provinces Mahon, Donald and others should develop similar Socialist organizations—the North of England Socialist Federation and the Scottish Land and Labour League—connected only loosely with the parent body. But the plan was faulty in several respects. It could only be operated by breaking with any pretence of party discipline or loyalty within the Socialist League, and embarking on a policy of intrigue and factionalism, rather than open controversy. It left the Council of the League more firmly than ever in the hands of the anti-parliamentarians, who were now aided by men of more pronounced Anarchist views, such as F.C. Slaughter (“Fred Charles”) and David Nicoll.1 From Morris’s point of view, the tactics of the parliamentarians appeared uncomradely, and the breach between them and his “centre” group was embittered.
Whatever judgements are made, much of this was inevitable from the first. It was the outcome of the confused manner in which the first “Split” took place in December, 1884. “No movement absorbs so much fruitless labour as one which has not yet emerged from the status of a sect”—this was Engels’s comment—“At such times everything turns to scandalmonger-ing.” Nor was Engels much perturbed at the defeat:
“It follows that our people, in face of the imminent outbreak of a bona fide labour movement, are not tied to an organization which claims to lead the whole movement… In the provinces the workers are everywhere organizing local Leagues (Socialist). They have a colossal contempt for anything coming from London.”2
Just as in the months following the “Split” of December, 1884, Morris continued to debate the issues in his mind. His immediate reaction to any contact with “things parliamentary” was emotional rather than carefully considered. His disgust at a Parliament of Podsnaps had been nourished in him during his early revolt, encouraged by Dickens and John Ruskin, intensified by his experiences during the “Eastern Question” agitation. Parliament (in his mind) was a word synonymous with sharp-tactics, intrigue, false promises: it was the “great myth” of modern capitalism, the greatest barrier to the advance of revolutionary ideas. His position before the Annual Conference he summed up thus:
“We should treat Parliament as a representative of the enemy… We might for some definite purpose be forced to send members to Parliament as rebels… but under no circumstances to help to carry on their Government of the country… and therefore we ought not to put forward palliative measures to be carried through Parliament, for that would be helping them to govern us.”1
After the Annual Conference he made a more serious attempt to present an alternative to parliamentary action, in a new lecture, “The Policy of Abstention”, first delivered at Hammersmith at the end of July, 1887, and afterwards read to private meetings of Socialists in several places.2 In this he sought to characterize two possible Socialist policies—the policy of parliamentary action, and that of abstention. Advocates of the first, he said, “believe in what may be called a system of cumulative reforms… carried out by means of Parliament and a bourgeois executive”. They hoped to elect sufficient Socialists to Parliament to transform it from “a mere instrument in the hands of the monopolizers of the means of production, into a body which should destroy monopoly”. The policy of abstention he characterized in greater detail:
“This plan is founded on the necessity of making the class-struggle clear to the workers, of pointing out to them that while monopoly exists they can only exist as its slaves: so that Parliament and all other institutions at present existing are maintained for the purpose of upholding this slavery; that their wages are but slaves’ rations, and if they were increased tenfold would be nothing more: that while the bourgeois rule lasts they can indeed take part in it, but only on the terms that they shall do nothing to attack the grand edifice of which their slavery is the foundation. Nay more than that: that they are asked to vote and send representatives to Parliament (if ‘working-men’ so much the better) that they may point out what concessions may be necessary for the ruling class to make in order that the slavery of the workers may last on: in a word that to vote for the continuance of their own slavery is all the parliamentary action that they will be allowed to take under the present regime: Liberal Associations, Radical clubs, working men members are at present, and Socialist members will be in the future, looked on with complacency by the government classes as serving towards the end of propping the stability of robber society in the safest and least troublesome manner by beguiling them to take part in their own government. A great invention, and well worthy of the reputation of the Briton for practicality—and swindling! How much better than the coarse old-world iron repression of that blunderer Bismark…”
“The Policy of Abstention”, he continued, “is founded on this view”:
“That the interests of the two classes, the workers and the capitalists are irreconcilable, and as long as the capitalists exist as a class, they having the monopoly of the means of production, have all the power of ordered and legal society; but on the other hand that the use of this power to keep down a wronged population, which feels itself wronged, and is organizing for illegal resistance… would impose such a burden on the governing classes as they will not be able to bear; and they must finally break down under it, and take one of two courses, either of them the birth of fear acting on the instinct to prolong and sustain their life which is essential in all organisms. One course would be to try the effect of wholesale concessions… and this course would be almost certain to have a partial success; but I feel sure not so great a success in delaying revolution as it would have if taken with the expressed agreement of Socialist representatives in Parliament: in the latter case the concessions would be looked upon as a victory; whereas if they were the work of a hated government from which the people were standing aloof, they would be dreaded as a bait, and scorned as the last resource of a tyranny growing helpless. The other course… would be stern repression… of the opinion and aspirations of the working classes as a whole: for in England at least there would be no attempt to adopt this course until opinion was so grown and so organized that the danger to monopoly seemed imminent. In short the two courses are fraud and force, and doubtless in a commercial country like this the resources of fraud would be exhausted before the ruling class betook itself to open force.”
Supposing the policy of abstention were to be adopted, what did it imply in immediate tactics? First, the preaching of the principles of Socialism as widely as possible. “The real business of us propagandists”, Morris suggested, “is to instil this aim of the workers becoming the masters of their own destinies, their own lives”. Once this was done, the workers should be organized through trade unions in “a vast labour organization—the federation according to their crafts… of all the workmen who have awoke to the fact that they are the slaves of monopoly”. The one overriding aim of these unions should be the overthrow of capitalism, and the establishment of Socialism. All their tactics before achieving this victory should be looked upon “as so much necessary work… to enable them to live till they have marched to the great battlefield”:
“Let them settle… what wages are to be paid by their temporary managers, what number of hours it may be expedient to work; let them arrange for the filling of their military chest, the care of the sick, the unemployed, the dismissed: let them learn also how to administer their own affairs.”
But Morris sketched only the general outline of this plan: “time and also power fails me to give any scheme for how all this could be done”.
The problems of the building of such a Federation being thus glossed over (and Morris never returned to them in any detail) he advanced to the point at which the labour organization was already established and powerful. The result would be the open and “conscious opposition of the two powers, monopolist authority and free labour”, and this, in turn, could not fail to lead on to a revolutionary situation; whereas the policy of parliamentary socialism would enable the monopolists—
“to detach a portion of the people from the people’s side, to have it in their midst helpless, dazed, wearied with ceaseless compromise, or certain defeat, and yet to put it before the world as the advanced guard of the revolutionary party, the representative of all that is active or practical of the popular party.”
The policy of abstention might be supplemented, he suggested, by creating a truly popular centre outside Parliament (“call it the labour parliament if you will”), deliberating at the same time, and whose decrees will be obeyed by the people “and not those of the Westminster Committee”. Its weapons of enforcement would be those of the strike, co-operation, and the boycott: above all, it would be continually educating the people in the administration of their own affairs. The plan of parliamentary action, by contrast, he prophesied would develop along the following lines:
“Starting from the same point as the abstentionists they have to preach an electioneering campaign as an absolute necessity, and to set about it as soon as possible: they will then have to put forward a programme of reforms deduced from the principles of Socialism… they will necessarily have to appeal for support (i.e. votes) to a great number of people who are not convinced Socialists, and their programme of reforms will be the bait to catch these votes: and to the ordinary voter it will be this bait which will be the matter of interest, and not the principle… So that… The Socialist members when they get into Parliament will represent a heterogenous body of opinion, ultraradical, democratic, discontented non-politicals, rather than a body of Socialists; and it will be their opinions and prejudices that will sway the action of the members in Parliament. With these fetters on them the Socialist members will have to act, and whatever they propose will have to be a mere matter of compromise: yet even those measures they will not carry: because long before their party gets powerful enough to form even a formidable group for alliance with other parties, one section or other of ordinary politicians will dish them, and will carry measures that will pass current for being the very thing the Socialists have been asking for; because once get Socialist M.Ps., and to the ordinary public they will be the representatives of the only Socialists… So it will go on till either the Socialist party in Parliament disappears into the advanced Democratic party, or until they look round and find that they, still Socialists, have done nothing but give various opportunities to the reactionists for widening the basis of monopoly by creating a fresh middle-class under the present one, and so staving off the day of the great change.”
He admitted a further possibility—that the Socialists in Parliament by good fortune or intrigue should capture power; but in this case it would not be a conscious revolution, since the people would have been “ignorantly betrayed into Socialism” instead of achieving it by their own conscious efforts; and, hence, a counter-revolutionary movement would quickly triumph.1
This lecture contains Morris’s most considered reflections during his anti-parliamentary period; and although he repeated them in a hundred different ways, he did not substantially modify them until 1891 or 1892. Already in September, 1887, he was identifying his real theoretical opponents as being among the Fabians, and this despite the fact that Shaw was a close personal friend. “The attitude of Shaw… and his Fabians is very difficult to get over”, he wrote to Glasse. “They are distinctly pushing forward that very useful association of lecturers as the only sound Socialist Body in the country: which I think is nonsense”:
“I admit, and always have admitted, that at some future period it may be necessary to use parliament mechanically: what I object to is depending on parliamentary agitation. There must be a great party, a great organization outside parliament actively engaged in reconstructing society and learning administration whatever goes on in the parliament itself. This is in direct opposition to the view of the regular parliamentary section as represented by Shaw, who look upon parliament as the means; and it seems to me will fall into the error of moving earth 8c sea to fill the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not represent Socialist men”1
If he could not win the Socialist movement as a whole to his view, still he believed it necessary for the League to exist alongside the parliamentary movement, keeping alive the propaganda of “principle”. Increasingly between 1887 and 1890 he came to see the role of the League as being educational and propagandist within a larger Socialist movement. He was opposed to the amalgamation of the various Socialist groupings, but strongly in favour of joint action wherever possible. “Let those meet together who agree and like each other, however few they are”, he wrote to Glasier in January, 1888:
“And not entangle themselves by joining bodies in which they must either quarrel or suppress part of their genuine opinions. In meantime the various bodies can always unite for specified purposes, and are much more likely to do so effectively if they are not always wrangling about their differences… The party cannot possibly be coterminious with one organization in it, or indeed with all the organizations together.”2
Such reflections were forced upon him increasingly in the next two years by the gradual disintegration of the League. In July, 1887, the circulation of Commonweal was in the region of 2,800 and Morris gave a general estimate of League membership at about 700.3 In December, 1887, the Commonweal sales still stood at 2,850, but in June, 1889, the number “sent out” (not necessarily sold) had fallen to 2,331.1 The sharpest decline came after the Fourth Annual Conference in May, 1888, but a general decline may be presumed over the whole period. This decline is a fair index of the general activity of the League, since the bulk of Commonweal sales were in conjunction with the open-air propaganda. The Hammersmith Branch recruited over forty new members in 1887 (nearly all in the second half of the year), and it was conducting a vigorous open-air propaganda. But the lectures were of an increasingly intellectual character2 and the Fabians (among them Hubert Bland, Shaw, Graham Wallas, Sidney Webb and Sydney Olivier), were becoming more popular among the members.
Hammersmith was a lively Branch, which put out new off-shoots (Fulham, Acton, North Kensington, Notting Hill) right to the end. Morris was always prodding forward new activities, in which he took his full share himself.3 Few of the other Branches were gaining ground. Glasgow, although active in its propaganda, persistently failed to pay its full capitation dues to the central Council, and sometimes failed to return cash for Commonweals sold. Norwich, which claimed a membership of over 150 at the Third Annual Conference (May 29th, 1887), had fallen below 100 at the Fourth (May 20th, 1888): nevertheless, its propaganda was very much more vigorous than most. The Leeds Branch, which—together with the small Bradford Branch—was gaining influence in the working-class movement of the West Riding, still could not seem to climb above the charmed figure of thirty or forty members.1. Morris’s private letters of the summer of 1887 are profoundly discouraged. “I cannot say that I have encouraging news from London”, he wrote to Glasier on July 23rd, 1887:
“I am afraid that our parliamentary friends if they cannot get their way will at any rate break up the League… It is but right and proper to let you know how things really are; and you must remember that the parliamentarians are only running their heads into a sack; they have no chance of beating the S.D.F. because that has been in existence so long that it has got that best of all titles ‘prescription’. The Ps will if they please succeed in breaking up the League, but they will not succeed in founding another body. Their mistake is not joining the S.D.F. at once: they might raise its tone, or else get so many supporters in it that they could secede later on when they had done all that could be done in it.
“All that we Londoners can do is to try to keep up the old status of the League as long as possible and altogether if possible; to be as little controversial as we can help and to push on London Propaganda: though of course these wretched intrigues stop us very much, and make us dreadfully short-handed. If after all our struggles we are beaten we must then begin again, as a sort of 12 or even 6 apostles: but I am now more than ever determined that I will not go into the humbug business and promise people political successes and economical relief which I know we have no power to win for them. Our Hammersmith Branch is doing pretty well: very well as far as half a dozen members are concerned: and all we of any character are really working like niggers at it…”2
The decisive failure was in the provinces. Bradford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Hamilton, Hull, Ipswich, Lancaster, Leeds, Leicester, North Shields, Norwich, Oxford and Walsall (thirteen in all) were represented at the Annual Conference in 1887: at the Conference in 1888 only eight provincial branches sent delegates (although at least one other effective branch, Leeds, was still active), and Hamilton, Hull, Lancaster and North Shields had disappeared. After this date, it is true, the League occasionally promoted new branches, or gained affiliations from independent societies, at such various places as Yarmouth, Southampton, Wednesbury and Bristol. But, with the possible exception of Yarmouth, these did not constitute stable new propagandist centres. Propagandist visits to the South Wales coalfields, by Mainwaring and Kitz, resulted in good meetings but in no new branches. The foothold in Lancashire (in Manchester) was maintained, but the S.D.F. had the cotton towns to itself.
The reasons for this disintegration of the League in the provinces are not far to seek. The rising tide of the mass movement did not appear as a sudden desire amongst the workers for Socialism in the abstract, but as a taughtening mood of militancy in their fight for industrial and political objectives, combined with a new receptiveness to Socialist propaganda. The decision of the Third Annual Conference on parliamentary action had immediate repercussions: the Socialists of Clay Cross refused to affiliate to the League as a result,1 and the Secretary of the Nottingham Socialist Club who had been trying to persuade his members to affiliate, wrote of his disappointment, and mentioned rumours of “general dissatisfaction” in the League and of a crisis in the Norwich branch.2 Commonweal was out of touch with the working-class movement, and was difficult to sell: where branches were small and poor, unsold copies became a burden. “2/3rds of our members are out of work or on short time”, wrote the Secretary of the Leicester branch in January, 1888, complaining that only a dozen of their quota could be sold. 3 “We cannot sell the Commonweals”, he wrote in March, “simply because our members have no work and no money”.4
The fact that there was a potential readership for a lively Socialist paper, in touch with events in the labour movement, is indicated by the progress of the Labour Elector, Keir Hardie’s Miner, the Cotton Factory Times, and (in 1889) the Yorkshire Factory Times. The League was not failing through the apathy or opposition of the working class. It was being left behind and isolated by its own purism, and for this failure William Morris must bear a part of the blame.
VI. John Lincoln Mahon
The career of J.L. Mahon in the last six months of 1887 illustrates the dilemmas of the League and of the movement. Returning to Northumberland after the Third Annual Conference, Mahon put into effect his policy of organizing a North of England Socialist Federation independent of both League and S.D.F. The Federation’s Programme followed that of the draft constitution of the Socialist League, with one significant change—participation in parliamentary, as well as local elections was advocated. (Mahon sent on a copy to Engels, who gave his general approval.1) In the rules it was laid down that the Socialist League and S.D.F. should be treated “on equal terms of friendship and equality.”2 Branches might be formed “in any district in the North of England.”
The first results of the Federation were good, although when Mahon told Engels that it had “about twenty branches” he was probably exaggerating. The S.D.F. now had several of its own branches in Newcastle and Gateshead, and Tom Mann came up as organiser at the end of May, working amicably enough with the Federation, whose branches were in the coalfield.3 With the prospects of success opening before him Mahon began in earnest to “have ideas”.
Mahon was a capable propagandist. But he seems to have been an incapable organiser,1 with rather more vanity than is proper in a man of twenty-four. (“I wish”, he wrote in one letter to Engels, “our young lecturers could be got to pay more attention to these facts”). “He has more cheek and less chin than any man in the movement”, Morris once said of a comrade who was almost certainly Mahon.2 To Mahon himself he wrote: “I have always thought that though you were good at propaganda, you had a knack of setting people by the ears.”3 And later, when Mahon had broken with the League, Morris wrote in sorrow to Glasse:
“I like him… and when I last saw him had no doubt of his sincerity: but I think as I always thought that as things are the career of a professional agitator is not good for him, & I am afraid that he will do nothing else now… Somehow he has (though a good natured fellow enough) a fatal gift of breeding squabbles, I scarcely know how… When he was up in London he used to have ‘ideas’ from time to time, which always ended in a quarrel.”4
The exchanges between Mahon and Engels in June and July 1887 are of exceptional interest. In his first letter, of June 14th, Mahon sketched out a policy which some elements in the movement were in fact to follow in the next five years, and which was to lead to the formation of the I.L.P. in 1893:
“I really think that here amongst the miners & iron works Socialism will take its first firm hold on the masses of the people. . Our real immediate foes are the Trades Union Leaders. We must fight these fellows in their own stronghold. We must lay down a policy & line of action for Socialists to persue inside the Unions, foster a Socialist ring there 8c get the leaders driven out.”
His perspective was to “amalgamate the various little organizations on one broad definite political platform.” He deprecated further secessions from the S.D.F. or League, and advocated the formation of an unofficial group “of influential people from all the organizations.” Only “a good & overwhelming force from the provinces” would be able to silence the London factions or bring the London leaders together. The North of England Socialist Federation and a (revived) Scottish Land and Labour League were steps in implementing this strategy. A.K. Donald was to keep the former going in Northumberland while Mahon went on a ten week missionary tour in Scotland. Engels was invited to make a financial contribution to this propaganda.1
Mahon’s proposals appear very reasonable, and they won Engels’s general assent. But the dividing line between political manoeuvring and intrigue, in this delicate situation, was very fine. To Engels—and no doubt to the parliamentary section of the League—Mahon offered this perspective; but it would seem that he was telling to Morris a different story. The independent North of England Federation was a necessary stratagem, forced upon him by the need to avoid a confrontation in the North with the S.D.F. He called upon Morris and the League to support him financially, while insisting upon his own independence of action.2 Morris temporised, and handled the problem with genial patience, publishing Mahon’s reports and advertisements in Commonweal (“I don’t want to make the Commonweal sectional so I will probably put them in”), and finally blowing up when Mahon failed to return money for Commonweals sold—presumably because he was applying the funds to his own keep.1 “I am vexed,” he wrote at the end of July, “that the road to organisation should lie through the breaking up of the League, and the snuffing out of Commonweal”2
Meanwhile Mahon was receiving, through the hands of A.K. Donald, some subsidy from the Bloomsbury Branch and the League’s parliamentarians. Mahon was himself a very recent convert to the parliamentary side, and he already had a reputation for sudden changes of front. Yet his policy demanded the building of a new centre of personal influence within the movement, and hence could not be divorced from his own reputation and stability. When Engels was applied to by Mahon for money, his reply was (on the face of it) correct. With the work of propaganda amongst the industrial workers in the provinces he thoroughly sympathised, but—while encouraging Mahon—he mildly rebuked him for experimenting with fresh organizations: “there has been in my opinion already too much impatience in what is called by courtesy the Socialist movement in England”. As for funds for the propaganda,
“I am quite willing to contribute my share. But the means for this must be got together & distributed by some English Committee, & as far as they are to come from London, by a London Committee. I shall speak to the Avelings about this & give them my contribution.”3
It is clear that Engels was placing his subsidy in the hands of the League’s parliamentary faction.
This faction, however, was evidently suffering from its own tensions. Certain of these arose from a long-familiar problem: the position in the movement of Edward Aveling. Mahon visited London in July, and had conversations with Aveling and with Engels. In a letter to Engels of July 21st, he summarised the outcome of the latter meeting:
“I understand that your financial help to the provincial propaganda will only be given on the conditions that I treat Aveling with the fullest confidence, consult him in all party matters & regard him as an essential person in the movement. You insist upon a clear understanding in this matter & therefore I am compelled to say bluntly that I do not accept these conditions.”
But—as was again becoming very familiar—no particular charges were brought against Aveling. Engels demanded that these be brought (“If you decline to work along with Aveling on public grounds, you are bound to come out with them”), and Aveling wrote to Mahon demanding to know why he wished to “shove me out of the movement”. Mahon’s reply was formal and evasive:
“As I am not breaking off any relations with you, nor making any attack upon you, but simply refusing an invitation to work with you I don’t see why I should be called upon to formulate any charges. Nor do I see what good could come of it if I did, and I have never said that I had any to make.”1
It is a most complex and confused situation. By the summer of 1887 Aveling’s reputation in the movement had—as Eleanor Marx’s biographer notes—fallen “very low indeed”. The Aveling’s recent lecture-tour of the United States as guests of the Socialist Labour Party of America had ended in bitter public controversy, turning upon Aveling’s luxurious tastes and excessive expenses: but even these accusations, upon close examination, appeared to be unproven, and Engels could comfort himself with the reflection that all came from Aveling’s “weakness for poetic dreaming… Well, I still remember the time when I was just such a noodle.” The suggestion that Eleanor could have been associated in any “swindle” on the working class provoked him to a defensive paternal fury: “I have inherited from Marx the obligation to stand by his children as he would have done himself, and to see, as far as lies in my power, that they are not wronged.”1 And other accusations against Aveling had a way of disappearing into rumour, insinuation, innuendo, which Engels could dismiss as the fabrications of political enemies. Some part of these probably arose from Aveling’s financial expedients and his willingness to exploit the movement;2 others from his exploits in borrowing money on all sides which (Shaw later wrote) “have grown into a Homeric legend”;3 and others from the rumours of his sexual infidelities—rumours which were never particularised for obvious reasons. For Aveling hid from all criticism behind Eleanor, and any blow aimed at him must strike at Eleanor first. In June 1887, only a few weeks before Mahon refused to work with Aveling, Mme Guillaume-Schack, a visitor to Engels’s house, broke off relations with him on the grounds that she could no longer meet Aveling who had “committed discreditable acts” and had been slandering Eleanor. But when Engels “summoned her to particularize and prove” there was “nothing but gossip, insinuations, infamies” and suggestions that “ ‘the credit of my house’ must suffer if I take responsibility for Edward”. As always, Engels placed his loyalty to Eleanor first: Mme Schack’s accusations were dismissed as the provocations of the Anarchists and the gossip of “pious bourgeois women.”1
Confronted by Mahon’s unexplained refusal to work with Aveling, Engels was puzzled and exasperated:
“Of all the various Socialist groups in England, what is now the ‘opposition’ in the League, was the only one with which so far I could thoroughly sympathize. But if that group is allowed to fall to pieces from mere personal whims and squabbles, or from mutual suspicions and insinuations which are carefully kept away from the light of day, it can only dissolve into a number of small cliques held together by personal motives, and utterly unfit to take any sort of lead in a really national movement. And I do not see on what grounds I should sympathize with any of these cliques more than with another, or with the S.D. federation or any other body.”2
This may seem a correct enough response, in its way. But Engels’s motivation was very much less his political judgement than his personal loyalty to Tussy. He had been warned again and again, and—with few sources of information about the English movement except those which came through the Avelings and their friends—he was being wilfully blind. If Mahon was right that the only way out of the wrangling of the London factions lay through building a new centre for political influence attached to no section, then he was also right that it would have been harmful to have identified Aveling as one of the main leaders of a movement for Socialist unity. In insisting that Aveling be “essential” and be consulted “in all party matters”, Engels was imposing an arbitrary and personal condition. While pretending not to meddle in English matters, he was in fact meddling in an ineffectual, ill-informed and damaging way. Ageing, in trouble with his eyes, surrounded with the demands of Marx’s manuscripts, the problems of the German party, international concerns, the concerns of Marx’s extended political family, Engels simply had no time to exert an informed influence within the English movement. He should therefore have watched his own impatient reactions with more self-criticism, and have restrained himself from exerting an uninformed influence. The impatience, the pressure of work, and the self-satisfied assumption of authority can all be felt in a comment upon Morris of the previous September:
“Morris is a settled sentimental socialist; he would be easily managed if one saw him regularly a couple of times a week, but who has the time to do it, and if you drop him for a month, he is sure to lose himself again. And is he worth all that trouble even if one had the time?”1
But Morris was worth, perhaps, as much “trouble” as was Edward Aveling.2 Engels’s lofty dismissal of “small cliques held together by personal motives” ill became a man whose own “party”, in its British influence, might be described in exactly this way.
At this point Mahon struck off on his own. In July he had discussions with H.H. Champion and others in London,3 and he then went North, to act as agitator for the Scottish Land and Labour League for the next six months. “A great deal of hard propagandist work must be done yet before we can call ourselves a party at all,” he wrote to Engels at the conclusion of the Aveling incident. “In the meantime, I wish only to be of service to the cause in doing such part of that work as I can.”1 His work for the Land and Labour League immediately provoked suspicion within the Glasgow branch of the League. “I am afraid Mahon has taken post to the Devil,” Morris wrote to Glasier on July 23rd (possibly after some news of the Champion-Mahon meeting had come to his ears): “which is a pity, as I am sure he is sincere; but, O so weak!”2 But Morris tried to prevent the burning of any bridges. He published in Commonweal, through August and September 1887, a series of articles from Mahon, which represent a serious attempt to work out the policy learned from Engels in terms of British conditions.
In fact Mahon was one of the first to write and think in a creative way about the Labour Movement as a whole, rather than the propaganda within it of a strict Socialist theory. “Socialism”, wrote Mahon in Commonweal (“A Labour Policy”, August 27th), “is simply [the] most advanced stage of the labour movement,” the most conscious expression of the class struggle which already existed in spontaneous forms:
“The Socialist party has no interests in antagonism to other labour organisations… Trades’ unionism means securing to the workers a larger share of the fruits of their labour; Socialism means securing to the workers the full fruits of their labour. Co-operation means checking the shop keeping section of the traders from cheating the people; Socialism means stopping all sections of traders from cheating the people. Therefore, there cannot be any antagonism between these movements and the Socialist movement. Socialism embraces all other Labour movements, and the very gist of the Socialist policy is to combine all sectional Labour movements into one solid array…”
On October 8th, in an article on trade unionism, he came out in flat opposition to the purism of the League. The Trades Union Congress of September, 1887, had seen the first serious challenge to the old Lib-Lab leadership. Keir Hardie had come into sharp opposition to Broadhurst. The fight for the Eight-hour Day was winning widespread support and (while Tom Mann and John Burns were championing this fight within the engineers) generally speaking both the S.D.F. and the League were standing aside from the agitation, and ignoring the importance of the new militancy within the unions. Mahon, touring the industrial centres of Scotland, could see the futility of this policy:
“Socialism… is on its trial! the Socialists generally must soon choose between broadening the lines of their movement so as to include the practical aspirations of the working class, or becoming a mere group of factions, preaching, it may be, pure enough principles, but preaching them to the winds and exercising no real influence with the masses. My view of the matter is… that the method of Socialist propaganda must not be merely, or mainly, preaching rigidly pure principles which the masses of the people cannot grasp, but taking hold of the working-class movement as it exists at present, and gently and gradually moulding it into a Socialist shape.”
Socialists—Mahon declared—should without any further delay enter the fight of the unions, struggle to get elected to trades councils, to send Socialists to the T.U.C., and organize a group to combat the “Burt and Broadhurst gang”. One of his last contributions to Commonweal (on October 15th, 1887), was a forthright appeal to the miners in Conference at Edinburgh. There is no doubt that with his defection in December, the League lost one of their best theorists.
They also lost one of their best agitators. Wherever he went this year, Mahon seemed to have “green fingers”. Small Socialist organizations sprang up in his wake. Glasgow was a regular branch of the League, but Edinburgh was still in affiliated relationship, as the Scottish Land and Labour League, and through this organization Mahon conducted his propaganda, forming new branches which were only in loose association with the League’s Council. Since he was operating with the support of the Edinburgh comrades (while Glasier and the Glasgow Branch looked on him with distrust), his propaganda was largely in the east—Forfarshire, West Fife, Aberdeen and Dundee. Within a very few weeks he had actually formed branches with a fair membership at Arbroath, Carnoustie and Lochee in Forfarshire, Cowdenbeath and Dysart and Gallatown in Fife, while by the end of October he had formed firm branches at Aberdeen and Dundee, and opened up new centres at Galashiels, Lochgelly and West Calder.
These successes were so striking (and in such marked contrast with Glasgow, which could only keep the Hamilton branch going with difficulty) that they give cause for reflection. In some places, as in the mining villages of West Fife, Mahon was on virgin territory: and yet found the miners willing to enroll in tens and twenties at the first or second open-air meeting. It was only necessary for him to put round handbills advertising his meetings, to get a large and eager audience. He succeeded where the Leaguers were failing in Lanarkshire because he took the trouble really to discover the aims and grievances of the workers whom he was addressing, and because he presented the case for Socialism in straightforward, practical terms.
Socialism reached Aberdeen with a spectacular episode in the fight for free speech which illustrates both Mahon’s ability and the ready reception of the people. For some time a radical Unitarian minister, Mr. Webster, had been giving his support to Socialist ideas. Young James Leatham had been writing some articles with a Socialist slant which came to Mahon’s notice. He wrote to the author (then unknown to him) asking if he would be prepared to make arrangements for a series of open-air meetings in Aberdeen. Leatham agreed:
“Mahon arrived on a fine harvest Saturday afternoon. He was only a year or two older than myself, but sported a small Swinburnianbeard of sanguine hue, his fine head of red-gold hair was topped by a broad-brimmed soft black hat, and he carried, besides his satchel, two large bundles of pamphlets… He was a fine specimen of a type with which I was afterwards to have considerable experience.
“In Aberdeen’s great historic square, Castle Street, that same evening, as Chairman of a large gathering, I delivered the first avowed Socialist speech ever given in [that] arena.
“Mahon… was an experienced outdoor speaker—robust but leisurely…—and he gripped his audience at once with simple, pungent, sentences such as: ‘You sing about your bonnie Scotland and your heather hills. It’s not your bonnie Scotland. It’s not your heather hills. It’s the landlord’s bonnie Scotland. It’s the landlord’s heather hills. And if you want enough earth to set a geranium in you’ve got to pinch it.’ “1
There was a large and responsive audience, which the police-by chivvying the speakers—succeeded in swelling. A few names were handed in at the end of the meeting of people willing to form a Socialist branch.
The next day (Sunday) further meetings were held, which culminated in the arrest of Mahon for lecturing on politics on the Lord’s Day. This served as a splendid advertisement for Socialism. On Monday evening there was a packed protest meeting in the hall of the Friendly Societies, with the president of the Trades Council in the chair. A hostile journalist, who described the audience as being “of a low nature” and the Land and Labour League as a “newly-emerged abortion”, was nevertheless favourably impressed by Mahon’s presence:
“His long wavy hair comes down on the right side over a high broad forehead. His eyes are somewhat shifting, save when he concentrates all his passion in some argument—they are then fixed and keen. His red beard does not completely hide his lower jaw which recedes far and is the worst feature in an otherwise interesting and powerful face. Mahon is of middle height, of spare build and has a slight stoop—in form, altogether a typical factory-worker… His speech is on the whole logically arranged… His illustrations are capital and entirely suited to his audience.”1
In the result—and by skilful defence by himself and his Aberdeen friends—Mahon obtained an acquittal. There were further well-attended open-air meetings, leading on to the formation of a branch which continued in the next year or two to grow in numbers on the curious basis of affiliation to the League, while adopting the programme of the S.D.F. In view of Mahon’s subsequent failures as a propagandist and organiser, the honours of this encounter should in fairness be granted to him.
Mahon’s term as a League agitator came to an end in December 1887. He had appointed himself to this role, and he must have been living on the proceeds of collections, literature sales, and occasional donations from the Edinburgh branch and possibly from H.H. Champion. As a result of his refusal to consult Aveling “in all party matters” the parliamentarians of the League had sent him no assistance. He wrote to Engels in January 1888:
“For the last twelve months I have been agitating on workhouse rations… I shall carry it on for another couple of months & if I can’t get a half decent living by then I shall return to making my living in the factory—the sublime enjoyments of which can only be appreciated properly after experiencing the untold hardships and humiliations of the life of a Socialist Agitator.”2
Morris and the official League had also refused him assistance. Morris clearly felt that Mahon was ill-suited to his self-appointed mission, warning him, in kindly terms, not to “become a hack of any party” nor to live on the movement by—“well, by cadging”. “It’s all very well for a time, at some special crisis to do as you have been doing”, but: “I don’t like the idea of professional agitators, & think we ought to be able to do without them: but at any rate no loose organisation can manage with them; they must be employed either by a well organised body, or by some private person, and be either kept in very strict order, or be perfectly free to go their own ways.”1
Mahon certainly had felt himself free to do that, and in December, 1887, with the support of H.H. Champion he had moved his propaganda campaign across to the West of Scotland. Here he immediately quarrelled with the members of the Glasgow Socialist League, who complained that “J.L. Mahon… has been with us during the past week, and has attempted to suppress the name Socialist League in everything he has done for us.”2 “The Glasgow chaps fairly quarrelled with him,” Morris wrote to Glasse. “I don’t know all the story, but judge… that he, knowing the turn of mind of our friends there, unnecessarily irritated them.”3 To Glasier he wrote in private:
“As for Mahon… I don’t know all the circumstances, but it was clear to me that he had been rather playing for his own side of things, so I had to write as I did write, though without any wish to exacerbate the quarrel… Yes, I think that Champion is going all awry with his opportunism… I cannot believe, however, that he is a self-seeker, and so hope that he will one day see the error of his ways.”4
Mahon retired to his old centre in Northumberland. The North of England Socialist Federation still maintained a paper existence, but the great miners’ strike had been defeated, and organized anti-Socialist propaganda had made some headway. Several branches had, in Mahon’s absence, linked officially with the League, the comrades at North Shields requesting in August, 1887, “to be properly connected with the Central Socialist League under Mr. Morris’ Socialism”.1 The branches were working under the greatest difficulty, without political leadership, or secretarial experience. Blyth was forced to reduce its order of Commonweal to twelve in the autumn, “as the pits are working short time and cannot get sale for them”. East Hollywell, at the end of November, cancelled their order altogether: “the pits are working so bad and so small wages… we might make another Effort soon”.2 The most effective organizer in the area in the previous six months had been Tom Mann of the S.D.F., who—while centred on the S.D.F. branches in Newcastle—had lent a fraternal hand to keeping the branches in the coalfields alive. Mahon and Tom Mann found that they were both looking in the same direction. Mann and John Burns were canvassing the possibility of amalgamating the best elements among the Socialists, launching a general Socialist newspaper, and thus cutting the movement free of the disastrous influence of Hyndman, who—despite what Morris called his “sham terrorist tactics”3 —was ridiculing the engineer’s demand, for the “palliative” of an Eight-hour Day. Both Mann and Mahon were thinking less of a strict Socialist propaganda than of a Labour Party under Socialist leadership: and Mahon now saw the need for electing “three or four Socialist M.P.s… who could put Socialism in this country on a different footing… and weld the party together.”4 It seemed the height of folly that Mann and Mahon should be working in opposed organizations. Mahon swallowed his pride and rejoined the S.D.F., bringing whatever remained of the North of England Socialist Federation with him into formal union. “I suppose you know that Mahon has definitely joined the S.D.F.”, Morris wrote to Glasier in January 1888,
“which makes me grin somewhat considering the energy with which he once attacked it. However, I am not going to quarrel with him: though I am sincerely sorry that for the present he is chiefly of use as an example of… political intrigue. He certainly has a genius for setting people by the ears… I still hope there is some sincerity in him, though it is clear that there is no stability.”1
VII. The Jingo Jubilee
In the summer of 1887 only one campaign of the London Leaguers really seemed to arouse their ready enthusiasm—the campaign against Queen Victoria’s Jingo Jubilee. This was real red meat for the old ultra-Radical leftists like Frank Kitz: it provided the Anarchists with an opportunity to take a bash at the State: and all elements of the League were able to unite in some effective anti-imperialist propaganda. Comrade Kitz was in his element, and proposed the sending up of balloons laden with Socialist literature on Jubilee Day.2 The Queen was well known to be both an arch-imperialist and an arch-enemy of Socialism. She was also suspected, among the old Leftist core, of being an arch-fraud and the mother of an illegitimate child whose father was the notorious John Brown. As the supreme symbol of bourgeois sham and fraud, she presented them with a full-size target.
The Jubilee of 1887 may be taken as the inauguration of the “modern” concept of royalty. Although the Republican sentiment of the early 1870s had long subsided as an effective political force, it was still alive among the Radicals, and among the people generally indifference towards royalty was the rule. Now the stage-managers of the monarchy cast the Queen for the three roles which she and her successors have played ever since. First, the Crown was to serve as a symbol of imperial unity. Properly speaking, it was Disraeli who hatched this idea in 1876, when he proclaimed the Queen “Empress of India”. But 1887 was a Jingo Jubilee in good earnest. Maharajas and African tribal chiefs were paraded in the streets, as at a Roman triumph. As a climax to the imperial celebrations, no less than 23,000 prisoners in Indian jails (some of them political offenders) were released. Morris had an apt comment in his regular Commonweal notes on this piece of “Jubilee flunkeyism”:
“To some people it will reveal depths of tyranny undreamed of before. Here is a dilemma for our Jubileeists: Tf it was dangerous to the public that these men should be at large, why do you release them?… If you can safely release this host of poor miserable tortured people, why did you torture them with your infernal prison?’ “1
Second, the occasion was used (as it is always used) to provide pageants to distract the people from their own problems—in this case, from the severe depression year of 1887. The Romans at least doled out some bread with their circuses. This one was different. The people had to pay for their flag-wagging. But the Jubilee was not all made up of ardour and enthusiasm, as the official historians suggest. The unemployed and the working-class movement in many towns stood like a rock against the mass-produced hysteria. The Commonweal assiduously gathered the reports. At a public meeting in Llanelly “Her Majesty’s name was received with groans and hisses”. The Neath Town Council refused to pay for celebrations. The Cardiff Trades Council refused “to do anything in the shape of servile admiration of a well-paid servant of the State”. At Bristol a large open-air meeting was held in the centre of the city on Jubilee day, addressed by Socialists and trade unionists, at which two militant Republican resolutions were carried with enthusiasm.2 In some parts of the country, at least, the League was swimming with the stream.
Third, the monarchy was employed as a focal point for all the humbug, “respectability”, and orthodox herd instincts which can be employed to prop up bourgeois rule. In brief, the Crown was to be used as an occasion for jingoism, circuses and guff, as it has been used ever since, and of the three, Morris found the guff the most distasteful. “The powers that be”, he wrote in his Commonweal notes,
“are determined to use the opportunity to show what a nuisance the monarchy and court can be as a centre of hypocrisy and corruption, and the densest form of stupidity.”1
The Leaguers set themselves athwart the insidious gathering pressure of orthodox emotion, distributing on Jubilee Day a leaflet in Kitz’s style which included the words:
“The discovery of gas, electricity, steam-driven locomotives and machinery and the vast extension of commerce, is all to be mixed up with the deification of a mean old woman who has had as much to do with inventions or art as the man in the moon.”2
On June 25th, 1887, the week after the main pageantry, Morris summed up his impressions in Commonweal:
“Socialists feel of course that the mere abolition of the monarchy would help them little if it only gave place to a middle-class republic; such a one, for example, as that which butchered so many thousands of citizens at Paris in 1871… Nevertheless, now the monstrous stupidity is on us… one’s indignation swells pretty much to the bursting-point… We must not after all forget what the hideous, revolting, and vulgar toomfoolery in question really means nowadays…”
After recalling the position of the Crown in feudal times, when the monarch—for good or ill—has at least “to do the deeds of men and women, however faulty or perverse, and not the deeds of a gilt gibbiestick”, Morris considered the role of the Crown in his own time, describing the Jubilee as “a set of antics… compared with which a corobboree of Australian black-fellows is a decent and dignified performance.” The monarchy no longer represented the “extinct superstitions” of feudalism and the divine right of kings,
“but commercial realities rather: to wit, jobbery official and commercial, and its foundation, the Privilege of Capital, set on a background of the due performance of the conventional domestic duties: in short, the representation of the anti-social spirit in its fulness is what is required of it.
“That is the reason why the career of the present representative is… so eminently satisfactory. It has been the life of a respectable official who has always been careful to give the minimum of work for the maximum of pay… All this… it has performed in a way which has duly earned the shouts of the holiday-makers, the upholsterers, firework makers, gasfitters and others who may gain some temporary advantage from the Royal (but shabby) Jubilee Circus, as well as the deeper-seated applause of those whose be-all and end-all is the continuance of respectable robbery.”
And yet from all this farce, Morris extracted some comfort:
“Even this vulgar Royal Upholstery procession, trumpery as it is, may deepen the discontent a little, when the newspapers are once more empty of it, and when people wake up, as on the morrow of a disgraceful orgie, and find dull trade all the duller for it, and have to face according to their position the wearisome struggle for riches, for place, for respectability, for decent livelihood, for bare subsistence, in the teeth of growing competition in a society now at last showing its rottenness openly.”
VIII. “Bloody Sunday”
The bourgeoisie could not lay on a Jubilee every month to provide a target for League propaganda. But more serious trouble was gathering. Throughout the spring and summer months the mood of the London unemployed had been rising. The S.D.F. had put forward demands for immediate relief and public works, and had led a number of successful demonstrations—a great Church Parade at St. Paul’s, a counter-demonstration to the Lord Mayor’s Show, smaller church parades and deputations to the local authorities in the East End and many other centres. Although individual Leaguers had helped in the agitation, Morris and the Council had held aloof. Morris applauded the major demonstrations and some of the local agitation, as drawing attention to the misery of the unemployed, but he suspected Hyndman of using the agitation for opportunist ends—on the one hand holding out prospects of relief to the starving men which a capitalist State would never grant, and on the other using their misery to advertise the S.D.F. and to brandish as a stick of sham insurrection at the Government.1
Some colour was lent to Morris’s view by the retirement of both John Burns and H.H. Champion from the agitation in the summer of 1887 (both of whom had become dissatisfied with Hyndman’s attitude), and according to Shaw, “the result was that the unemployed agitation was left almost leaderless at the moment when the unemployed themselves were getting almost desperate”. Early in the winter of 1887,
“the men themselves, under all sorts of casual leaders, or rather speech-makers, took to meeting constantly in Trafalgar Square… The shopkeepers began to complain that the sensational newspaper accounts of the meetings were frightening away their customers and endangering the Christmas quarter’s rent. On this the newspapers became more sensational than ever; and those fervid orators who preserve friendly relations with the police began to throw in the usual occasional proposal to set London on fire simultaneously at the Bank, St. Paul’s, the House of Commons, the Stock Exchange, and the Tower. This helped to keep the pot boiling; and at last the police cleared the unemployed out of the square…”1
Shaw’s account, despite its mock cynicism, seems to be pretty close to the mark. At least one agent provocateur was unearthed in the subsequent court proceedings, and it is clear that the relatively unorganized nature of the agitation gave the police the opportunity, for which they had been watching, of forcing a showdown on the issue of free-speech in the Metropolis.
James Allman, an unemployed worker on the Council of the League, took a leading part in the agitation, but again in a haphazard way. “Returning from a meeting held early in October to protest against the murder of our Chicago comrades”, relates Allman, he and three other Socialists passed through the Square, and seeing the unemployed gathered without leaders or purpose, determined that they and other unemployed Socialists would conduct a series of organized meetings:
“The first meeting was held next morning, the speeches being delivered from one of the seats and beneath the shadow of a black banner upon which the words ‘We will have work or bread’ were inscribed in large white letters. The result of this meeting was a series of daily assemblages in the same place… Day by day the sansculotic workless multitude met, marched, and spoke, and daily their numbers increased.”2
On one occasion, Allman recounted, while the injury was still fresh in his mind:
“The processionists were proceeding towards Stepney Green via Strand and City, when, opposite Charing Cross Station, the police suddenly pounced upon them, seized and smashed up their black banner, and dispersed the procession. Strange to say, though, the red flag remained, and from that day till quite recently was borne before the procession. The black banner, representing the dark prospects of unemployed workmen, and borne in our parades as an appeal to the commiseration of the wealthy and a symbol of despair, was torn from us… But the red flag, the emblem of sturdy revolt, remained with us, and henceforth we marched in the wake of the flame-coloured flag…”
Strange, indeed! But it would not have been so strange to Allman and the unemployed if they had realized that the police were deliberately provoking them into an insurrectionary temper.
Morris and the Council of the League smelled danger, but took refuge in their old purism. They passed a resolution on the Unemployed Question which was definitely flabby:
“That the Socialist League do maintain officially the continuance of that policy of non-intervention pursued by it up to the present; and though it can prohibit no individual members… from participating in unemployed agitation, it cannot undertake to support, either morally or pecuniarily, any member whose participation… leads him into difficulties.”1
This was backed up, on October 29th, by a Manifesto of the Council, signed by H.A. Barker, the Secretary, but certainly written by Morris. While expressing sympathy with the unemployed, and demanding (in an off-hand way) immediate relief, the Manifesto urged the futility of asking the capitalist State to provide outdoor relief, since—while such relief might be given—the result would only be to throw more workers out of employment:
“While the present State lasts… there is no remedy possible for this huge misery and wrong. Must we Socialists tell this, then, to starving men seeking victuals and shelter for the passing day? Yes, we must tell it them… to give them lying and delusive hopes of a decent livelihood which they have no chance of obtaining is not doing them a service… There is no salvation for the unemployed but in the general combination of the workers for the freedom of labour-for the REVOLUTION…”
Premature rioting would bring no relief—and here Morris showed that he had seen through the police tactics, and had real and genuine cause for anger at Hyndman’s opportunism:
“Once for all, unless we Socialists are prepared to organize and lead such disturbances, and carry them through to the bitter end, we are bound, under penalty of being justly blamed for egging on people to do what we dare not heartily take part in, to point out to the unemployed what would probably be the results of a riot…”
The riot, Morris declared, would be repressed with ease, unless part of a general revolutionary movement of the whole working class. Moreover, the brutal attacks at present being made by the police upon the unemployed demonstrations (against which the statement made a vigorous protest) “are made with the deliberate intention of forcing them into riot in order to give the authorities an excuse for another step in the suppression of free speech”.
The Manifesto was negative on the one hand, prophetic on the other. The mood of the authorities was a great deal sterner than it had been when they were taken unawares by the riots of 1886. Gladstone and the old Liberal Party had been defeated on Home Rule, and the Tory-Liberal Unionist Government was forcing coercion upon Ireland, and in a mood to destroy Socialism at home. Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws had attracted favourable attention in England, and the judicial murder of the Anarchists in Chicago (the long public preparations for which were going on throughout October and November, until their execution on November 11th) had emboldened reactionaries to preach openly from the text, “Go thou, and do likewise”. On the day after the Chicago executions, and the day before “Bloody Sunday”, The Times published a remarkable editorial, denouncing the public petitions throughout the United States for clemency to the Anarchists as a “mischievous practice… an unparalleled amount of illegitimate pressure”: complaining at the “lax discipline which enabled Lingg [who committed suicide] to disappoint the hangman”: and commending,
“the sternness of Americans in repressing offences against law and order… American police… do not wait to read a Riot Act… They take little reck of the right of public meetings… They carry revolvers, and use them without mercy when they see signs of resistance… Judges and juries draw no distinction between incendiaries of the platform and the Press, and the men who do their dirty work. These things, which happen in the freest Republic in the world, may suggest… whether there is anything so essentially incompatible with the liberty of the subject in the methods, in many respects milder, which are the objects of… vehement denunciation…”
in Ireland, and (as the events of the next day were to show) in Britain as well. “If the people of the United States do not hesitate when order is persistently disturbed to restore it with a strong hand, why should we be afraid to give effect to the general will?”1
The brutal assaults of the police upon the unemployed demonstrators were no mere fictions of the imaginations of All man and the Council of the League. Throughout October repeated assaults and arrests were made upon the demonstrators. On October 17th, 18th, and 19th, Trafalgar Square was cleared by charges of mounted police and the plentiful use of the baton. In the first week of November meetings were being held daily in the Square, and on November 4th, when the Square was once again cleared, the red flag was at last taken. On November 8th Sir Charles Warren banned all further meetings in the Square, on the pretext that it was Crown property. By now the best of the Radicals were alarmed. Reynolds and the Pall Mall Gazette (under the editorship of W.T. Stead) were championing the cause of free speech and exposing the worst cases of provocation and framed-up charges of the police. Morris wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette proposing a Law and Liberty League, to defend the rights of free speech. The Metropolitan Radical Association and several prominent individuals—Annie Besant, W.T. Stead, Cunninghame Graham, the Rev. Stewart Headlam—took up the issue with vigour. The Radicals and the Irish called for a demonstration in Trafalgar Square on November 13th, to protest against Coercion and the treatment in prison of the Irish M.P. O’Brien. It was an emergency decision, driven forward by Stead, under the slogan: “To the Square!” Scarcely three days were left for preparations, but—as at Dod Street—the Radicals and the Irish turned out in their thousands on the day.
The events of November 13th have gone down in history as “Bloody Sunday”. For action of this kind—the keeping of the streets and squares free for the work of propaganda—Morris and the Council of the League had no hesitation. The demonstrators—Radicals, Irish National League, and Socialists-formed up at various points in the east, before rallying for the procession to the west. Morris joined the contingent on Clerkenwell Green. According to The Times’ report, the contingent was made up of “respectable artisans”, and was addressed from a cart by Morris and Annie Besant, in speeches of a “determined character”:
“Mr. William Morris… proceeded to say that wherever free speech was attempted to be put down, it was their bounden duty to resist the attempt by every means in their power. He thought their business was to get to the Square by some means or other, and he intended to do his best to get there whatever the consequences might be. They must press on to the Square like orderly people and good citizens. Mr. Morris’s views were evidently the views of most of those he was addressing, and met with not a little applause…”
According to another report, he also added some advice as to how to deal with the police:
“When the procession was passing through the streets, those behind must not fall back, no matter what happened to those in front. This, he added, amid laughter, would only be offering ‘passive resistance’ to the authorities. He hoped they would shove the policemen, rather than hit them, for the policemen were armed and they were not…”1
It is clear that he had a better idea of what was to be expected than most of the good-humoured but earnest crowd massing around the cart. But what took place far surpassed even his worst expectations. The main body of the foot police and the military (armed, and with twenty rounds apiece) lined the sunken part of the Square, while the mounted police and contingents of foot police guarded the outlying approaches. The defence, Morris wrote in the next issue of Commonweal, “was ample against anything except an organized attack from determined persons acting in concert and able to depend on one another”. The Clerkenwell contingent of upwards of 5,000, which had marched in good order to within a quarter of a mile of the Square, was attacked as it was entering St. Martin’s Lane:
“It was all over in a few minutes: our comrades fought valiantly, but they had not learned how to stand and turn their column into a line, or to march on to the front. Those in front turned and faced their rear, not to run away, but to join in the fray if opportunity served. The police struck right and left like what they were, soldiers attacking an enemy…”
The Socialist League banner was torn from the hands of a determined comrade, Mrs. Taylor. Flags were torn from the hands of the processionists, “and their staves broken by the police laying them down… and jumping on them”. The band instruments were captured, and—Morris recounted:
“All that our people could do was to straggle into the Square as helpless units. I confess I was astounded at the rapidity of the thing and the ease with which military organization got its victory. I could see that numbers were of no avail unless led by a band of men acting in concert and each knowing his own part.”
Morris himself was in the centre of the police attack. He had been walking in the middle of the column beside Shaw, but-anticipating trouble—he had gone to the head of the procession, “where he saw the rout at its most striking moment”.1 “I shall never forget how quickly these unarmed crowds were dispersed into clouds of dust”, he wrote to Andreas Scheu. “I found myself suddenly alone in the middle of the street, and, deserted as I was, I had to use all my strength to gain safety.”2 By some means he entered the Square and witnessed the last act of the assault.
The other columns had met with even more brutality before they reached the Square. Cunninghame Graham, the aristocratic Radical-Socialist M.P. for N.-W. Lanark, headed an attack on the police cordon with John Burns. Graham’s head was cut open, and a neutral observer reported:
“After Mr. Graham’s arrest was complete one policeman after another, two certainly, but I think no more, stepped up from behind and struck him on the head from behind with a violence and brutality which were shocking to behold. Even after this, and when some five or six other police were dragging him into the Square, another from behind seized him most needlessly by the hair… and dragged his head back, and in that condition he was forced forwards many yards.”3
Even the foreign Socialists were appalled at the behaviour of the “British bobby”. The Radicals were angry and astonished, “but by no means strung up to fighting pitch”, commented Morris. The many stragglers on the edges of the Square were treated to another demonstration of “firmness”, in the calling out of the soldiers, the reading of the Riot Act by “a sort of country-gentleman-looking imbecile”, and the totally unnecessary appearance of a regiment of Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, who proceeded to clear the Square. Seventy-five arrests were made: 200 people were treated in hospital for injuries, and countless scores more bore the marks of “law and order” to their homes: three sustained fatal injuries.1
The reactions of the various parties were immediate. In the police stations the prisoners were kept from sleeping by the “Hurrahs!” and choruses of “Rule Britannia” of the victorious police. The Times blossomed into a leader which far exceeded its “mingled feelings” of February, 1886, and which (not that it mattered) completely contradicted the accounts of its own reporters:
“Putting aside mere idlers and sightseers… and putting aside also a small band of persons with a diseased craving for notoriety… the active portion of yesterday’s mob was composed of all that is weakest, most worthless, and most vicious of the slums of a great city… no honest purpose… animated these howling roughs. It was simple love of disorder, hope of plunder, and the revolt of dull brutality against the rule of law… morbid vanity… greed of gain… hound… ignorant… debased… ranting… pernicious incitements… nauseous hypocrisy… ringleaders… criminals.”2
On the 15th it reported “great rejoicings all over London, especially in the West End”:
“If this meeting had been permitted, no other meetings, even if they had been held day and night, could have been put down.”
The authorities consolidated their victory by swearing in special constables and trying to recall the panic of 1848. On the next Sunday mounted police galloped up and down the Square, pursuing irresolute and straggling crowds, and an innocent by-stander, a Radical law-writer named Alfred Linnell, was ridden down and sustained fatal injuries. Sentences of hard labour, ranging from one month to a year, were doled out on largely perjured evidence. Two months after the affair John Burns and Cunninghame Graham were awarded the relatively mild sentence of six weeks.
The Gladstonian Liberals maintained a shameful complicity of silence—only Bradlaugh resuming his old championship of the rights of free speech. Among the Radicals and Socialists reactions were altogether different. Morris’s feelings were ones of fury from the start. “Harmless citizens were… beaten and trodden underfoot; men were haled off to the police courts and there beaten again”, he wrote in his Notes on the year, 1887, after he had had time to check the evidence.1 In Commonweal he wrote, “Sir Charles Warren… has given us a lesson in street fighting”, and stressed the need for crowd drill and discipline:
“The mask is off now, and the real meaning of all the petty persecution of our open-air meetings is as clear as may be. No more humbug need be talked about obstruction… The very Radicals have been taught that slaves have no rights.”2
Cunninghame Graham, as might be expected, took his own lesson thoroughly to heart. Whilst a captive in the Square, he saw plenty to cause reflection:
“I saw repeated charges made at a perfectly unarmed and helpless crowd; I saw policemen… under the express order of their superiors, repeatedly strike women and children… As I was being led out of the crowd a poor woman asked a police inspector… if he had seen a child she had lost. His answer was to tell her she was a ‘damned whore’, and to knock her down…”
The main result of the brutality, in his opinion, was “to make the Liberal Party as odious and as despised as the Tory Party in the Metropolis”. Three men killed (one of them a well-known local Radical leader),1 hundreds wounded and bruised, three hundred arrested, many imprisoned—and the great Liberal Party that was crying out against Irish Coercion did—nothing. “I expected”—wrote Graham—“that it would be thought as cruel and tyrannical to break up a meeting at which thousands of Irishmen were to be present, in London as it would be in Ireland”.
“I thought that freedom of speech and the right of public meeting were facts in themselves, about which politicians were agreed. I did not know the meanness of the whole crew even at that time. I was not aware that freedom of speech and public meeting were nothing to them but stalking-horses to hide themselves behind, and under cover of which to crawl into Downing Street. I soon found, however, that the Liberal party was a complete cur, that what they excelled in doing was singing, ‘Gloria Gladstone in excelsis’, and talking of what they intended to do in Ireland…”2
Thousands of London Radical working men shared his views.
This new unity between the Radicals and the Socialists found its complete and victorious demonstration in the solemn public funeral of Alfred Linnell. Morris, together with Annie Besant, W.T. Stead, and others in the Law and Liberty League, played a prominent part in preparing the ceremony. Despite the poor weather, the people—Radicals, Irish, and Socialists-turned out in their tens of thousands, in the greatest united demonstration which London had seen. “It was a victory”, wrote Morris, “for it was the most enormous concourse of people I ever saw; the number incalculable; the crowd sympathetic and quite orderly.”1 Cunninghame Graham, Annie Besant, W.T. Stead, Herbert Burrows, Frank Smith (of the Salvation Army) and William Morris were the pall-bearers: on the hearse were the flags of the Irish, Socialists and Radicals, and a shield with the lettering, “KILLED IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE”. As the enormous procession moved behind a band playing the “Dead March” to Bow Cemetery, the streets were lined with vast crowds of sympathizers, and the police were greeted with cries of “That’s your work!” They reached the graveside at about half-past four, with the light already failing in the rain, so that the Rev. Stewart Headlam read the burial service by the light of a lantern. “The scene at the grave”, Morris wrote, “was the strangest sight I have ever seen, I think. It was most impressive to witness; there was to me something aweful (I can use no other word) in such a tremendous mass of people, unorganized, unhelped, and so harmless and good-tempered.”2 First, Mr. Tims, of the London Liberal and Radical Federation, spoke to the crowd. Morris followed, speaking with great simplicity and under the stress of strong feeling:
“There lay a man of no particular party—a man who until a week or two ago was perfectly obscure, and probably was only known to a few… Their brother lay there—let them remember for all time this man as their brother and their friend… Their friend who lay there had had a hard life and met with a hard death; and if society had been differently constituted from what it was, that man’s life might have been a delightful, a beautiful one, and a happy one to him. It was their business to try and make this earth a very beautiful and happy place. They were engaged in a most holy war, trying to prevent their rulers… making this great town of London nothing more than a prison. He could not help thinking the immense procession in which they had walked that day would have the effect of teaching a great lesson. He begged them to do their best to preserve order in getting back to their homes, because their enemies would be only too glad to throw a blot upon that most successful celebration; and they should begin to-morrow to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things should not happen again.”1
“He threw his whole soul into his speech”, recorded one witness. “There was fearful earnestness in his voice when referring to the victim we had just laid to rest. He cried out, ‘Let us feel he is our brother.’ The ring of brotherly love in it was most affecting.”2 The London organizer of the Irish National League and Harry Quelch of the S.D.F. followed—the latter forcing his Socialist views a little sharply upon the mourners. The light was growing very dim as the crowd sang Morris’s “Death Song” to the music of Malcolm Lowson, and with Walter Crane’s design of a mounted policeman attacking the people on the front of the sheet:
“We asked them for a life of toilsome earning,
They bade us bide their leisure for our bread;
We craved to speak to tell our woeful learning:
We come back speechless, bearing back our dead.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all If they would dusk the day.
“They will not learn; they have no ears to hearken.
They turn their faces from the eyes of fate;
Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies that darken.
But, lo! this dead man knocking at the gate.
Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,
But one and all If they would dusk the day. ”
Quietly the great crowd dispersed from the cemetery. Morris walked back in the rain with the comrades, deeply moved, and musing to himself. “Well, I like ceremony”, he finally said.
For many weeks Morris was busy with the Law and Liberty League, and was lecturing by choice upon “Trafalgar Square” in different parts of the country.1 He was bitterly attacked in the Press for his part in the Linnell funeral. But at the same time he gained, for the first time in his political agitation, real stature and affection in the eyes of the Radical London masses. It was perhaps in these days, more than at any other time, that he laid the basis for the love—almost veneration—in which he was held by great sections of the Labour movement at the time of his death. It is true that he did not regard the Radical-Socialist alliance as anything more than a temporary unity upon a limited issue. In some ways he even regarded the work of the Law and Liberty League as a distraction from the essential work of the Socialist propaganda.2 But where the unity existed he valued it: he understood and respected both the motives of his new allies and the limits of his agreement with them: when he acted with the Radicals, or spoke at combined meetings, he respected their prejudices and spoke upon the cause they had in common. He was looked on from all sides—S.D.F. and Radical alike—as a spokesman and arbiter. By contrast, Hyndman, who had never ceased to wither the Radicals with his scorn, saw the agitation as only one more platform from which to retail the red meat of his own brand of Socialist theory, irrespective of the occasion or the audience. On February 19th, 1888, Morris went down to Pentonville Jail early in the morning to greet John Burns and Cunninghame Graham and other prisoners on their release from their sentences. In the evening he helped to serve tea at a social in their honour, in which the Irish and the Radicals joined. The next evening a great public meeting was held to greet them, with Michael Davitt, the Irish leader, in the Chair, and William O’Brien (the Irish M.P. whose imprisonment had been the occasion for the calling of the demonstration on November 13th), Annie Besant, John Burns, Cunninghame Graham, W.T. Stead, Hyndman and Morris as the speakers—a considerable victory, Morris thought, since “it will mean no less than an acknowledgement by the Irish party that they are the allies of the London discontent & Trafalgar Square”.1 The hall was crammed, the audience at the height of excitement and taking their mutual differences in good humour until Hyndman rose. He began by attacking the cowardice of the Liberal party, and the Liberal M.Ps. for not being present: then suddenly he swung round upon twelve Radical M.Ps., who—while certainly not conspicuous for their part in the earlier agitation—had at least made a tardy gesture of solidarity by accepting an invitation to sit on the platform, and—Morris afterwards remarked—“we were therefore prepared to accept their repentance I suppose.”2 “The sight of those twelve Radical M.Ps.”, Hyndman later wrote,
“who had never done anything for the unemployed nor helped our fight for free speech in any way, stirred my anger, and turning on them I asked: ‘What on earth are these men doing here?’ “3
And thereupon he began to direct his scorn upon their individual shortcomings, until one of the restive Radicals broke from the audience with a cry of “You infernal firebrand!” and rushed at the platform with the apparent intention of knocking Hyndman down. The meeting broke up in scrimmages and disorder, with Morris’s speech undelivered. Its break-up signaled the end of the unity of Trafalgar Square.
The episode of Bloody Sunday affected Morris’s imagination powerfully. It marked also a perceptible change in his outlook and perspectives. “Up to this time”, Bax records, “he had more or less believed in the possible success of a revolutionary outbreak on the part of the populace of our great cities.” Bax was attending the German Social-Democrat Congress in Zurich at the time:
“He wrote me a letter… telling me that he had always recognized the probability of any scratch body of men getting the worst of it in a rough-and-tumble with the police, not to speak of the military, yet he had not realized till that day how soon such a body could be scattered by a comparatively small but well-organized force… When I had come back to London, he vividly described to me how, singly and in twos and threes, his followers began for a few moments to make a show of fight with the police, and how in vain he tried to rally them to effect a determined dash as a united body on… Trafalgar Square itself… This incident certainly had a strong effect in making Morris pessimistic as to the success of any popular civil rising under existing circumstances…”1
Shaw, also writing after Morris’s death, was even more emphatic:
“If the men who had had the presumption to call themselves his ‘comrades’ and ‘brothers’ had been in earnest about cleaning and beautifying human society as he was in earnest about it, he would have been justified in believing that there was a great revolutionary force beginning to move in society. Trafalgar Square cured him and many others of that illusion.”2
Most of Morris’s biographers have accepted the evidence of these two friends, and especially that of Shaw, without question—and even embroidered on it, in the sense that it is suggested that after Bloody Sunday Morris passed out of the revolutionary phase of his political convictions into one of reformism or Utopian idealism.
It must be said that both Bax and Shaw misunderstood the effect of Bloody Sunday—and that, in the case of Shaw at least, the misunderstanding was wilful. Shaw was, perhaps, reluctant to admit that it was Bloody Sunday which saw the parting of the political ways between him and Morris. Until this time they had been close colleagues in the movement: and, indeed, they remained on friendly terms until Morris’s death. Morris had been among the first to recognize the genius of Shaw’s early novels.1 He rejoiced in his company, and the wit with which he scourged their common enemy, the Bourgeois. Shaw was—and remained—the most popular outside lecturer at the Hammersmith Clubroom, and one observer recalled,
“there were few prettier sights than to see the rugged Saxon viking and the daring Celtic sabreur on the same platform. If you imagine a father and son deeply attached to one another—the elder man warmly admiring yet at times questioning the adroit cleverness of his boy, and the younger man eager to suppress himself and his sardonic humour when touched by a genuine regard for the dignity of his sire—you can picture Morris and Shaw together.”2
In the years between 1884 and 1887, Shaw had refused to join either Federation or League, finding various reasons to justify his own intellectual vanity and eclecticism. Later he declared that he had remained uncommitted because he felt more at home among the middle-class milieu of the Fabians.3 His failure to throw in his lot with the League in 1885, and subsequent failures to support it on important occasions,4 must have been a disappointment to Morris. Yet it should not be supposed that Shaw’s services to the movement at this time were unimportant. Apart from his important fact-finding work with the Fabian Society, he addressed hundreds of meetings for the SiD.F., League, Radical Clubs, and other bodies, and sometimes took part in the League’s open-air propaganda. William Morris was the one man whom Shaw in his maturity respected without reserve, and to the end of his life he always wrote of Morris with quite unusual warmth and humility. Morris’s influence upon him was perhaps the most positive and enduring of any other influence in his adult life.
It was Shaw, however, and not Morris, who thought himself cured of “illusions” by Bloody Sunday, and his comments upon Morris’s reactions are clouded by his own. The two men had marched in the column together, but had separated shortly before the attack of the police. A few days later Shaw sent his comments to Morris:
“The women were much in the way. The police charged us the moment they saw Mrs. Taylor. But you should have seen that highhearted host run. Running hardly expresses our collective action. We skedaddled, and never drew rein until we were safe on Hampstead Heath or thereabouts. Tarleton found me paralysed with terror and brought me on to the Square, the police kindly letting me through in consideration of my genteel appearance. On the whole, I think it was the most abjectly disgraceful defeat ever suffered by a band of heroes outnumbering their foes a 1,000 to 1.”
Shaw next objected to an article in Commonweal by Sparling (who now—married to May—was Morris’s son-in-law)—not because it was revolutionary, but because if it got him into gaol it would do no good. Since Sparling’s article was a fairly inoffensive parable, Shaw was probably criticizing in a roundabout way Morris’s own comments in his article: “London in a State of Siege”. He continued:
“I object to a defiant policy altogether at present. If we persist in it, we shall be eaten bit by bit like an artichoke. They will provoke; we will defy; they will punish. I do not see the wisdom of that until we are at least strong enough to resist 20 policemen with the help of Heaven and Mrs. Taylor.
“I wish generally that our journals would keep their tempers. If Stead had not forced us to march on the Square a week too soon by his ‘Not one Sunday must be allowed to pass’ nonsense, we should have been there now. It all comes from people trying to live down [‘up’ deleted] to fiction instead of up to facts.”1
Five years later it was Shaw, once again, who looked back on this “defeat” as a turning-point for British Socialism:
“Insurrectionism, after a two year’s innings, vanished from the field… In the middle of the revengful growling over the defeat at the Square, trade revived; the unemployed were absorbed; the Star newspaper [which the Fabians for a brief season “captured”] appeared to let in light and let off steam: in short, the way was clear at last for Fabianism.”1
In his most famous Fabian essay (written in September, 1888) he paid his parting tribute to the views of Morris, declaring his sympathy for those “enthusiasts” who refused to believe in the slow and cowardly course of winning Socialism through vestries and Parliament, and who still aimed at establishing the new society with one revolutionary stroke. The course he chose—he argued—was less heroic, but was inevitable. Such an “army of light” as Morris and the revolutionary Socialists envisaged “is no more to be gathered from the human product of nineteenth-century civilization than grapes are to be gathered from thistles…”.2 From the outset Shaw’s fine intellectual fury against capitalism had been blunted by his lack of faith in the conscious, revolutionary efforts of the proletariat. He saw the workers (as he was to describe them in Major Barbara) as corrupted and demoralized by capitalism. Bloody Sunday he took as confirmation of his disillusion.
Morris knew all about Fabianism—that chip off the old utilitarian block. He had thought it all out for himself several years before Shaw had started reading Henry George—in the days of the old National Liberal League—and he had become a Socialist because he did not like the thought. He knew, and publicly acknowledged, that “in economics Shaw is my master”,3 but he also knew that Fabianism led in the end to “deadlock” and that it bred the kind of moral evasions and class attitudes which he abhorred. Morris’s reactions, both at the time of Bloody Sunday and in the months that followed, had little in common with those of Shaw. In what sense, then, did the episode mark a change in his outlook?
Trafalgar Square confirmed for Morris the train of thought which he had first started in his article, “Facing the Worst of It” at the beginning of the year. Throughout 1887 he had been abandoning his hopes of a speedy revolution; after 1887, to all intents and purposes, he had abandoned any hope of seeing Socialism in his own lifetime. Bloody Sunday showed him not so much the weakness of the people as the true face of reaction. He saw not only the mounted police and the batons; he also saw the complicity of almost the entire capitalist Press, the treachery of the professed advocates of freedom in Parliament and public life. He saw the need not only for organization, but for a vast increase in Socialist understanding on the part of the people, if a revolutionary movement were to stand any chance of success. Moreover, he saw the effect upon Shaw and others of his comrades of the “defeat”: he saw the turn towards Fabianism and gradualism, the spread of disillusion in revolutionary organization and tactics: he foresaw the whole story ahead of him, of blind alleys, betrayals and failure. In so far as this foresight damped his earlier optimism, and even made him feel less urgency in his own part in the propaganda, Shaw and Bax were right.
But this implied not a modification of his theory, but a change in his perspectives. There is no need to speculate about the effect upon him of his experiences during these months: they are written into every page of the remarkable chapter of News from Nowhere, “How the Change Came”. They are implicit in the date suggested for the beginning of the Revolution—1952—a date which many of his comrades thought unduly pessimistic and which he himself would never have conceived in 1885. The first events of the Revolution are drawn from the main tendencies and events of November, 1887: the vacillating Government, the clever young General (Sir Charles Warren), the betrayal of the Press (worst of all in the Liberal Daily News), the horror of the people and their counter-demonstrations (LinnelPs funeral), the excitement of the young reactionaries who at last had something to do when the General Strike was proclaimed (comparable to the reactions of the young aristocrats enrolled as special constables after Bloody Sunday). The events take a different pattern in 1952 because the workers are more determined, better organized in their Federation of labour (despite repeated corruption of its leadership by opportunists and time-servers), and because there are younger determined Socialist cadres at work among the rank-and-file organizations of the masses, who in the struggle gain in ability and influence. After 1887 Morris more and more saw his work in this long-term perspective: whatever vagaries the movement as a whole might pass through, he saw the need for the establishment of a school of Socialist theory which would survive the failures and errors of opportunism. In the year before his death he reaffirmed once more his conviction that sooner or later a moment of climactic revolutionary confrontation must come:
“I have thought the matter up and down and in and out, and I cannot for the life of me see how the great change which we long for can come otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind… Can we escape that? I fear not. We are living… in an epoch when there is combat between commercialism, or the system of reckless waste, and communism, or the system of neighbourly common sense. Can that combat be fought out… without loss and suffering? Plainly speaking I know that it cannot.”1
IX. Exit the Bloomsbury Branch
“I am not in a good temper with myself”, Morris wrote to Geòrgie Burne-Jones in March, 1888:
“I cannot shake off the feeling that I might have done much more in these recent matters than I have; though I really don’t know what I could have done: but I feel beaten and humbled. Yet one ought not to be down in the mouth about matters; for I certainly never thought that things would have gone on so fast as they have in the last three years; only, again, as opinion spreads, organization does not spread with it…”1
Morris could never fool himself for long. Now he was coming to a realization that the League had little future as a mass Socialist organization, and that he himself had failed as a propagandist leader. Somehow his organization and his ideas were being left outside the general line of advance of the broader movement. During the early months of 1888 he did not slacken in the least in his propaganda work: in March he paid a visit to Scotland, touring some of the new centres which had been opened by Mahon, encouraging the comrades and leaving them in good heart; Commonweal now, more than ever, was filled with his lectures and political notes. But, gradually some of his older interests were coming to reclaim more of his attention—the Anti-Scrape, preparations for the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition, the Firm, and the first of his prose romances—The House of the Wolfings. The incessant faction fights and squabbles among his comrades was beginning to wear down his patience.
Early in 1888, when the reverberations of Bloody Sunday had scarcely died away, dissension broke out once again in the League. The Bloomsbury Branch, which included Edward and Eleanor Aveling, A.K. Donald, the two Binnings and most of the active London “parliamentary” Leaguers, had continued an active and semi-independent existence. It had played an important part in the agitation among the Radical Clubs after Bloody Sunday and had greatly increased its membership during the year. In April, 1888, it had united with the local S.D.F. to run two candidates for the Board of Guardians elections. There had been one or two minor quarrels between the two sections: but the angry faction fights of the previous year had died down. They revived when the branch put down a resolution for the Fourth Annual Conference:
“That the Conference… take measures to call a meeting of all Socialist Bodies to endeavour to arrive at a scheme for the federation of the various Socialist organizations.”
Morris thought the resolution to be “nonsense”—a mere symptom of faction.1 In the 1890s he was to change his mind on this question. But in 1888 he thought that unity was valuable only on specific issues and he read the resolution as implying (in effect) the merging of the League once more in the S.D.F. Further resolutions from the Bloomsbury Branch raised once again the issue of parliamentary and municipal electioneering, and attempted to establish the principle of a National, rather than a London, Council for the League—a proposal resisted by the majority on the grounds of impracticability and expense.
In general, the dispute followed the same lines as in 1887. Once again the parliamentarians failed either to raise the quarrel to a serious theoretical level, or to find common cause with Morris and his group against the increasing Anarchist influence. This was the more serious in that the Anarchists, who in 1887 had represented a sentiment rather than a party, had now become an effective, organized and coherent group.
It was clear as early as 1885 that the errors of the “Lefts” were breeding tendencies towards Anarchism within the League. But the declared Anarchists—few in numbers and mostly foreign refugees of Johann Most’s old circle—had been scattered either in tiny intransigent organizations of their own, like the “Autonomic Group”, or—like Mrs. Wilson and her small following in the Fabian Society—within other Socialist bodies. Prince Kropotkin’s arrival in England in the spring of 1886 resulted in the formation of a small “Freedom Group”, publishing its own monthly paper (Freedom) which was sold at open-air meetings, alongside Commonweal by members of League branches in London, Glasgow and Norwich.
Throughout 1887 Kropotkin’s influence gained ground within the League. To the Leftists thirsting for the revolution Kropotkin’s was a name to conjure with—Scientist and Adventurer, “Apostle of Revolutionary Socialism”. “The life of this remarkable man is itself a prophecy of a new and nobler civilization”, declared a handbill of the Glasgow Branch:
“PRINCE KROPOTKIN has stepped down from his place beside the imperial throne to fraternise with the poor and the oppressed. He has faced imprisonment and death in behalf of the cause of the people. After escaping by a remarkable strategem from a Russian Prison… he came to Western Europe to associate himself with the struggle of the workers. In 1882 he was thrown into a French prison… Whilst in prison, Prince Kropotkin,—whose scientific and literary attainments are as remarkable as his humane sympathies,—occupied himself in writing scientific and literary essays…”
The tone of the handbill is worth noting—for it was Kropotkin’s romantic history even more than his writings which brought him support within the League. His was a name which could fill any hall. His great reputation, pleasant manners, and the note of high-toned idealism which was the main message of his Appeal to the Young, were exactly calculated to appeal to those earnest and self-educated comrades who had come to Socialism by way of Ruskin’s Munera Pulveris and Morris’s Lectures on Art, or who had been nurtured on the ethical idealism of the militant Secularists.
The decisive factor in turning the League in an Anarchist direction, however, was not Kropotkin’s teaching but the great and inspiring example of the Chicago Anarchists, whose brutal judicial murder on the eve of Bloody Sunday had both shocked and inspired Socialists of every opinion. For months the shameful proceedings of a brutal and prejured “justice” had dragged themselves out before the horror-struck Leaguers-seeming to their eyes as if they were a grotesque magnification of the petty perjuries and brutalities familiar to them in the British courts. The case exhibited to the full what William Morris termed “that spirit of cold cruelty, heartless and careless at once, which is one of the most noticeable characteristics of American commercialism”.1
“… a country with universal suffrage, no king, no House of Lords, no privilege as you fondly think; only a little standing army chiefly used for the murder of red-skins; a democracy after your model; and with all that a society corrupt to the core, and at this moment engaged in suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar of all the Russias uses.”2
The heroic bearing of the Chicago victims inclined many members of the Socialist League to listen with respect to the Anarchist case—and even to look with sympathy upon acts of terrorism and political assassination on the continent of Europe. From the time of the execution of the Chicago Anarchists, the small Anarchist movement in Britain, took on for several years a more determined and serious character. A pamphlet on the trial was widely sold by the Leaguers and biographies of the martyrs were published in Commonweal The influence of their example did not reach its climax until November, 1888, when Lucy Parsons, the heroic widow—a woman of American-Indian origin, of striking beauty, and a moving speaker—addressed a series of commemorative meetings in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Ipswich and Norwich, largely organized by the League. But early in 1888 it is possible to identify a declared Anarchist group among the leadership of the League, and distinct from the old “Leftists”, such as Joseph Lane, Frank Kitz and Sam Mainwaring. Most prominent amongst this group were Charles Mowbray, the London tailoring worker who had come into prominence after receiving a vindictive sentence of nine months’ hard labour after addressing a meeting of Norwich unemployed who had later sacked a butcher’s shop; “Fred Charles” (F.C. Slaughter), also of Norwich; David J. Nicoll, a young man with a very small independent income—a highly-strung and unstable intellectual, who gave up most of his time to the propaganda of the London League, and helped to compile an excellent weekly “Revolutionary Calendar” for Commonweal; and among other Londoners, H. Davis, Tom Cantwell and J, Tochatti, a tailoring worker and very active propagandist in the Hammersmith Branch.
The real victory in the League’s Fourth Annual Conference was won, not by Morris and the anti-parliamentarians, but by this small Anarchist section. Morris, in his alarm at the vision of reformism, overbalanced backwards into their arms. On the eve of the Conference, Glasier, who was staying with Morris at Hammersmith, found him looking forward to the proceedings “without anger, but with a sense of depression”. The activities of the Bloomsbury Branch he regarded as “a sheer faction racket”.1 Donald and his friends had clearly forfeited all Morris’s respect, and he doubted not their policy so much as their intentions and motives. On the following day (May 20th) discussion continued for nearly twelve hours. At the end of the day the Bloomsbury resolutions were all rejected by large majorities, the Conference adopting amendments from the Hammersmith Branch which urged “cordial co-operation” (as opposed to “formal federation”) with other Socialist bodies, and which evaded the old issue of parliamentary action. Morris then rose “and made a deeply earnest appeal for unity and good-will”.2 But the split was beyond healing. The parliamentarians refused once again to stand for election to the Council: and a Council was appointed which showed a clear majority of “Leftists” (including Kitz, Lane, Mainwaring, Sparling, Philip Webb3 and Morris himself), with two of the pronounced Anarchist wing—Tochatti and Charles. Morris seconded a resolution recommending the Council “to take steps to reconciliate or, if necessary, exclude the Bloomsbury Branch from the… League”. “The damned business is over at least for another year”, Morris said, as he and Glasier went back on the bus to Hammersmith. But he was by no means satisfied with the outcome: “We have got rid of the parliamentarians, and now our anarchist friends will want to drive the team. However, we have the Council and the Commonweal safe with us for at least a twelve-month, and that is something to be thankful for.”1 A week later he wrote to Glasier: “We… yesterday suspended (not dissolved) the BL[oomsbury] B [ranch] until they should withdraw their stupid defiance… I don’t want to dissolve them if they would give us some pledge of peace.”2 Charges against the branch, tabled by Mainwaring, included the fact that some members held joint membership of the S.D.F., and that Mahon (still a member of the branch) had conducted a “largely political” propaganda in the North of England, and had acted as election agent for Keir Hardie in Mid-Lanark. But it was a melancholy reflection upon the level which the dispute had now reached that the actual occasion of the branch’s suspension lay not in any question of principle, but in the fact that its members had “sold publicly in the streets” an “illustrated squib” lampooning Morris and his following.3
The breach was final, and the independent Bloomsbury Socialist Society was formed. A few days later, the Labour Emancipation League (Hoxton) withdrew its affiliation. On June 9th, 1888, Commonweal published a new policy statement of the League’s Council, drafted by Morris, which reaffirmed the League’s rejection of parliamentary action, and declared once again that “the education of the vague discontent… of the workers into a definite aim, is the chief business of the Socialist League”.
It was an inglorious conclusion to a dispute which was of serious importance to the British labour movement. Morris in the previous twelve months—despite his contact with the Radical masses in the agitation for the right of public meeting—had fallen even further out of touch with working-class opinion. Keir Hardie’s election fight at Mid-Lanark was scarcely allowed to soil the pure pages of Commonweal1 Throughout the dispute Morris had persisted in equating parliamentary action with opportunism, careerism and political corruption. Many times after the break with his old comrades he felt doubts as to the wisdom of his own position. At the end of July, 1888, he expressed them to Georgie Burne-Jones:
“I am a little dispirited over our movement in all directions. Perhaps we Leaguers have been somewhat too stiff in our refusal of compromise. I have always felt that it was rather a matter of temperament than of principle; that some transition period was of course inevitable, I mean a transition involving State Socialism and pretty stiff at that; and… towards this State Socialism things are certainly tending, and swiftly too. But then in all the wearisome shilly-shally of parliamentary politics I should be absolutely useless: and the immediate end to be gained, the pushing things a trifle nearer to State Socialism, which when realized seems to me but a dull goal—all this quite sickens me… Preaching the ideal is surely always necessary. Yet on the other hand I sometimes vex myself by thinking that perhaps I am not doing the most I can merely for the sake of a piece of ‘preciousness, “2
Meanwhile, if any of the Anarchists within the League had hoped to find a convert in Morris for their last redoubt of individualism, they would have been swiftly disillusioned if they had glanced over his shoulder in his leisure moments; for they would have found him busy on the manuscript of The House of the Wolfings, written “to illustrate the melting of the individual into the society of the tribes”—and in its pages a rediscovery of that social sense which Victorian “self-help” had brought near to extinction everywhere except in the centres of working-class life.
For five years William Morris had been in the very forefront of the Socialist propaganda in England—setting the fire aflame in new centres, patiently explaining this or that point of theory, encouraging the doubters, putting himself in the van of scores of actions, bringing his own special qualities of vision and enthusiasm to the new movement, spending his own energies without thought. The last two years, in particular, had seen an unending series of committees, lectures, articles and editorial work, open-air meetings and correspondence, which he had undertaken without complaint. Was it all to end in a faction-fight within his own party, and alongside it the birth of a new movement, Socialist in name but Radical and opportunist in reality? Whatever he may have said, by way of encouragement to his comrades, by the summer of 1888 Morris knew that somehow he and the pioneers had failed in their aim of building a revolutionary party. And from that time onward he looked increasingly across the intervening years to a future in which he never lost confidence.
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1 See Mackail, II, p. 172.
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1 Socialist Diary, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45335: “Did… an article for Commonweal which… was weak, long and no use.”
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1 “Facing the Worst of It”, Commonweal, February 19th, 1887.
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1 Morris to Glasier, January 27th, 1887, April 16th, 1888, Glasier MSS.
2 Mackail, II, p. 169.
3 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45335. Some passages were published by Mackail, II, pp. 169–80.
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1 “Facing the Worst of It”, Commonweal, February 19th, 1887.
2 Morris to his daughter, Jenny, February 18th, 1887, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45339.
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1 Strikes and the Labour Struggle, issued by the Strike Committee of the Socialist League (1886).
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1 Manifes to of the Glasgow Branch of the Socialist League to the People of Scotland (1887).
2 See Annual Report of the Glasgow Branch (May, 1887), pp. 4–50.
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1 Commonweal, April 16th, 1887.
2 Hull Critic, July 26th, 1890.
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1 J.L. Mahon to S.L. Council, February 19th, 1887, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc Hist., and Commonweal, March 12th, 1887.
2 J.L. Mahon to S.L. Council, March 19th and 26th, 1887.
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1 J.L. Mahon to S.L. Council, April 2nd, 1887.
2 There is a full account of this propaganda trip to Scotland in his Socialist Diary, and anecdotes from it are recounted in Glasier, pp. 72–83, “A Propaganda Outing”. See also Letters, pp. 269–71, and Commonweal, April 16th, 1887.
3 Letters, p. 271; Socialist Diary; Glasier, op. cit.
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1 The account of the Northumberland demonstration is given in the Socialist Diary; Letters, pp. 271–4; Commonweal, April 16th and 23rd, 1887; Newcastle Chronicle, April 12th, 1887.
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1 The report is reliable, since Morris noted in his diary that it was almost verbatim.
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1 Engels to Sorge, May 4th, 1887, Labour Monthly, December, 1933: “It is now an immediate question of organizing an English Labour Party with an independent class programme. If it is successful, it will relegate to a back seat both the S.D.F. and the Socialist League, and that would be the most satisfactory end to the present squabbles…”
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1 It was in 1887 that Mahon declined to work with Aveling on personal grounds (see p. 468) and (in September) that Morris referred to Aveling as “that disreputable dog”.
2 Report of the Third Annual Conference of the Socialist League, p. 12.
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1 Hammersmith Minutes, March 27th, 1887.
2 Unpublished Letters, p. 4.
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1 Unpublished Letters, pp. 6–7.
2 Morris to Glasier, May 27th, 1887 (Glasier MSS.). See also Letters, p. 291.
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1 To the Members of the Socialist League, a handbill issued by J. Lane and F. Charles in preparation for the Annual Conference of 1888.
2 Engels to Sorge, June 4th, 1887, Labour Monthly, December, 1933.
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1 David Nicoll, Librarian and Propaganda Secretary of League, 1887-8.
2 Engels to Sorge, June 4th, 1887, Labour Monthly, December, 1933, Engels’s optimistic picture of developments in the provinces might perhaps have been a little coloured by the enthusiastic reports of J.L. Mahon.
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1 Morris to Glasier, May 19th, 1887, Glasier, op. ext., p. 193. For the misdating of letters in Glasier and in Henderson, Letters, see first edition, p. 540 n.2.
2 Hammersmith Minutes, July 31st, 1887; Morris to Glasier, July 27th, 1887.
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1 The lecture is published in full in May Morris, II, pp. 434–52.
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1 Morris to Glasse, September 23rd, 1887, Unpublished Letters, pp. 7–8.
2 Glasier MSS., January 28th, 1888.
3 Based on Morris’s statement to Glasier, July 27th, 1887 (Glasier, op. cit., p. 194), that 1½d. a week from each member of the League would cover the weekly loss of £4 on Commonweal This would give an exact figure of 720 members. The voting strength at the Annual Conference was twenty-eight, with at least one branch (Leicester) unrepresented; an analysis would give six full fifties, and twenty-three parts of fifty. Taking an average of twenty per branch, this would give about 760 members.
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1 Weekly Letter to Secretaries of Socialist League branches, June 20th, 1889 (among papers of Hammersmith Society, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45893).
2 Among lectures between December, 1887 and June, 1888 were “Peasant Life in Italy” (E. Carpenter), “The Origins of the Ornamental Arts” (Morris), “Copyright” (Shaw), “The Policy of Ancient Peru” (Beasley), and “Social Science 2,200 Years Ago” (Graham Wallas).
3 E.g. Of seventy-two ordinary branch meetings between December, 1887 and September, 1888 (average attendance eleven), Morris was present at fifty-two; in addition, he spoke at many of the 150 open-air meetings held by his branch in the same period, and (when not lecturing elsewhere himself) was usually in the chair at the regular Sunday-night lecture. (Hammersmith Minutes, passim.)
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1 Notebooks and papers of Alf. Mattison.
2 Glasier MSS. It is not certain whether this letter should be 1887 or 1888, but internal evidence suggests 1887.
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1 R. Unwin to Secretary, S.L., September 18th, 1887, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst Soc. Hist
2 Ibid, A. Clifton to Secretary, S.L., June 7th, 1887.
3 Ibid, J. Fowkes to Secretary, S.L., January 18th, 1888.
4 Ibid, J. Fowkes to Secretary, S.L., March 1st, 1888.
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1 The full correspondence between Mahon and Engels is published in Appendix II in the first edition of this book.
2 Commonweal, June 25th, 1887.
3 See Dona Torr, Tom Mann and His Times (1956), pp. 242–51.
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1 He had resigned after a few months as the first Secretary of the League, under pressure and as a result of his own “shortcomings”: see R. Page Arnot, William Morris, the Man and the Myth (1964), pp. 51–2. This study publishes in full the letters from Morris to Mahon—letters not available to me for the first edition of this book.
2 James Leatham, William Morris, Master of Many Crafts (1908), p. 115.
3 R. Page Arnot, op. cit., p. 71.
4 Ibid., p. 90.
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1 See first edition of this book, pp. 861–3.
2 It is clear from Morris’s letters to Mahon in R. Page Arnot, op. cit., pp. 67–73, that this support was withheld. The League’s “Strike Committee” thought it “inadvisable” to keep Mahon as an emissary in the North, and Morris told Mahon that he would give money only through the League’s Treasurer, i.e. for objects approved by the League’s Council.
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1 Ibid, pp. 68–71; Morris to Mahon, July 30th, 1887: “It seems to me as if this were dis-organisation rather than organisation. Of course I admit that you acted for what you thought the best: but lord! if we all take to the same game why should we take to an organisation at all? This is anarchism gone mad.”
2 Ibid, p. 72. It is clear from Morris’s correspondence in these months with Glasse, Mahon and Glasier that he was working exceedingly hard on Commonweal—not only in the editorial department but also in pushing circulation, raising funds and trying to get sellers to pay their debts. This constant preoccupation added to his irritation with the parliamentary section, who did little for the paper except criticise it: he also believed (ibid., p. 67) that Aveling wished to get it out of his hands.
3 First edition, p. 864.
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1 First edition, pp. 866–9.
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1 See the judicious assessment of this episode in C. Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx (Oxford, 1967), Chapter VI.
2 In January 1886 Morris had written to Mahon: “Aveling—hem hem! he has been behaving more than queerly to the Woolwich people about some science lessons he was to have given there. They however couldn’t quite make a hanging matter of it, and weak attacks strengthen the object of them…”: R. Page Arnot, op. cit, p. 56.
3 Tsuzuki, op. city pp. 308–9.
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1 F. Engels, Paul and Laura Lafargue, Correspondence (Moscow, 1959), pp. 45–6.
2 First edition, p. 867.
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1 Engels to Laura Lafargue, September 13th, 1886, in Engels-Lafargue Correspondence, II, p. 370. As Page Arnot has remarked (op. cit., p.40): “in none of his correspondence after the death of Marx does Engels give unqualified praise to any Briton, middle class or working class. Outside the circle of the Marx family, there is no Englishman or Scotsman for whom Engels has really a good word to say.”
2In January 1886 Morris commented on Aveling: “I wish he would join Hyndman and let them have a hell of their own like the Texas Ranger.” In the summer of 1887, when it became apparent that the Aveling group were refusing to accept the decision of the Third Annual Conference, and were forming a continuing opposition, he wrote to Mahon: “In no spirit of hostility I recommend the parliamentary section of the League to join the Federation.” By October 1887 he saw the threat of renewed disruption within the League as coming from the “Marxist” section, writing to Mahon: “I am in hopes we shall yet turn our backs on our quarrels; only there is not one back but Bax who is being steeped in the Marxite pickle over at Zurich who I fear will want some sitting on when he returns, it would be very foolish to let him embroil everything again merely to get a compact adherence to the German Social Democrats.” R. Page Arnot, pp. 56, 70, 74. For Bax’s close contacts with Engels in August 1887, see Engels-Laf argue Correspondence, II, p. 58.
3 See first edition, p. 553 n.1 and (for Champion) H.H. Pelling, “H.H. Champion”, Cambridge Historical Journal, VI, 1953.
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1 First edition, p. 869.
2 This ill-advised comment evidently came to Mahon’s ears: but when he wrote to Morris complaining of it, in September, Morris appears to have forgotten that he had made it: see R. Page Arnot, op. cit, p. 72.
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1 The Gateway, November, 1941.
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1 Northern Figaro, October 8th, 1887.
2 First edition, p. 870. Tom Mann in Newcastle, at about this time, was experiencing the same hardships and humiliations. He had been forced to sell his violin, his telescope-and his books, and bitterly resented being accused of being “a paid agitator”: See Dona Torr, op. cit, pp. 244–6.
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1 R. Page Arnot, op. cit., pp. 68–70, 71.
2 G. McLean (Sec, Propaganda Committee, Glasgow S.L.) and four others to Secretary, S.L., December 2nd, 1887: Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
3 R. Page Arnot, op. cit., p. 90.
4 Glasier MSS., December 21st, 1887.
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1 Secretary, North Shields, to Secretary, S.L., August 22nd, 1887, S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
2 Ibid., Secretary, East Holywell, to Secretary, S.L., November 28th, 1887.
3 Glasier, op. cit, p. 190.
4 First edition, p. 870. In a few month’s time Mahon was to be supporting Keir Hardie’s electoral intervention at Mid-Lanark: see R. Page Arnot, pp. 74–5.
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1 Glasier MSS., January 28th, 1888.
2 Hammersmith Minutes, June 19th, 1887. The Hammersmith Branch turned down the proposal.
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1 Commonweal, February 26th, 1887.
2 Ibid., June 25th, 1887.
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1 Commonweal, June 18th, 1887.
2 Socialists and the Jubilee. A Word on the Class War (Socialist League handbill).
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1 For the S.D.F.’s part in the unemployed agitation, see Lee, op. cit., pp. 125–30. Morris’s commem-; in his Diary are published in part in Mackail, II, pp. 175–6, and conclude: “It a riot is quite spontaneous it does frighten the bourgeois even if it is but isolated; but planned riots or shows of force are no good unless in a time of action, when they are backed by the opinion of the people and are in point of fact indications of the rising tide…” Of a torchlight procession organized by the Clerkenwell and Marylebone branches of the S.D.F. in commemoration of the “riots” of 1886, Morris noted: “a stupid thing to do unless they had strength and resolution to make a big row, which they know they have not got.” On the other hand, Morris took part in several unemployed demonstrations, both in Hammersmith and in London (see Vallance, op. cit., p. 341), and Joseph Pennell recollected one church parade from Trafalgar Square to Westminster Abbey: “An enormous crowd began to pour out of the Square down Parliament Street… On they came, with a sort of irresistible force,… and right in front—among the red flags, singing with all his might the ‘Marseillaise’—was William Morris. He had the face of a Crusader, and he marched with that big stick of his, as the Crusaders must have marched” (quoted in Labour Leader, October 10th, 1896).
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1 G.B. Shaw, The Fabian Society: What It has Done and How It has Dont It (Fabian Tract No. 41, 1892), pp. 7–10.
2 “The Truth About the Unemployed, By One of Them”, Commonweal, November 26th, 1887.
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1 Commonweal, October 22nd, 1887. The Glasgow Branch passed a vigorous protest against this resolution, which it accused of giving the impression of “callousness or indifference”. Glasier, in a well-argued covering letter (October 24th, 1887), said he had found it “no easy task to maintain the principle that we cannot secure any adequate amelioration of the condition of the unemployed under the existing system”. The comrades had maintained that “cases of absolute starvation must have to the living generation a claim above all abstract principles”. In Glasgow the City Council had a large fund for “the common good” and unreclaimed land on which to give employment to the unemployed, and the comrades urged an agitation for the employment of direct labour (“without middlemen or contractors”) on socially useful tasks. Such measures, so far from weakening Socialist support among the unemployed, “would be of immense advantage as means of creating a sympathy and interest in our propaganda if we took the lead in the matter… as in the case of the Lanarkshire miners’ strike”. S.L. Correspondence, Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.
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1 The Times, November 12th, 1887.
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1 The Times, November 14th, 1887.
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1 Account of G.B. Shaw, quoted by Vallance, op. cit., p. 338.
2 Scheu, op. cit., Part III, Ch. VI.
3 Remember Trafalgar Square (Pall Mall Gazette “Extra”). Account by Sir E. Reed, M.P.
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1 W.B. Curner and Connell died soon after Bloody Sunday; another victim, Harrison, died after a lingering illness. Linnell received his injuries on another occasion.
2 The Times, November 14th, 1887.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 46345.
2“London in a State of Siege”, Commonweal, November 19th, 1887.
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1 William B. Curner, a prominent Deptford Radical and Secularist, was buried with public ceremony on January 7th, 1888, William Morris’s “Death Song” closing the proceedings.
2 Commonweal, November 10th, 1888.
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1 Glasier, op. cit., p. 190.
2 Mackail, II, p. 193.
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1 Commonweal, December 24th, 1887.
2 MS. reminiscences of H.A. Barker in the Walthamstow Collection.
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1 See Morris to Glasse, March 2nd, 1888: “I don’t think the Glasgow people have chosen a good subject: who cares about history? I think I shall refuse to give it them. I think I might make Trafalgar Square the subject of the lecture at Edinburgh. I notice that out of London people are quite ignorant of the subject” (Glasse MSS).
2 See Glasier, op. cit., p. 190, where Morris writes (December 21st, 1887): “I shall be glad to let the Pall Mall Gazette go on its way now… Ordinary meetings have been somewhat neglected for these bigger jobs.”
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1 Letters, p. 280.
2 May Morris, II, p. 268.
3 Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life, pp. 323–4.
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1 Bax, op. cit., pp. 87–8.
2 Vallance, op. cit., p. 339.
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1 See G.B. Shaw, “William Morris as I Knew Him”, Preface to May Morris, II, p. xii.
2 Labour Leader, October 10th, 1896.
3 Fabian Tract, No. 41 (1892), pp. 9–10.
4 For example, the League wished him to be their protagonist in debate with Bradlaugh, but Shaw made so many difficulties about the wording of the resolution to be debated that it was impossible to continue.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45345.
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1 Fabian Tract No. 41.
2 Fabian Essays (1889), p. 201. See also Alick West, A Good Man Fallen Among Fabians, pp. 34–47.
3 May Morris, II, p. xx.
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1 “What We Have to Look For” (March 30th, 1895), Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45334.
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1 Letters, p. 280.
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1 See account in Glasier, op. cit., p. 47.
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1 Commonweal, September 24th, 1887.
2 “Whigs, Democrats and Socialists” (Signs of Change, 1888, pp. 42–3).
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1 Glasier, op. cit, pp. 47 ff.
2 Glasier, op. cit, p. 50, and Report of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Socialist League, passim. 3
3 Philip Webb was now Treasurer of the League, but was inactive during much of 1887-8 owing to illness.
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1 Glasier, op. cit, p. 122.
2 Glasier MSS., May 29th, 1888.
3 The MS. of Mainwaring’s motion in the Nettlau Collection, and reference to it in the Council’s Weekly Letter to Branches, May 14th, 1888; also extract from the Minutes of the Council, June 4th, 1888, suspending the Bloomsbury Branch on account of “this insult to the League” (Int. Inst. Soc. Hist.).
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1 Almost the only reference to this famous election fight in Morris’s correspondence is in a letter to his daughter May, March 26th, 1888, referring to Mahon: “He is on some electioneering job or trying to be: for a candidate (labour) who is going to contest Mid-Lanark” (Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45341). For a good account of the circumstances of the Mid-Lanark election, see H.M. Pelling, op. cit., pp. 68–73.
2 Letters, p. 291.