I. The Kelmscott Press
“I AM not going to retire”, Morris wrote to Glasier on December 16th, 1890. “We Hammersmith-ers will… be eager to join in any arrangement which would bring us together.” Certainly, Morris did not think of his defeat as the signal for his withdrawal from active propaganda. Rather, he felt that in breaking with the Anarchists he had untied his hands for cooperation with the general movement. Before deciding the form which this co-operation might take, he wanted time to take new bearings. Meanwhile, he turned to organizing the half of the League that remained in the new Hammersmith Socialist Society.1
The “Rules” and “Statement of Principles” of the Hammersmith Society were ratified on January 2nd, 1891. It was declared:
“That the object of the Society shall be the spreading of the principles of Socialism, especially by Lectures, Street-Meetings, and Publications, and its funds be applicable to that object only.”2
The “Statement of Principles”, drafted by Morris, was of a very general character, and marked a low ebb in his usually vigorous style. The new society, it declared, could only be won “by the conscious exertions of those who have learned to know what Socialism is”. Both Anarchism and Parliamentarian-ism were disclaimed, but little was put in their places other than the general aim of “making Socialists”—
“by putting before people, and especially the working-classes, the elementary truths of Socialism; since we feel sure… that in spite of the stir in the ranks of labour, there are comparatively few who understand what Socialism is…”
But there was no attempt in the Statement to represent the Society as holding to the only pure and true Socialist doctrine, or to set it forward as a rival national centre to Fabians or S.D.F. Morris was temporizing.
If Morris refused to acknowledge that he was beaten, it would be foolish to minimize the bitterness of his defeat. “I have got to rewrite the manifesto for the new Hammersmith Society”, he wrote on December 9th—“and that I must do this very night: it is a troublesome and difficult job, and I had so much rather go on with my Saga work.”1 Now, as before, his reflex when faced with disappointment was to plunge himself into other work. The volume of his writing had been growing throughout the previous eighteen months. In the summer of 1890 he had embarked upon the Kelmscott Press in earnest. Now, in January, 1891, his preparations were complete: a cottage was rented close to his Hammersmith home, and the Press was installed.
Notwithstanding this new interest, which was to sustain him for the rest of his life, suddenly, in February, 1891, Morris’s health collapsed. More than once before attacks of gout had followed hard upon the heels of some disappointment, and it is reasonable to connect this most serious illness of all with the failure of the League, and with his distress at a new turn for the worse in the condition of his daughter, Jenny. His illness was more grave than has generally been realized, and it may have represented the first onset of the diabetic condition from which he died. In the middle of March, May Morris wrote to Glasier that Morris was still too ill to write: he was “terribly low-spirited”, and anxiety over his daughter Jenny had “terribly upset my Father’s nerves”. On March 27th, her husband, Halliday Sparling, was writing:
“Morris is on the mend… is now quite cheerful, which is an immense gain. Part of the time he was fearfully depressed, and talked about dying… He will write when he can hold a pen comfortably.” 1
By April he was back at his work: “It is a fine thing to have some interesting work to do, and more than ever when one is in trouble—I found that out the other day.”2 In May, June and July he spent much time at Folkestone, convalescing from his own illness, and keeping company with Jenny who was recovering from hers. But he was by no means fit. On July 29th he was writing to Geòrgie: “I am ashamed to say that I am not as well as I should like, and am even such a fool as to be rather anxious…”3 In August he went with Jenny for a holiday in France (on “doctor’s orders”): despite his impatience at being taken from his work with the Press, he was refreshed by the journey, writing lengthy architectural commentaries to Emery Walker and Philip Webb.4 “I have given myself up to thinking of nothing but the passing day and keeping my eyes open”, he wrote from France.5 It was not until the autumn that he was fit enough to take up his work with the Press once again.
The illness left its mark. It is only necessary to compare a photograph of Morris in the late 1880s with one in his last years to see how rapidly he must have aged between 1890 and 1893. No longer did he have that excess of energy which had enabled him to do the business of half a dozen ordinary men. A new mood of resignation was growing upon him. His temper was becoming more equable, his outbursts of rage more rare. He knew that he would not see Socialism in his own life-time. He knew that as a practical leader of the movement he had failed. He had given the best of his mind and energies to the “Cause”, and now, when he must have known that he had not many more years to live, he allowed himself to enjoy his pleasures. Once again he attended sales of manuscripts and early printed books, and added to his collection. Both his last prose romances and his work with the Kelmscott Press were undertaken in this mood.
The Kelmscott Press, about which much has already been written by experts,1 was founded in a different spirit from that in which the original Firm had been launched thirty years before. Morris now had no thought of reforming the world through his art, and little thought of reforming contemporary printing and book production. Indeed, he did not seek to justify his pleasure in any way. The Press was simply a source of delight and relaxation, in which his craft as designer and his craft as a writer both found expression. His son-in-law, Halliday Sparling, who was closely associated with the venture, described the Press as “a personal experiment to see what could be done at his own expense in the way of producing a decent book”.2 It was his intention at first neither to publish nor to sell the books, but only to work at the designing of type and at printing as a private hobby. In the outcome, the high cost of his experiments made it essential that he should recoup some of his losses by publishing a limited edition of each work. The prices of the books were prohibitive for the general public. “When he has paid a high price for his paper”, Frank Colebrook recalled,
“hand-made from the linen shirts of certain peasants; when he has used black ink at about 10 shillings a pound; when he has designed his three types and had them cut; when he has paid fair wages to his workmen, from whom he does not require a longer week than 46½ hours—nor, indeed, bind them down to any specified time—he is not able to sell the product of all this for a less sum.”1
As each new book came off the Press, he dissipated any possible profit by distributing copies among his closest friends. “You see… I do the books mainly for you and one or two others”, he wrote to Philip Webb in August, 1894.2 With the exception of one small job for the new London County Council, Morris executed no outside orders at the Press. The atmosphere of the place was rather that of a studio than of a business. Entering the Press once, Morris found the foreman, Mr. Bowden, “in the depth of dismay”. A long deal slab with dozens of page formes on it had collapsed, and all the type was pied. Morris regarded the disaster with equanimity. “Oh then,” he remarked, “this is what you call ‘pie’… Ah well, we must put it straight. I came up to tell you that you must take a holiday on May 1st, Labour Day…”3
In October, 1892, Morris cancelled an engagement to lecture in Glasgow, writing: “At present the absolute duties of my life are summed up in the necessity for taking care of my wife and daughter… My work of all kinds is really simply an amusement taken when I can out of my duty time.”4 The Kelmscott Press proved to be the perfect form of creative relaxation for him in his last years, since he could continue with his designing even when in poor health or confined to bed. The scale of his work was so costly, and his favourite Gothic type was so unfamiliar, that his work could not have an immediate influence upon popular book production. “Morris’s achievement”, in the view of Gerald Crow,
“is more conspicuously that of having awakened general interest in the production of volumes beautiful in every feature (including an appropriate type and an insistence upon well-proportioned margins), than of having contributed to type-design as an independent and specialised art.”1
This stimulus to general interest provided by the Press was probably the greatest single factor in the revival of fine printing, both in England and in Europe, in succeeding years.
So, with his work at the Press, visits to Kelmscott Manor, work on the prose romances and his translations, and occasional propaganda for the Socialist movement or for Anti-Scrape, he passed his last few years. The intense nervous energy which had sustained him through the 1880s was flagging, and was giving way to a note of peace unknown in his life before, and given expression in some verses written for his old bed at Kelmscott Manor in the summer of 1891:
“I am old and have seen
Many things that have been;
Both grief and peace
And wane and increase.
No tale I tell
Of ill or well,
But this I say,
Night treadeth on day,
And for worst and best
Right good is rest.”
II. Goodbye to the Anarchists
Despite his recent illness, from which he had scarcely recovered, Morris was present at London’s May Day in 1891. He spoke, not at a splinter meeting as in the year before, but at the main demonstration of May the Third. Aveling was Chairman of his platform, and Cunninghame Graham, Shaw, and Harry Quelch (of the S.D.F.) spoke beside him, while Engels, a spectator, sat on the platform. This was symbolic of the direction of his last years of work for the “Cause”.
For the greater part of the next year, his activities were limited to his own society at Hammersmith. It was certainly in a healthy state. A regular audience of between forty and seventy attended its Sunday lectures. In addition a monthly discussion meeting was held, and at the weekly business meetings, which Morris usually attended,1 twenty and more members were regularly present. Throughout the year, summer and winter, the open-air stands were kept open, with a regular audience of 300 at the Hammersmith Bridge site. Morris was still a frequent open-air speaker, sometimes carrying the banner and platform himself to the Bridge or to the Latimer Road arches. With Commonweal now a monthly Anarchist broadsheet, the Society sought for another paper to sell at their propaganda meetings. Justice was passed over in favour of the Labour Leader (Keir Hardie’s paper), and then for Burgess’s Workman’s Times. Early in 1892 both of these were given up in favour of Robert Blatchford’s more forthright Socialist paper, the Clarion. Meanwhile, in October, 1891, the Society commenced publication of a small four-page monthly, the Hammersmith Socialist Record.
The Hammersmith Socialist Society provided a platform where every opinion within the movement could find expression. Lecturers in 1891, 1892 and the first three months of 1893 included Morris (eight times), Hyndman (twice), Keir Hardie (February, 1893), Shaw (three times), Scheu, Stuart Headlam, Bax, Graham Wallas, Carruthers, Edouard Bernstein, Shaw Maxwell, Robert Banner, Sidney Olivier, Stepniak, Herbert Burrows, D.J. Nicoll, Tom Mann and many others. In October, 1891, the Society took some provisional steps towards giving support to a candidate of the Chelsea S.D.F. in the School Board elections, but relations were later broken off. Slowly Morris was beginning to shed his purist attitudes, and to revive in spirit.
Ever since that day of bright sunshine in April, 1887, when Morris had addressed the striking Northumbrian miners, he had been particularly responsive to events in the coalfields. Here he had gained a sense of the tremendous power of the organized workers in action. In the London streets he saw only the fragments, “ground down by the life of our easygoing hell”. The great strikes of 1890 had won his immediate enthusiasm. Now, in 1892 and 1893, further great strikes in the coalfields helped him to complete his own “education”. In his comments of 1890 he well understood the miners’ power; but he suggested that their knowledge “of what to claim” must come from the independent Socialist propaganda outside their own ranks. In April, 1892, writing in the Hammersmith Socialist Record, he expressed clearly for the first time the importance of the educative role of the struggle itself. After pointing to the half-hearted “Lib.-Lab.” leadership of the miners, he continued:
“The conduct of the labour war under its present purblind guidance and weak organization will teach the workers by hard necessity. Their very mistakes will force them into looking into the facts of their position; their gains will show them how wretchedly they live still; their losses will show them that they must take the responsibility of their labour and lives on their own shoulders. They will learn that there is no necessity for masters, and therefore that the masters need not be paid at the dire price to the workers of their foregoing all the pleasure and dignity of life. And then they will use the power which all are now beginning to see that they have got, and true Society will be born.”
If Morris was coming closer towards Engels’s position, events were placing a gulf between him and his former comrades of the League. After November, 1890, the remaining “Leftists”, such as Kitz, Tochatti and Mainwaring, were quickly swamped by the pronounced Anarchists. The innate tendency of the Anarchists towards the liquidation of all organization ensured that the League, as a national organization, did not survive after February, 1891. Morris, before leaving, had paid up all debts to the end of 1890, leaving the type, plant and copyright of Commonweal, without any liabilities, in the hands of the Council. For a month or two, indeed, he seems to have hoped that the Hammersmith Society might continue selling the paper at their own propaganda meetings.1 But it was obvious within a few weeks that this would be impossible. Angry replies to “Where are We Now?” by Dr. Creaghe (of Sheffield) and Charles Mowbray in the issue of November 29th revealed only too clearly that Morris had got out of the League only just in time. Creaghe advocated “really revolutionary action” to “show our contempt for what is called private property”:
“Every man should take what he requires of the wealth around him, using violence whenever necessary, and when dragged before his enemies he should tell them plainly that he has done what he knows to be right…”
“I feel confident”, wrote Mowbray, “that a few determined men… could paralyse the forces of our masters.” The means, he suggested, were “gatlings, hand-grenades, strychnine, and lead… Everywhere there are signs of the bloody conflict which is about to take place between the workers and their masters.” Dynamite, above all, was the weapon for revolutionaries: “the people could carry it around in their pockets… and destroy whole cities and whole armies.” Thereafter Commonweal became once again a monthly: in February, 1891, it was announced as the property of the newly-formed “London Socialist League”; in May it was subtitled, “A Revolutionary Journal of Anarchist Communism”. The formation of the London League did not mean the complete extinction of all provincial support: groups of Anarchists still persisted in Walsall, Leicester, Glasgow, Norwich, Hull, Leeds, and, above all, Sheffield. Rather, it signified an intensification of the process by which every Anarchist constituted himself into “a committee of one”.
“Hurrah! for the kettle, the club, and the poker Good medicine always, for landlord and broker…”
So carolled D.J. Nicoll and the “moderate” section of the old League (Mainwaring, Mowbray, John Turner and W.B. Parker) when advertising a “No Rent” meeting in July, 1891, on a handbill headed “MURDER!”1 In the next few years a rash of Anarchism was to appear in one major city after another. It took all sorts of shapes and colours: there was the sober group around Kropotkin and Edward Carpenter, which published Freedom; there was the studious and restrained old friend of Morris, the tailor, James Tochatti, who lived at Carmagnole House, Railway Approach, Hammersmith, and who (after 1893) edited Liberty; there was the old Autonomic Club, in Windmill Street, where foreign refugees hatched real conspiracies: the Jewish Anarchist Club in Berners Street; the Scandinavian Club, in Rathbone Place; the Christian Anarchists, the Associated Anarchists, the Collectivist Anarchists, Socialist Anarchists, the followers of Albert Tarn and those of Benjamin Tucker. Papers published, on blue paper, red paper, and toilet paper, ranged from the Anarchist, Commonweal, Alarm and Sheffield Anarchist, to the Firebrand, Revenge, British Nihilist and Dan Chatterton’s Atheistic Communistic Scorcher.
It would be impossible to understand the vagaries of sincere and self-sacrificing Socialists like Sam Mainwaring, James Tochatti and Fred Charles,2 unless one fact is recognized: the Anarchist groupings were now deeply penetrated by spies, and deliberately used by agents-provocateurs to discredit the wider movement. In France this process went so far that one Anarchist journal was actually subsidized by the police. It is doubtful whether the British police ever troubled to go so far as this, but undoubtedly by 1890 they were learning from their Continental colleagues that the Anarchists could create dissension far out of proportion to their small numbers. In 1890 the Anarchist Leaguers were physically driven off by the dockers, after bringing their red flag and their bluster to a dockers’demonstration.1 In Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham and other cities, the Anarchist Communists aroused disgust among the workers by advocating immediate forcible actions, or the “propaganda by deed”. The fact that prosecutions were infrequent needs no explanation. It was in the interests of the police to prosecute only when their agents had succeeded in manufacturing a “conspiracy” which would provide a Nine Days’ Wonder in the Press.
Such an occasion was reached in February,$1892. The agent in this case was Auguste Coulon, who had been connected with the French Possibilists, had worked for a few months within the Social Democratic Society in Dublin, and had come to England, joining the North Kensington Branch (an offshoot and close relation of the Hammersmith Branch) of the League in January, 1890. He posed as a militant Anarchist; wrote stirring and convincing “International Notes” for Commonweal; and visited the Hammersmith Branch frequently, selling copies of L’Indicateur Anarchiste, a terrorist manual (compiled, it is said, by a French detective) containing instructions on the making of bombs and dynamite. He joined the Autonomic Club, and imposed upon the noble Anarchist refugee, Louise Michel, who was running a school in Fitzroy Square. As Louise Michel’s assistant he appeared to other Anarchists to be above suspicion.
In 1891, after Morris had left the League, Coulon got to work in earnest, and there is no doubt that he had assistants in his work. He approached Nicoll to commence the “propaganda by deed” (theft), but was rebuffed. He won the confidence of Fred Charles, accompanied him to Sheffield, where, with Dr. Creaghe, he published some numbers of the SheffieId Anarchist. In July, 1891, he found his way to Walsall, where he got into touch with a tiny Socialist Club of Anarchist complexion, and got on to friendly terms with John Westley, a brush-manufacturer, and the Secretary, Deakin, who worked in an iron foundry. Returning to London, he sent a French Anarchist refugee, Victor Cailes, down to Walsall, asking the comrades to look after him and find him some work. A few weeks later a letter reached Cailes, signed “Degnal”, and including a sketch of a bomb which he was asked to manufacture. Cailes wrote to Coulon, who informed him that the request was authentic, and that the bombs were being made for use by the Russian Nihilists. Cailes and Fred Charles, who was now in Walsall, agreed to do what they could.
Meanwhile, Coulon was hard at work in London. In August, 1891, a “Revolutionary Conference” was held in the Jewish Anarchist Club in Berners Street. Coulon was present, advocating the formation of chemistry classes, to study the making of explosives; and several such groups of “mere boys” were formed. Nicoll, the Editor, and Mowbray, the publisher of Commonweal, were invited to join, but both (on their own evidence) declined. Nevertheless, they allowed Coulon to continue writing his “International Notes”, in which he showered praise on every terrorist attempt abroad. “No voice speaks so loud as Dynamite”, he wrote in December, 1891, “and we are glad to see it is getting into use all over the place.” His example was infectious; other comrades tried to outdo him by the fury of their bluster. In the last months of 1891 the Commonweal advocated theft, train-robbery, assassination, the sacking of warehouses and of jewellers’ shops and indiscriminate terrorism. Later, even Nicoll came to understand how he had been duped:
“Thus the great conspiracy was worked up. Violent paragraphs in The Commonweal, a book on explosives in the Press [Johann Most’s latest production], the bombs at Walsall, Nitro-Glycerine in the hands of a mere child in London. Voila the widespread conspiracy of which Mr. A. Young, the council for the Treasury, spoke in an awestruck tone at the commencement of the case. Coulon understood his trade…”1
So it was that the great Walsall Anarchist Case was sprung on the public in February, 1892. Coulon, in December, 1891, and January, 1892, sent urgent messages to Deakin to hurry up. Jean Battola, an Italian shoemaker, was sent from London to Walsall to get the bomb. From this time onwards, the Walsall group were shadowed. Deakin, sent by Cailes with a bottle of chloroform to London, was shadowed to the Autonomic Club, where he was arrested. The arrest of Fred Charles, Cailes, Westley, Battola and another Walsall anarchist implicated in the bomb manufacture, Ditchfield, followed in the early days of January. Coulon, denounced by his colleagues, disappeared into hiding in London; his brother admitted in an unguarded moment that Coulon had for two years been in the pay of the police. In prison, Deakin was brought to confess the whole “conspiracy” after the police had staged the voices of a bogus “confession” of his supposed comrades in the next cell. The authorities took their revenge. Despite the fact that all evidence pointed to Coulon as the real instigator, despite the fact that there was no evidence of any overt act beyond the making of the bomb which Charles and Deakin seem genuinely to have believed was meant for Russia, and despite the fact that the defence solicitor, Thompson, extracted from Chief-Inspector Melville the admission that he “had paid lots of Anarchists money”,2 savage sentences of ten years’ penal servitude were passed on Charles, Cailes and Battola; five years on Deakin; while only Westley and Ditchfield were acquitted.
The Press had their Nine Days’ Wonder, and used the occasion to the utmost. Nicoll rushed to the defence of his comrades with a mixture of courage and stupidity. He published in Commonweal on April 9th, 1892, an article (“Are these men fit to live?”), which could hardly fail to be interpreted as inciting to the murder of the Judge in the Walsall Case, and of Chief Inspector Melville. On April 18th, the police raided the Commonweal office, effectively suppressing a number of the paper which exposed Coulon’s part in the “conspiracy”. Nicoll and Mowbray were arrested, and held jointly responsible for the article of April 9th: “You will be sorry to see”, Morris wrote to his daughter on the 21st, “that Nicoll and Mowbray, two of our old comrades, have got into trouble with the Commonweal It was very stupid of Nicoll, for it seems that he stuck in his idiotic article while Mowbray was away, so that the latter knew nothing of it. I think Mowbray will get off. I am sorry for him, and even for the Commonweal”1 Mowbray’s wife had died a day or two before the arrest, and he was refused permission to attend the funeral, until Morris came before the Court and entered into surety for him for JE500.2 In the event, Nicoll was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment. With all his faults, he was no coward, and he succeeded in carrying on the fight for Fred Charles and his other comrades from prison.
It was one thing for Morris to come to the aid of an old comrade in distress. But it was of the first importance that he should not appear to condone the Anarchist folly which had been so deliberately engineered to discredit the Left. In the Hammersmith Socialist Record for May, 1892, he made his position plain enough:
“It is difficult to express in words strong enough the perversity of the idea that it is possible for a minority to carry on a war of violence against an overwhelming majority without being utterly crushed. There is no royal road to revolution or the change in the basis of society. To make the workers conscious of the disabilities which beset them; to make them conscious of the dormant power in them for the removal of these disabilities; to give them hope and an aim and organization to carry out their aspirations. Here is work enough for the most energetic; it is the work of patience, but nothing can take the place of it. And moreover it is being done, however slowly, however imperfectly.”
In February, 1893, when he delivered before the Hammersmith Society a lecture on “Communism”, he turned aside to emphasize the same point:
“As to the attempt of a small minority to terrify a vast majority into accepting something which they do not understand, by spasmodic acts of violence, mostly involving the death or mutilation of non-combatants, I can call that nothing else than sheer madness. And here I will say once for all, what I have often wanted to say of late… that the idea of taking any human life for any reason whatsoever is horrible and abhorrent to me.”1
The immediate effect of Walsall upon the remaining old Leaguers, who were not frightened out of the movement, was to make them suspect any and every colleague, and thereby to loosen their organization and make its penetration by spies all the more easy. “Down with the Politicians!” declared a leaflet issued in support of Commonweal:
“In the struggle which is near at hand any weapon is justifiable, but we must beware of traitors and spies… trust your life in no man’s hands. Keep your own secrets; individual initiative will paralyze the efforts and successfully defy the political pimps who seek to entrap you.”
This was not Frank Kitz’s work—he had pulled out some time before, burning the minute books of the League when he left.2 Nor is it in the style of Mainwaring or Tochatti, who were both, in their own ways, responsible men. Commonweal now appeared over the name of an old member of the League Council, T. Cantwell, and with unsigned articles. “The day when a Government depot of ammunition”, declared an article entitled “Revolution and Physical Force” on August 6th, 1892, “can be safely and suddenly made to vanish into the hands of those who will use it in self defence… the prestige of the State will have received a shock from which it will find it hard to recover.” How true!
The name “Commonweal” persisted off and on for several more years, but the old League was splitting into smaller and smaller factions. Nicoll, on his release from prison, engaged in bitter polemic with his old comrades, who would not permit him to resume the editorship of the paper.1 He was now a pathetic figure; he surrounded his life in imaginary conspiracy, and his conversation returned again and again to the subject of police spies. To his credit, he never gave up the fight for his imprisoned comrades. He resumed the editorship of a spasmodic Commonweal, hawking it at meetings to gain a wretched livelihood. Later, he sold pitiful, child-like stories scrawled in coloured crayons, in return for which old comrades and sympathizers gave him donations, until his life ended in St. Pancras Workhouse in 1919.2
The remaining Anarchist Communists scattered in different directions, Kitz, Turner, Mainwaring and Tochatti all playing a more sober part on the extreme left-wing of the movement.3 Once more Morris went into Court to help one of his old comrades—this time Tom Cantwell, who had been charged with “soliciting the murder of members of the Royal Family”.1 Only with Tochatti, at Hammersmith, did he remain on friendly personal terms. In December, 1893, Tochatti asked Morris to write an article for his Liberty. During the previous two years a series of Anarchist outrages had taken place on the Continent; in 1892 Ravachol was arrested after several explosions in Paris; in October, 1892, the Mayor of Chicago was assassinated, an attempt was made to blow up the Spanish Cortes, and a bomb was placed in front of the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company. In 1893, at Barcelona, a bomb was thrown in the Liceo Theatre, killing about twenty of the audience; in Paris a bomb was thrown in the French Chamber of Deputies by August Vaillant; and, late in the year, there were further incidents in Spain and Italy. These were the circumstances in which Morris replied to Tochatti on December 21st, 1893:
“I do not remember having promised to contribute to your paper, though I do remember promising to write a pamphlet for you. In any case however considering the attitude which some anarchists are taking up about the recent anarchist murders, and attempts to murder, I could not in conscience allow anything with my name attached to it to appear in an anarchist paper, (as I understand yours is to be) unless you publish in said paper a distinct repudiation of such monstrosities.
“Here I might make an end, but since we have been in friendly association, I will ask you if you do not think you ought for your own sake as (I should hope) a person holding views which may be reasonably argued about [‘against’ deleted], to repudiate the use of means which can bring with them nothing but disaster to the cause of liberty. For your own sake and for those who honestly think that the principles of anarchy are right. For I cannot for the life of me see how such principles, which propose the abolition of compulsion, can admit of promiscuous slaughter as a means of converting people.”2
Tochatti gave the repudiation Morris asked for, and Morris, in his turn, fulfilled his part of the bargain by allowing him to print “Why I am a Communist” in Liberty, and, later, to reprint it as a pamphlet. In May, 1895, Tochatti secured from Morris a further article for Liberty, “As to Bribing Excellence”.1
In 1894 the first pathetic action of the Anarchists in England took place—a French member of the Autonomic Club, Martial Bourdin, blew himself up on his way to destroy (it was supposed) the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. As for Morris, his final opinions on the Anarchist movement were given in an interview with Justice on January 27th, 1894:
“I regard it as simply a disease—a social disease caused by the evil conditions of society. I cannot regard it in any other light. Of course, as a Socialist I regard the Anarchists—that is, those who believe in Anarchism pure and simple—as being diametrically opposed to us.”
“You are not opposed to insurrectionary methods simply because they are insurrectionary?” he was asked: and he replied:
“No, but because they are inexpedient. Here in England, at any rate, it would be simply madness to attempt anything like an insurrection… Anarchism, as a theory, negatives society, and puts man outside it. Now, man is unthinkable outside society. Man cannot live or move outside it.”
III. The Rejection of Purism
“What do you think of the L.C.C. election?” Morris asked Glasier, in March, 1892:
“I am pleased on the whole. It is certainly the result of the Socialist movement, and is a Labour victory, as the affair was worked by the Socialist and Labour people… Of course, I don’t think much of gas and-water Socialism, or indeed of any mere mechanical accessories to Socialism; but I can see that the spirit of the thing is bettering, and in spite of all disappointments I am very hopeful.”1
In the elections the Progressives—an alliance of the London Liberal and Radical Union, the Metropolitan Radical Federation, trade unions, nonconformist bodies, and Fabians—had won the victory, with six Fabian candidates (including the twenty-four-year-old ex-Leaguer, Fred Henderson) securing election. The S.D.F., which had conducted an independent campaign, had secured some fair-sized votes. Slowly the propagandist work of ten years was beginning to take solid organizational form. In the North, the I.L.P. was taking shape, and the independent labour unions were coming into being. In London the Fabians were the first Socialist grouping to win any effective following of voters. In the previous year over 25,000 copies of the cheap edition of Fabian Essays had been sold. In Hammersmith they were making a determined effort to establish a strong group, and very possibly Shaw and his friends hoped that Morris’s disillusion in the League would throw him into their arms. Notable converts were made: Halliday Sparling (once as extreme a Leftist as the League contained), Sam Bullock (the Editor of the Hammersmith Record), Ernest Radford, Walter Crane, A. Beasley and (later) May Morris herself—all prominent members of the Hammersmith Socialist Society. In the provinces, too, in the two years preceding the formation of the I.L.P., remarkable events were taking place in the Fabian Society. Old Leaguers-Leonard Hall in Manchester, Tom Maguire and Alf. Mattison in Leeds—had, in default of any other organization, joined the Society, and were promoting working-class groups in their areas. During 1893 nearly all these working-class provincial groups were absorbed into the I.L.P.
In the Record for August, 1892, Morris commented at greater length on the general development of the movement, as evidenced by the General Election, in which Keir Hardie was returned for West Ham, John Burns for Battersea, and J. Havelock Wilson (the seamen’s leader) for Middlesbrough. In addition, thirteen “Lib.-Lab.” candidates had been returned; Ben Tillett, fighting both Liberal and Conservative at East Bradford, had come within a few hundred of victory; and on Morris’s home ground at Hammersmith, Frank Smith, standing as independent Labour, had polled 3,718 against the Conservative’s 4,387. Morris withdrew none of his previous comments upon the institution of Parliament—“an institution… which would be a permanent and striking failure, if it were the business of parliament to do anything; but which, as it is the business of parliament to do nothing, must be considered a very fair success”. Once again, he spoke of “the cowardice, irresolution, chicanery, and downright lies in action, which after a little swamp all parliaments”. But the election itself he thought remarkable for one thing, “the weight that the instincts of the working men as working men have had in the polling”. The Labour Party of three would be able to do nothing: but their election was “significant of the change which is coming over working-class opinion; for they must be looked on by everyone not blinded by party politics as a protest against the organized hypocrisy of the two great (?) political parties…”:
“For us Socialists this obvious move forward of the class-feeling is full of real hope; for we cannot doubt that it is the result of the last ten years of Socialist agitation… Now once more it is incumbent on the Socialists whose ideas of Socialism are clear, who know what they are aiming at, to clear the essentials of Socialism from the mere passing accidents of the new form of the struggle between labour and capital. It is our business to show the workers that the essential thing is not an improved administrative machinery… not a more perfect form of joint-stock enterprise than at present… not a system of understanding between masters and men which would rain wages when the markets were good… not mere amelioration of the condition of certain groups of labour, necessarily at the expense of others… not to level down and level up till we are all of us sharing in a poor life, stripped of energy, without art, research or pleasure… But that the essence of our aim is the destruction of property of all kinds, by means of the organization of work for the benefit of the workers only, and each and all of them… Rise of wages, shortening of hours of labour, better education, etc., all these things are good, even in themselves; but unless they are used as steps towards equality of condition, the inconvenience they will cause to the capitalists will be met by changes in the markets, and in the methods of production, which will make the gains of the workers mere names…”
Close as these expressions were to his earlier views, they mark a definite stage in the evolution of his opinions. Now, for the first time, he was prepared to acknowledge the importance of the fight for limited gains, of “steps” on the road to Socialism, provided that they were fought for with a revolutionary aim kept steadily in view. In his first lecture on “Communism”, he at last retracted from his anti-parliamentary position:
“I am no great lover of political tactics; the sordid squabble of an election is unpleasant enough for a straightforward man to deal in: yet I cannot fail to see that it is necessary somehow to get hold of the machine which has at its back the executive power of the country, however that may be done. And that the organization and labour which will be necessary to effect that by means of the ballot box will be little indeed compared with what would be necessary to effect it by open revolt…”1
It was not easy for him. His direct contacts with the North were now few. At Whitsun, 1892, Alf. Mattison of Leeds called at the Clubroom, and Morris, hearing that an old Leeds Leaguer was there, paced the garden with him for an hour, questioning him closely about events in Yorkshire, the New Unionism, and the position of Tom Maguire.2 The Clarion helped him to understand the change that was in the air. But in his own Society he was still at a disadvantage. On the one hand, there was a group of comrades who had learned their “anti-parliamentarism” so thoroughly at his feet that they had come to accept it as an inflexible doctrine for every circumstance. On the other, the parliamentary members of the Society were already being drawn into Fabian channels. He had no desire to fight the matter to an issue within his own Society, only to emerge at the end with a new sect of Morrisian parliamentary revolutionaries! His own position now approximated more closely to that of the S.D.F., so far as theory was concerned, than at any time since 1885. But, had he swallowed his own pride (as he was ready to do), and rejoined the Federation, the Hammersmith Society would have fallen into two or more parts in a matter of weeks. More important than this, he could see how the arrogant, dogmatic tone bred into the membership of the S.D.F. by ten years of Hyndman’s leadership and of isolation from the mass movement, was actually holding back the cause. In December, 1889, Engels had written to Sorge:
“Here in England one can see that it is impossible simply to drill a theory in an abstract dogmatic way into a great nation, even if one has the best of theories, developed out of their own conditions of life… The movement has now got going at last… But it is not directly Socialist, and those English who have understood our theory best remain outside it: Hyndman because he is incurably jealous and intriguing, Bax because he is only a bookworm.”1
The Federation, he wrote next year, “still behave as if everyone except themselves were asses and bunglers.” In April, 1891, he was writing of Hyndman:
“He proves how useless a platform is—theoretically correct to a large extent—if it does not show understanding of how to fasten on to the real needs of the people.”
In the most important parts of the movement, the New Unionism, and the Eight Hours’ agitation, many S.D.F. members were active, “but it is precisely those who are being drawn away from the particular influence of Hyndman, and treat the S.D.F. as a purely secondary matter”. “People who pass as orthodox Marxists”, Engels wrote in June, 1891, “have turned our ideas of movement into a fixed dogma to be learnt by heart… [and] appear as pure sects.”1
Morris echoed his words. “I sometimes have a vision of a real Socialist Party at once united and free”, he wrote to Glasier in March, 1892:
“Is it possible? Here in London it might be done, I think, but the S.D.F. stands in the way. Although the individual members are good fellows enough as far as I have met them, the society has got a sort of pedantic tone of arrogance and lack of generosity, which is disgusting and does disgust both Socialists and Non-Soc.”2
A great Socialist working-class party, “at once united and free”. It was his old dream at the founding of the League: now it was to become a central preoccupation for the rest of his life. If he was an “untalented politician” (and knew it): if he could scarcely persuade the twenty-odd most active members of the Hammersmith Socialist Society to follow his lead; nevertheless, he was gradually becoming aware that he exercised enormous influence within the young Socialist movement. Ever since the days of “Bloody Sunday” his reputation had continued to grow, despite his dwindling following in the League. His propaganda (as often as not) had been the first to be heard in this great town and that city; every group of Socialists included some who had been converted by his words, his poems, or his Signs of Change; his News from Nowhere (published in a cheap edition in 1891) was selling more widely than any other of his Socialist writings, and was making his name widely known among the workers of America and on the Continent.
If with every year that passed Morris’s stature grew greater in the eyes of the working-class movement, startling confirmation of his great reputation among his own class came when, on Tennyson’s death, he was “sounded” by a member of the Cabinet (with Gladstone’s approval) to become the next Poet Laureate.1 “What a set of ninnies the papers are about the Laureateship”, Morris wrote to Glasier on October 11th, 1892, when speculation was rife: “Treating it with such absurd solemnity! Bet you it is offered to Swinburne. Bet you he takes it…”2 Some hint of the matter reached the Press, and Blatchford sent a Clarion reporter down to Kelmscott House. First, Morris was questioned about his work with the Firm:
“ ‘It is a shoddy age’, he cried. ‘Shoddy is King. From the statesman to the shoemaker all is shoddy!’
“I concealed my boots under the table…
“ ‘Then you do not admire the commonsense John Bull, Mr. Morris?’
“ ‘John Bull is a STUPID, UNPRACTICAL OAF.’ ”
The reporter (“Quinbus Flestrin”) changed the subject:
“ ‘What do you think of Manchester, Mr. Morris?’
“The Poet started as if he had been stung, drew his pipe from his mouth, blew a gargantuan cloud, and after a pause, as if he were seeking a fitting expression, exclaimed, ‘Manchester is a big— —.’ ”
The subject was changed again:
“ ‘I see it was said in the Daily Chronicle that you had been offered the Laureateship.’
“ ‘The very idea!’ he replied. ‘As if I could possibly accept it. A PRETTY PICTURE I should cut: a Socialist Court Poet!’ And his laugh was good—exceedingly good to hear.”3
Among his friends, Morris pictured himself with joy, “sitting down in crimson plush breeches and white silk stockings to write birthday odes in honour of all the blooming little Guelphings and Battenbergs that happen to come along!”1
It was in such ways as this that the new generation of the Labour Movement of the Nineties made their acquaintance with Morris, fashioning a picture made up of humour, affection and deep respect. For ten years the capitalist Press had cast doubts upon his moral honesty or mental sanity. If the question, “How can you be a ‘capitalist’ and a Socialist at the same time?” had been asked once, it had been asked a thousand times. “This modern Moses of Socialism”, wrote the Primitive Methodist Quarterly Review in July, 1892, “prefers the ease and luxury of commercial Egypt to the arduous and risky labour of leading the hosts to their promised land.” But the mud had refused to stick. The rank and file of the Socialist movement might disagree with Morris’s tactics and misunderstand his theory; they might be amused at his manners, and mistrust the luxuries of the Firm; but one fact was known throughout the movement: Morris was incorruptible.
Morris’s long and steadfast refusal to become engaged in the bitter polemics which were such a common feature of the early movement, or to allow the columns of Commonweal to be used for personal attacks upon any section of the Socialist movement, was now beginning to bear fruit. In these last years, from 1892 to 1896, Morris stood above the movement—not in the sense of standing apart from it, but in the sense of comprising in his own person a point of unity above the divisions. He could write for the Labour Prophet (the organ of the Labour Church) although it was known that he had no interest in religion; or for Liberty without being accused of returning to Anarchism; or for Justice without bringing down on himself an attack from the Labour Leader; or he could lecture to the Fabians without being accused by Hyndman of treachery to the cause. This was in part, it is true, because he was no longer so closely engaged in the day-to-day struggle of the movement. But this very disengagement meant that he could work for the unity he so much desired with better effect.
IV. An Approach to Unity
In December, 1892, the Hammersmith Socialist Society held a discussion on the subject: “Is it now desirable to form a Socialist Federation?” The question was answered in the affirmative, and approaches were made at once to the two effective Socialist organizations in London—the S.D.F. and the Fabian Society. On December 18th, the Society appointed a special sub-committee, including Morris, “to promote the alliance of Socialist organizations in Great Britain”. From the outset, Morris advocated an alliance of autonomous bodies, rather than proposing the merging of bodies so recently in opposition to each other. By mid-January, 1893, a joint committee of the Hammersmith Society and S.D.F. was meeting, which resolved:
“It is advisable that an alliance should be established of all avowed Socialist organizations in the British Isles with the object of taking united action whenever possible without infringing on the autonomy of any organization represented.1
At the same time the Fabian Society agreed to join the “Alliance” on these very general terms. Unexpected opposition came from Morris’s own Society, which passed a resolution on February 10th, advocating the calling of a Conference of all Socialist societies by the narrow margin of fifteen to eight.
In a sense, the move towards unity was made from the wrong end. Instead of seeking to build up unity in action upon common issues of importance, Morris was seeking the acknowledgement of a general agreement upon points of Socialist theory—where disagreement was most bitter. It was largely a tribute to Morris’s own position that the Committee succeeded in achieving anything. Five delegates were appointed from each of the three societies: Morris was elected Chairman, Sydney Olivier Treasurer, and Hyndman, Morris and Shaw were appointed to draw up a joint Manifesto. Later Hyndman, characteristically, claimed the Manifesto as his own production; Shaw, more circumstantially, attributed the original drafting to Morris:
“In drafting the manifesto Morris had taken care to give some expression to both the Fabian policy and the Social Democratic Federation policy. Hyndman immediately proposed the omission of the Fabian programme of municipal Socialism, and its explicit denunciation… I was equally determined not to endorse the policy of the S.D.F. Morris soon saw that we were irreconcilable. There was nothing for it but to omit both policies and substitute platitudes that any Church Congress could have signed.”1
“The result was, I believe, a complete agreement between the three of us, though we did not formally express it, that the Manifesto was beneath contempt.”2 “It was the only document any of the three of us had ever signed that was honestly not worth a farthing.”3
So much for Shaw’s opinion. Unfortunately, it is Shaw’s opinion, which is not worth a farthing, since—the week after Morris died—he convicted himself out of his own mouth of bad faith in the whole proceedings. “I did not believe in the proposed union”, he wrote, “and, in fact, did not intend that it should be carried out if I could help it.”4 The Manifesto of English Socialists, which was issued on May 1st, 1893, bears the mark of both Morris and Hyndman, but very little of Shaw. So far from containing “platitudes that any Church Congress could have signed”, it succeeded in presenting a platform which would (if accepted in good faith) have committed the Fabian Society to a statement of revolutionary principles a good deal more explicit than they desired. As far as the drafting of unity on paper went, Morris had won a success, and had nailed down Shaw and his friends to definitive statements from which they soon sought to wriggle free. A comparison of the Fabian “Basis” and the Manifesto makes this clear enough:
“The Fabian Society consists of Socialists.
“It therefore aims at the re-organization of Society by the emancipation of Land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership, and the vesting of them in the community for the general benefit…
“The Society… works for the extinction of private property in Land… and for the transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial Capital as can conveniently be managed socially…”
In every third word is an imprecise definition, a qualification evasion. “Re-organization” as opposed to revolutionary change; “emancipation”, not of the working class, but of “Land and Industrial Capital”—to be “vested in” the community, not to be owned and controlled by the producers; the community to “administer” “such industrial Capital” (not means of production) “as can conveniently be managed”. Here are the words of the Manifesto:
“Municipalization… can only be accpeted as Socialism on the condition of its forming a part of national and at last international Socialism, in which the workers of all nations… can federate upon a common basis of the collective ownership of the great means and instruments of the creation and distribution of wealth…
“On this point all Socialists agree. Our aim, one and all, is to obtain for the whole community complete ownership and control of the means of transport, the means of manufacture, the mines, and the land. Thus we look to put an end for ever to the wage-system, to sweep away all distinctions of class, and eventually to establish national and international communism…
“To this end it is imperative on all members of the Socialist party to gather together their forces in order to formulate a definite policy and force on its general acceptance.”
From its opening paragraphs, in Morris’s manner, in which it urged the need for co-operation among all genuine Socialists, to its final pages in which it set forward definite steps for immediate campaigning,1 and urged the necessity of Socialists constituting themselves “into a distinct political party with definite aims, marching steadily along our own highway”, the Manifesto was both more constructive and more specific than Shaw, and the historian of the Fabian Society (Edward R. Pease) suggest.2 It is clear enough why “it was deemed advisable” by Shaw and Olivier to withdraw from the Committee in July.3
“Whatever other people do, we the Hammersmith people must be careful to make as little quarrel with either party as we can help”, Morris wrote to Emery Walker on August 9th, 1893, after the Fabian secession. “More and more at any rate I want to see a due Socialist party established.”4 But, if Shaw had been playing false, Hyndman was obstructing unity in a far more important direction. For, in January, 1893, the Independent Labour Party had held its first Conference in Bradford, and emerged confidently on the British scene. “You will find”, Tom Maguire wrote to Edward Carpenter in November, 1892:
“that this new party lifts its head all over the North. It has caught the people as I imagine the Chartist movement did. And it is of the people—such will be the secret of its success. Everywhere its bent is Socialist because Socialists are the only people who have a message for it…”1
Maguire had a right to rejoice. His active mind and resolute leadership had done more than any other individual in the West Riding to pilot the newly-emerged mass movement into this form. Several other old Leaguers were prominent at the first Conference of the I.L.P., among them J.L. Mahon and A.K. Donald (supported, back-stage, by H.H. Champion). Other old Leaguers present included Jowett and Pickles of Bradford, Alf. Mattison of Leeds, while in 1894 Leonard Hall of Manchester went onto the Executive.
What was Morris’s attitude to the I.L.P.? Why did the Joint Committee not include their representatives? “I really think we must have taken it for granted that the I.L.P. did not rank as a Socialist body”, Shaw wrote, when trying to answer this question.2 Once again, Shaw’s recollection played him false. Hyndman declared in his reminiscences that it was Morris’s hope that the I.L.P. would be drawn in. It can hardly be a coincidence that in February and March, 1893, the Hammersmith Socialist Society invited Keir Hardie and Shaw Maxwell (twice) to speak on their aims.3 The real cause lay in the unmeasured hostility of Hyndman and his following to the new party. “There is occasionally a cry for a united Independent Labour Party”, Justice declared while the Conference was sitting:
“A really independent labour party must be a Social-Democratic party. Outside Social-Democracy there is no basis for a labour party.”4
Engels, who declared his support for the tendency of the new party (and who approved Aveling’s action in taking a seat on its Executive), came in for a special round of abuse:
“Why is it that he carefully secludes himself, Grand Lama-like, in the Thibetan fastnesses of Regent’s Park Road, as if he were qualifying for the post of a Socialist Mahatma?”1
J.E. Dobson, of the S.D.F., who was a secretary of the Joint Committee, later crossed over to the I.L.P., where he declared the truth of the matter:
“When the Hammersmith Socialist Society, under William Morris, called for a united conference, the I.L.P. was left out, because in the eyes of the S.D.F., the I.L.P. was not a Socialist party, although the Fabians were included. He personally [Dobson] had met with nothing but censure when he proposed that the I.L.P. should be admitted…”2
So ended Morris’s most earnest attempt to promote a united party—with the Fabians frightened off by their own Manifesto, and Hyndman resolutely closing his eyes to the very existence of the I.L.P.
V. Mature Theory
It was the question of leadership, of the absorption into the mass movement of a clear, revolutionary theory—which was the constant theme of Morris’s last years. Unity in itself was not enough. The united party must be a Socialist party. The workers “need education; they want to be shown what to demand, and how to do so. This is the task of us Socialists…” Morris wrote in May, 1893.1 He distrusted the “intensely electioneering tactics of the new I.L.P., and had reservations about Keir Hardie, Robert Blatchford and its general leadership. Engels who shared this distrust, placed his confidence in the power of the mass movement to silence the petty ambitions of the leaders. “Socialism has penetrated the masses in the industrial districts enormously in the past years and I am counting on these masses to keep the leaders in order.”2 Morris did not share this confidence. While he now recognized the educative role of the struggle, he feared that the revolutionary theory might be submerged, rather than absorbed in the mass movement. The propaganda of theory, he repeatedly insisted, must not be neglected, but should rather be redoubled; although he now saw that it must come from within the movement, or in friendly alliance with it, rather than from a purist sect outside.
His article in the Labour Prophet for January, 1894, put the matter most clearly. It was still the business of Socialists to make Socialists, he began:
“Socialism has begun to take hold of the working classes, and is now a genuine working man’s movement. That is a fact, the importance of which it is impossible to overrate. But, on the other hand, the movement is taking a different form from what many, or most, of us supposed it would; a thing which was, in fact, inevitable, and which is so far encouraging that it is one of the signs of the genuineness and steadfastness of the movement. I mean, there is nothing in it of conscious and pedantic imitation of former changes—the French Revolution for instance. Abstract theories are not much in favour; less than they should be, perhaps, though time will surely mend that. As yet there is no formulated demand for a great, sudden, and obvious recasting of society… but there is a steady set towards a road which will infallibly lead us to a society recast in a Socialistic mould.
“The instinct towards Socialism is awake, and is forcing the working classes into what we now see to be the right, because it is the only course. And though as yet it may not be more than an instinct with the great mass of the workers, yet we must remember that it is headed by a great number of men (I am not speaking of those technically called ‘leaders’) who are declared Socialists, and who understand at least what may be called work-a-day Socialism. All this makes our advance much greater than we had any right to expect to come out of the then condition of things ten years ago… The first act of the great Class War has begun, for the workmen are claiming their recognition as citizens…
“But great as the gain is, our responsibilities as Socialists have increased in proportion to it. In the earlier stage of the movement they were simple indeed. Socialism was a theory in this country, an ideal held by a little knot of enthusiasts and students, who could give little reason for their hope of seeing it realized, save the irresistable force with which its truths had taken hold of their minds and hearts. The working classes were not in the least touched by it…
“I say our duties were simple… To preach Socialism, in season and out of season, where we were wanted, where we were tolerated, where we were not tolerated, that was all we had to do… No other action was possible to us than trying to convince people, by talking, that Socialism was right and possible.
“This has still to be done, and will always be necessary till Socialism is realized… But now… other action… is forced upon us by the growing… practical acception of the theory of Socialism. The workers have started to claim new conditions of life which they can only obtain at the expense of the possessing classes; and they must therefore force their claims on the latter…
“To speak plainly, there are only two methods of bringing the necessary force to bear: open armed insurrection on the one hand; the use of the vote, to get hold of the executive, on the other. Of the first method they are not even thinking: but the second they are growing more determined to use day by day, and it is practically the only direct means. And it must be said that, if they are defeated in their attempt, it means the present defeat of Socialism: though its ultimate defeat is impossible.”
Thus Socialists were set (Morris wrote) a twofold task. First, they must provide the theory of the struggle: if they failed in this, they were abandoning their duty of giving direction to the spontaneous movement of the workers. Second, they must participate alongside the workers in all forms of the labour struggle, including parliamentary and municipal elections:
“It is certainly our business, then, to make that struggle as strenuous as possible, while we at the same time hold up before the workers the ideal that lies ahead of the present days of conflict.”
It was precisely this period of transition, this “troublesome and wearisome action”, which he felt to be a difficult one. “The number of declared and instructed Socialists is small in proportion to the general movement”, and herein he noted both a source of danger, and an especial reason for Socialist unity.
This article contains the clearest practical embodiment of Morris’s changed views, which found many expressions in his lectures and writings between 1892 and 1894: notably in two lectures on “Communism”, his lecture, “What Is: What Should Be: What Will Be”, and his letters to the Sun and the Daily Chronicle (“The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle”—reprinted as a leaflet by the Hammersmith Socialist Society) on the great coal lock-out of the autumn of 1893. Morris had never, even in his most intransigent “anti-parliamentary” period, denied that at some stage Socialists might enter parliament to seize control of the executive power: now, with important qualifications, he accepted the necessity of following the parliamentary road. The lectures, written for close discussion among the Socialists, and not for general publication, are more hesitant in tone than the letters and the article in the Labour Prophet The workers, he declared in “What Is: What Should Be: What Will Be”—
“are beginning to be discontented. What they see is that they might be better off; that they might get higher wages and less precarious work, more leisure, more share in public advantages, and as a means to all these things some direct share in the national talk-shop. All this they will try for, and will get the formula thereto made into law within a certain time. Now I firmly believe that it is an illusion to think that they can have the reality of any of these things without their gaining the beginnings of Socialism… but I also believe that things have now gone so far, that the lesser claim above mentioned… will lead to the greater; though it will be through many blunders and disappointments: and the road will be long.”
The parliamentary road was not the road of his choice; but the workers had chosen it, and—
“I do not fail to appreciate the necessity for immediate action, and I now see that this parliamentary action must be and will be: so let us do our best in it, not merely [as] working men members but [as] Socialists.”
The lecture was now jotted rapidly in note form, and only the outline survives:
“Ought to have working men in order to break down the habit of class members, but get good men and good for the purpose where you can. And let them be under good party discipline. This party must be and will be, but I fear will be somewhat long in coming: but when it is formed, then the advance to Socialism will be speedy.”1
In his well-known lecture on “Communism”, delivered to the Fabian Society in 1893, his new understanding of the dual role of practical and theoretical struggle found its maturest expression. It is a lecture which should be read as a whole, in the light of the situation and of his changing views; here there is space only to summarize the leading lines of the argument:
“I am driven to the conclusion that those [i.e. immediate] measures … are of use toward the education of the great mass of the workers; that it is necessary in the present to give form to vague aspiration… Taking up such measures, directly tending towards Socialism, is necessary also in getting working people to raise their standard of livelihood… Lastly, such measures, with all that goes towards getting them carried, will train them into organization and administration… But this education by political and corporate action must… be supplemented by instilling into the minds of the people a knowledge of the aims of socialism, and a longing to bring about the complete change which will supplant civilization by communism… The measures… are either make-shift alleviations… or means for landing us in the new country of equality. And there is a danger that they will be looked upon as ends in themselves.”
If Morris now saw the importance of the practical struggle, he knew that his own abilities cast him for a role on the theoretical wing of the movement. In 1892 he had been revising with Bax the series of articles which they had written for Commonweal, “Socialism From the Root Up”. Now, in 1893, they were published in book form as Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome. The original Commonweal chapter on “Socialism Militant” was totally rewritten. A new prominence was given to the industrial struggle. By contrast with the position in 1883 (Bax and Morris wrote):
“There is in it less of the mere dispute between two parties to a contract admitted as necessary by either, and more of an instinct of essentially opposed interests between employers and employed.”1
They declared their approval for the immediate demands voiced by the most militant section of the movement: the legal eight-hour day, the minimum wage and maximum price. Municipal reform received favourable mention. The mass movement set in motion by the New Unionism, they were careful to point out, was a movement “not of Socialists, but of men moved by the growing instinct towards Socialism”. The traditional discrepancy, or even antipathy, “in all democratic fermentations… between the theoretic movement… and the actual popular or working-class struggle” might still be traced. But its end had been signalled in 1847, with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and in the new movement:
“The workmen are not unwilling to accept the theorists as leaders; while the theorists fully and frankly recognize that it is through the instinctive working-class movement towards the bettering of life, by whatever political-economic means, that their ideal of a new society must be sought.”
In short, while it was essential that the theory should be “always kept before the eyes of the mass of the working-classes”, lest the continuity of the struggle should be broken, or the movement should be misdirected, yet at the same time “it is no less essential that the theorists should steadily take part in all action that tends towards Socialism, lest their wholesome and truthful theories should be left adrift on the barren shore of Utopianism”.1 It is “a matter of course” that Socialism would not appear one day by some sudden catastrophe, “that some Monday morning the sun will rise on a communized state which was capitalistic on Saturday night”. Armed revolt or civil war was not the main, or the major, means of achieving the revolution, although it “may be an incident of the struggle, and in some form or another probably will be, especially in the latter phases of the revolution”. But these latter phases would only be reached through “the gradual shifting of the opinions and aspirations of the masses”, through the industrial and political struggles already outlined. At the same time, Morris and Bax did not suggest a gradual Fabian “glide” into the new society, but, rather, after long preliminaries of education and struggle, a sharp, qualitative break:
“The first real victory of the Social Revolution will be the establishment not indeed of a complete system of Communism in a day, which is absurd, but of a revolutionary administration whose definite and conscious aim will be to prepare and further, in all available ways, human life for such a system—… an administration whose every act will be of set purpose with a view to Socialism.”2
VI. Reconciliation with the S.D.F.
In Justice in January, 1894, Morris made his position even more clear. It is a sign of his generosity that he was ready to retract his old differences with Hyndman. “Present circumstances”, he said,
“go to prove the wisdom of the S.D.F. in drawing up palliative measures… Mean and paltry as it seemed to me,—and does still, as compared with the whole thing,—something of the kind is absolutely necessary.”
The immediate need was to create “a strong party”, “a party with delegates in the House of Commons, which would have complete control over those delegates”. This insistence upon the subordination of the parliamentary party to the discipline of the party as a whole is of the greatest importance, and Morris deliberately stressed it as a point of demarcation between the revolutionary and the reformist use of Parliament. Such a group of delegates would win concession after concession until the point of crisis would be reached. But Morris made it clear that there was nothing inherently holy in the constitutional machinery itself, nothing “undemocratic” in employing extra-parliamentary means. It was a matter of tactics, deduced from the conditions of the movement in Britain.
“You cannot start with revolt—you must lead up to it, and exhaust other means first. I do not agree that you should abstain from any act merely on the grounds that it would precipitate civil war, even though the result of the civil war were problematical, so long as the initial act was justifiable. But with the tremendous power of modern armies, it is essential that everything should be done to legalise revolt. As we have seen [at Featherstone, where Yorkshire miners were fired on in 1893] the soldiers will fire upon the people without hesitation so long as there is no doubt as to the legality of their doing so. Men do not fight well with halters round their necks, and that is what a revolt now would mean. We must try and… get at the butt end of the machine-gun and the rifle, and then force is much less likely to be necessary and much more sure to be successful.”1
The interview in Justice marked a definite turn by Morris towards the S.D.F. Blatchford, in Clarion, was calling upon him to take his rightful position in the leadership of the I.L.P. He refused, for several reasons. He knew that neither his health nor his abilities suited him for active leadership. Such propaganda work as he could still do in London was obviously done better for his own Society or the S.D.F. than for the I.L.P. He had turned his back upon the Fabians ever since their withdrawal from the Joint Committee. The blather by which they tried to represent the smallest piece of administrative machinery or the least “Lib.-Lab.” victory, as a portent for the advance of something they called “Socialism” earned his brief contempt: “Was it true that Shaw” (he asked the Justice interviewer) “said the other day that there was a party of fifteen already in the House of Commons? If I had been there I should have asked him to name them.”1 As far as Morris was concerned there was a party of one—Keir Hardie; and about him he had doubts, although he told Glasier next year that he felt “his fight for the unemployed has had something great in it”.2 Blatchford he “rather liked the looks of.” “You see”, he wrote to Leatham of Aberdeen, who had now joined the S.D.F., “you must let a man work on the lines he really likes. No man ever does good work unless he likes it: evasion is all you can get out of him by compulsion.”3 But, while he now accepted the need for a revolutionary parliamentary struggle, the absorption of the I.L.P. in electioneering and its neglect of theory disturbed him. In his own Society a contest was being waged, on the issue of whether or not to enter candidates to the joint “Progressive” list for the Vestry and Board of Guardians elections. The “Progressives” won, and Bullock and Morris’s daughter, May, were among the candidates. Morris duly voted; but the election (in December, 1894) left him “lethargic and faint-hearted”. “I dare say you think me rather lukewarm about the affair”, he wrote to Geòrgie Burne-Jones—
“but I am so depressed with the pettiness and timidity of the bill and the checks and counterchecks with which such an obvious measure [the new Local Government Act] has been hedged about.”
Eight candidates were successful for the Board of Guardians, but the Vestry candidates were defeated: “You see all through London the middle class voted solid against us; which I think extremely stupid of them, as they might well have got credit for supporting an improved administration.”1 The enthusiasm expended by some of his colleagues upon capturing a part of the liberal vote was “tommy-rot” which left him cold.2
Therefore it was with the S.D.F. that he identified himself most closely in 1894 and 1895. He would not join the organization, so long as he felt that his influence might contribute towards bridging the split in the movement. Moreover, in the first full article which he wrote for Justice (“How I Became a Socialist”, June 16th, 1894), he inserted a humorous reference to his own difficulties with Capital, and an insistence upon the importance of cultural questions to the Socialist movement: both very salutary rebuffs to the doctrinaire and mechanical outlook of some of the S.D.F. But, as the known party of revolution, he felt his place to be at its side: he contributed poems and occasional articles to Justice: he spoke from the S.D.F. platform on the May Day of 1894. In February, 1894, he spoke for George Lansbury, S.D.F. candidate at Walworth, in a by-election.3 In March, 1894, he made a propaganda visit to Manchester under the auspices of the local branch of the S.D.F., speaking both in the Free Trade Hall and at an open-air meeting near Trafford Bridge. Leatham has left a description of this last act of open-air propaganda in the North. “The last time I saw Morris”, he wrote,
“he was speaking from a lorry pitched on a piece of waste land close to the Ship Canal… It was a wild March Sunday morning, and he would not have been asked to speak out of doors, but he had expressed a desire to do so. and so there he was, talking with quiet strenuousness, drawing a laugh now and then from the undulating crowd, of working men mostly, who stood in the hollow and on the slopes before him. There would be quite two thousand of them. He wore a blue overcoat, but had laid aside his hat; and his grizzled hair blew in wisps and tumbles about his face… In spite of the bitter cold of the morning, scarcely a man moved from the crowd; though there was comparatively little fire or fervour in the speech, and next to no allusion to any special topic of the hour. Many there were hearing and seeing the man for the first time; most of us were hearing him for the last time; and we all looked and listened as though we knew it.”1
In 1895 he spoke again for George Lansbury and in the General Election of the same year, he was invited by the South Salford S.D.F. to become their parliamentary candidate (another “PRETTY PICTURE!”). He agreed to go to Burnley and speak in Hyndman’s support. There he publicly declared (according to Hyndman): “In 1884 Hyndman and I had a great quarrel, and I have to say this: that he was quite right and I was quite wrong.”2 If indeed he said this, then generosity could have been taken no further.3
His last full lecture-notes which have survived are dated March 30th, 1895, and the lecture entitled “What We have to Look For”. He started, as in other late lectures, by contrasting the early days of the movement, when the Socialists were no more than a sect, with the present labour movement, with its vague aspirations towards Socialism. Then he looked into the future. He could not, however he looked at the matter, see any final resolution of the class struggle “otherwise than by disturbance and suffering of some kind”. “I believe that the very upward movement of labour… will have to be paid for like other good things, and that the price will be no light one.” Then, once again, he struggled with the vision of reformism which had haunted all his Socialist propaganda. His friend, John Carruthers, had written a pamphlet (issued in 1894 by the Hammersmith Society) in which he made a masterly exposure of the way in which limited measures of nationalization, and in particular the nationalization of the railways, might make the machinery of exploitation more efficient, without endangering the existence of the capitalist system.1 Morris took due note of this, as he did also of the prevailing set of opinion in hostility to serious theory within the I.L.P. Here are the questions which he put to the new movement:
“I should above all things like to have a genuine answer to this question; setting aside all convention, all rhetoric and flummery, what is it that you want from the present labour movement? Higher wages; more regular employment? Shorter working hours—better education for your children—old age pensions, libraries, parks and the rest. Are these things and things like them what you want? They are of course, but what else do you want? If you cannot answer the question straightforwardly I must say you are wandering on a road the outcome of which you cannot tell…
“If you can answer it, and say Yes, that is all we want: then I say here is the real advice to give you: Don’t meddle with Socialism: make peace with your employers, before it is too late, and you will find that from them and their Committee, the House of Commons, you will get such measure of these things as will probably content you… If this is all you want, work with your employers… consider their interests as well as your own… make sacrifices to-day that you may do well to-morrow, compete your best with foreign nations… and I think you will do well. I cannot indeed promise you that you will bring back the prosperity of the country… but you may well stave off the breakdown, which in these last years does really seem to be drawing near, and at any rate you will make the best of what prosperity there is left us as workmen and according to their standard of life.
“If that is all you want, how can we who are not workmen blame you? … I must own that sometimes when I am dispirited I think this is all that the labour movement means: it doesn’t mean Socialism at all, it only means improvement in the condition of the working classes: they will get that in some terms or another—till the break up comes, and it may be a long way ahead. And yet… imperfect, erring, unorganized, chaotic as that movement is, there is a spirit of antagonism to our present foolish wasteful system in it, and a sense of the unity of labour as against the exploiters of labour which is the one necessary idea for those who are ever so little conscious of making toward Socialism.”
By example, he pointed to the astonishing reception of “Comrade Blatchford’s” Merry England:
“The thousands who have read that book must if they have done so carefully have found out that something better is possible to be thought of than the life of a prosperous mill-hand… Self-respect, happy and fit work, leisure, beautiful surroundings, in a word, the earth our own and the fullness thereof, and nobody really dares to assert that this good life can be attained to till we are essentially and practically Socialized.”
Finally, some words on the need for a united party:
“My hope is… that we shall do so much propagandist work, and convert so many people to Socialism that they will insist on having a genuine Socialist party… and they will not allow the personal fads and vanities of leaders (so-called) to stand in the way of real business.”
Until that party should be firmly formed, “we” (the Hammersmith Socialist Society) “had better confine ourselves to the old teaching and preaching of Socialism pure and simple, which I fear is more or less neglected amidst the… futile attempt to act as a party when we have no party”.1 On the back of the final page were jotted some notes to jog his memory when he replied to the discussion:
“Tochatti—to use our recruits when we’ve got them.
“Mordhurst—the unemployed.
“Unknown—Henry George and co-operation.
“Bullock—giving up the problem.
“Unknown clergyman—rather more depressed than I.”
On May Day, 1895, Morris was again on the S.D.F. platform.1 In Justice he contributed an article, in which he took up the same theme as in “What We have to Look For”—the difference between the revolutionary and reformist roads. “To the Socialist”, he stressed, “the aim is not the improvement of condition but the change in position of the working classes.” Of the reformist road he said, “I think it will be taken, I fear not wholly unsuccessfully”:
“The present necessities of working people are so great that they must take what they can get, and it so hard for them in their miserable condition to have any vivid conception of what a life of freedom and equality can give them that they can scarcely, the average of them, turn their hopes to a future which they may never see.”
“And yet if that future is not to be indefinitely postponed they must repudiate this demi-semi-Socialism”:
“Again and again it must be said that in this determination we shall be justified when the working-classes make it their determination; and… the first step towards this consummation is the union in one party of all those in the movement who take that view of the movement, and not merely the gas and water and improved trade union view. The view not of improved condition… for the workers but of essentially changed position.”2
It is a moving situation. Morris was depressed because he saw the future too plain. He saw the movement he had helped to form, the charlatans and parliamentary cheap-jacks who would betray it, and lead it for secondary or personal ends. When he had first thrown in his lot with the “Cause”, he had told Hyndman that he desired only to serve the movement, in whatever manner he could be of use. Now, in 1895, Bruce Glasier visited him for the last time. He questioned Glasier closely about the I.L.P. and the movement in the North:
“He listened to my apologia attentively, sitting back in his chair smoking, keeping his eyes fixed on me reflectively while I spoke/’
Glasier painted a picture of Keir Hardie and the I.L.P. in glowing terms. When he turned to leave,
“I remember that at the gate he held my hand longer than was his custom, and said, ‘I have been greatly cheered by what you say about Keir Hardie and the Labour movement. Our theories often blind us to the truth.’ Then, laying his hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘Ah, lad! if the workers are really going to march—won’t we all fall in.’ ”1
VII. The Last Year
In 1895, five years had passed since the founding of the Kelmscott Press. Morris’s grey beard and hair were shading into white. From the autumn of 1892 until early in 1895 he had enjoyed a recovery of health. A letter of Halliday Sparling’s, at Christmas 1892, reveals him at his favourite relaxation:
“… We are all here at Kelmscott… except Mrs. Morris, who had to go to Italy for the winter. Shaw is also here, amusing himself by pasting into a scrap-book all the Press-notices of his play… Morris has just gone off to try for a pike, having vainly endeavoured to get either Shaw or myself to share his fishing enthusiasm… He is extremely well & hearty.”2
To the active Socialists, Morris still seemed “one of the most get-at-able men around London.” He was a well-known figure in the Hammersmith streets, or in the Underground Railway, where “armed with books and wearing a soft crowned felt hat and Inverness cape… he made his presence fully known by the loud cheery tones in which he discussed art, literature, or politics with his companions.”1 But, although he scarcely noticed it himself, he was in a position of some intellectual isolation during his last years. As he walked up and down the aisle in the Kelmscott Clubroom, one observer thought he had “the air of a rather melancholy sea-captain on the quarterdeck”.2 Few of the intellectuals who gathered there had any real understanding of his profound revolutionary aspirations. Wilfred Scawen Blunt saw something of him in these last years, and interpreted Morris’s faint air of melancholy as disillusion in Socialism.3 The workers who saw him bareheaded by the Manchester Ship Canal knew better. But the story of Morris’s “disillusion” was beginning to go the rounds among the intelligentsia, gathering force as all stories do which people want to believe.
Absorption in work and family made his contacts fewer. He was writing, in odd moments, The Wood Beyond the World, The Well at the World’s End, The Water of the Wondrous Isles, and (in his last year) The Sundering Flood. When illness made him sleepless he would rise at dawn to continue his writing. From 1893 onwards he was co-operating with A.J. Wyatt in a version of Beowulf and other early English poetry. He was busy in the experiments which always gave him such pleasure, learning old processes for making the paper and ink to be used at the Kelmscott Press. From 1893 onwards he found ceaseless relaxation in the designing and production of the great Kelmscott Chaucer: “My eyes! how good it is!” he said, when the first page was complete.4 When his old friend Magnusson visited him in his last year, and praised the Chaucer, Morris rejoined with enthusiasm: “It is not only the finest book in the world, but an undertaking that was an absolutely unchecked success from beginning to end.”1 At the same time, Morris was still executing occasional designs for the Firm; and he was working once again with Magnusson—this time on a translation of the Heimskringla. Some contact he maintained outside the Hammersmith Socialist Society and the colleagues in his artistic work by attending, occasionally, the “Socialist Supper Club” and, more regularly, the Committee of Anti-Scrape. Indeed, his public work for this Society increased in his last four years. In 1893 he took a prominent part in resisting drastic proposals for the restoration of the spire of Great St. Mary’s, Oxford. In 1894 he was resisting a proposed addition to Westminster Abbey, which he described as “in a special degree the work of the people of the country in past times”. In 1895 he was protesting, as one “born and bred in its neighbourhood”, at the destruction of the special character of Epping Forest by the wholesale felling of hornbeams: “this strange, unexampled, and most romantic wood” was, he urged, in danger of being turned into a commonplace park or golf course.2
Thereafter came a spate of protests: at the proposed restoration of the Royal Tombs in Westminster Abbey; at the rebuilding, in red brick, of a lock-keeper’s cottage by the Thames Conservators in the grey stone village of Kelmscott; of the restoration of the cathedrals of Rouen, Peterborough, Chichester. More often than not the protests met with failure: the inroads of commercialism into the countryside could not be checked. Seeing, in August, 1895, a favourite barn transformed with a zinc and iron roof, he felt “quite sickened”:
“That’s the way all things are going now. In twenty years everything will be gone in this countryside, which twenty years ago was so rich in beautiful buildings: and we can do nothing to help it or mend it. The world had better say, ‘Let us be through with it and see what will come after it!’ Meanwhile, I can do nothing but a little bit of Anti-Scrape… Now that I am grown old and see that nothing is to be done, I half wish that I had not been born with a sense of romance and beauty in this accursed age…”
It is not clear whether it was this reflection, or some personal incident, which provoked the wry reflection in his same letter to Georgie:
“I was thinking… how I have wasted the many times when I have been ‘hurt’ and (especially of late years) have made no sign, but swallowed down my sorrow and anger, and nothing done! Whereas if I had but gone to bed and stayed there for a month or two and declined taking any part in life… I can’t help thinking that it might have been very effective. Perhaps you remember that this game was tried by some of my Icelandic heroes, and seemingly with great success…”1
By the summer of 1895 it was evident that Morris’s strength was gradually failing. He could no longer take strenuous walks, and even his favourite relaxation of fishing had lost its charm. “It is sad”, Burne-Jones (now, to Morris’s disappointment, Sir Edward)2 wrote in the autumn, “to see even his enormous vitality diminishing.”3 During the work of the Press they had been much together, Burne-Jones falling in with delight with all Morris’s projects. His admiration for Morris (despite his abhorrence of Socialism) was still that of his Oxford days. “Morris will be here to-morrow”, he wrote in 1891—
“strong, self-contained, master of himself and therefore of the world. Solitude cannot hurt him or dismay him. Such strength as his I see nowhere.”4
Now, as Morris saw the end drawing near, a wistful note came into their long relationship. One day, while the work on the Chaucer was going on apace, and a Kelmscott Malory and Froissart were dimly projected ahead, Morris remarked to his friend: “The best way of lengthening out the rest of our days now, old chap, is to finish off our old things.”1 If he had admitted, two years before, in “The Deeper Meaning of the Struggle”, that he felt that his own art was only “a survival of the organic art of the past”, yet still his service for the Socialist cause had rid him of his old sense of guilt at his own self-indulgence. “I am afire to see the new designs”, he wrote to Burne-Jones—“and as to the age, that be blowed!”2 He had not lost his delight at “the beauty of the earth”, but a letter written to Geòrgie in November from Rottingdean, shows an intermingling of reminiscence and regret for his passing strength:
“I started out at ten and went to… a chalk pit near (where you took me one hot evening in September, you remember), and I walked on thence a good way, and should have gone further, but prudence rather than weariness turned me back. They were ploughing a field at the bottom with no less than ten teams of great big horses: they were knocking off for their bever just as I came to them, and seemed very jolly, and my heart went out to them, both men and horses.”3
Two months later, walking back from his last meeting of Anti-Scrape, a friend who noted his weakness, commented politely that it was the worst time of the year. “No; it ain’t,” he replied, “it’s a very fine time of the year indeed: I’m getting old, that’s what it is.”4
In the summer months of 1895 his Socialist activity had dropped off to the very minimum: infrequent attendance at the Hammersmith Clubroom and the Socialist Supper Club. Now, as if with deliberate effort, he picked up some of the old threads: he would at least nail the lie that he was turning from Socialism before he died. On September 15th he was lecturing at Hammersmith; on October 6th he was Chairman for Shaw for the last time; on October 30th, at the request of Hines, the old League propagandist and chimney-sweep, he visited Oxford and inaugurated the Oxford Socialist Union before a large and enthusiastic audience; in December he lectured again, and took the chair for the last time for his old friend Bax.1 On December 28th he made his last open-air speech—in a foggy drizzle outside Waterloo Station. The occasion was the funeral of Sergius Stepniak. A speaker who preceded him said that Stepniak, in his later years, had abandoned his revolutionary outlook and become an advocate of Fabianism. When Morris’s turn to speak came, he had no hesitation in refuting the slander:
“This is a lie—to suggest that Stepniak had ceased to be a revolutionary. He died as he had lived, a revolutionary to the end.”2
“I have not changed my mind on Socialism”, Morris wrote to an American correspondent on January 9th, 1896. On January 3rd, he attended the New Year’s meeting of the London S.D.F. at Holborn Town Hall. He was received with tumultuous applause. George Lansbury moved a resolution of international fraternal greetings, and William Morris came forward as seconder. He congratulated the S.D.F.,3 and then-it was the time of the Jameson Raid—he turned to the subject which had first brought him into the movement, imperialism:
“As far as Africa was concerned [he said] there was a kind of desperation egging on all the nations to make something of that hitherto undeveloped country; and they were no doubt developing it with a vengeance. (Laughter and cheers). When he saw the last accounts about the Transvaal he almost wished he could be a Kaffir for five minutes in order to dance around the ‘ring’. (Laughter and cheers.) He thought it was a case of a pack of thieves quarrelling about their booty. The Boers had stolen their land from the people it had belonged to; people had come in to help them ‘develop’ their stolen property, and now wanted to steal it themselves. (Laughter and cheers.) The real fact, however, that we had to deal with was that we lived by stealing—that was, by wasting—all the labour of the workmen.”1
On January 5th he lectured for the last time in the Clubroom. His subject was “One Socialist Party”, but the notes of his lecture have not survived.
His active work for the movement was now over. The next day he entered in his diary, “Could not sleep at night: got up and worked from 1 to 4 at Sundering Flood”.2 On January 31st he spoke, for the last time in public, at a meeting of the Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising. He began to be anxious that he would not live to see the finished Chaucer: “I’d like it finished to-morrow”, he said: “Every day beyond to-morrow… is one too many.”3 In February the existence of diabetes, and complicating conditions, was confirmed. “I don’t feel any better: so weak”, he noted in his diary at the end of the month. He was working on a new prose romance, Kilian of the Close, whose hero was touched with his own mood: “On a day when the sun was just set, he sat in his hall by the fire under the luffer, turning over un-cheery thoughts in his mind. It was midmost March, and the wind swept up the bent and clattered on the hall-windows and moaned in the wall-nook, and the night drew on and seemed entering the wall from the grey world without as if it would presently tell him that there should never be another day.” By the end of April he seems to have recognized that his life was over. “My dear fellow”, he wrote to Philip Webb, “it was very kind of you to write to me and to want to know how I am. Well, I am not getting on; I say that in all calmness: I am afraid I am rather weaker than stronger…”1 And to Georgie he wrote from Kelmscott Manor: “Down in this deep quiet, away from the excitements of business and callers, and doctors, one is rather apt to brood, and I fear that I have made myself very disagreeable at times.”2 It was in this frame of mind that he set himself to write an article for the special May Day number of Justice. Once again he summoned up his mental energies, writing with his old fire, revealing that profound quality of moral insight which marks his best passages at once as “William Morris”. There can be no doubt that he intended the article as a final testament to the movement.
What wonder that he chose as his theme “imperialism”? Imperialism—which had brought him to Socialism; imperialism—fomenter of wars and last hope of capitalism drawing to its end; imperialism—corrupter of the moral health of the labour movement, already entering into it like a spreading stain. Even the S.D.F. was not free from its taint, as Morris, from his long association with Hyndman, well knew. In January, 1896, the S.D.F. Executive had issued a Manifesto in which Hyndman’s disastrous “Big Navy” policy (which Morris and Engels had detected beneath England for All in 1883, and which later led him directly into his capitulation in the First World War) was shadowed forth:
“To the adequate increase of our Navy no reasonable man can object. The navy is not an anti-democratic force, and can scarcely be used for aggression under present conditions. The Atlantic and the Pacific are now our Mediterranean Sea, and a nation like ours… cannot afford to take such risks in the future as we have taken in the past.”3
Many still think, Morris wrote:
“that civilization will grow so speedily and triumphantly, and production will become so easy and cheap, that the possessing classes will be able to spare more and more from the great heap of wealth to the producing classes… and all will be peace and prosperity. A futile hope indeed, and one which a mere glance at past history will dispel. For we find as a matter of fact that when we were emerging from semi-barbarism, when open violence was common, and privilege need put on no mask before the governed classes, the workers were not worse off than now, but better. In short, not all the discoveries of science, not all the tremendous organization of the factory and the market will produce true wealth, so long as the end and aim of it all is the production of profit for the privileged classes…
“The capitalist classes are doubtless alarmed at the spread of Socialism all over the civilized world. They have at least an instinct of danger; but with that instinct comes the other one of self-defence. Look how the whole capitalist world is stretching out long arms towards the barbarous world and grabbing and clutching in eager competition at countries whose inhabitants don’t want them; nay, in many cases, would rather die in battle, like the valiant men they are, than have them. So perverse are these wild men before the blessings of civilization which would do nothing worse for them (and also nothing better) than reduce them to a propertyless proletariat.
“And what is all this for? For the spread of abstract ideas of civilization, for pure benevolence, for the honour and glory of conquest? Not at all. It is for the opening of fresh markets to take in all the fresh profit-producing wealth which is growing greater and greater every day; in other words, to make fresh opportunities for waste; the waste of our labour and our lives.
“And I say this is an irresistible instinct on the part of the capitalists, an impulse like hunger, and I believe that it can only be met by another hunger, the hunger for freedom and fair play for all, both people and peoples. Anything less than that the capitalist power will brush aside. But that they cannot; for what will it mean? The most important part of their machinery, the ‘hands’ becoming MEN, and saying, ‘Now at last we will it; we will produce no more for profit but for use, for happiness, for LIFE.”1
It was generally known that Morris was coming to the end of his life. From Germany, Liebknecht sent his last fraternal greetings:
“It is a great debt which I owe to your country. The twelve years of exile I spent there gave me my political education. And your working classes have been my teacher…
“Au revoir, dear Morris! My wife, who translated your splendid News from Nowhere, sends her love…”1
His Sunday morning visits to Geòrgie and Ned Burne-Jones at the Grange were now discontinued—one February Sunday in the middle of breakfast he had leant his forehead on his hand, and Burne-Jones had written in alarm: “It is a thing I have never seen him do before in all the years I have known him.”2 In June he was convalescing in Folkestone: “I toddle about, and sit down, lean over the chains, and rather enjoy it, especially if there are any craft about.”3 He still had energy to explode to Philip Webb about the hideous ribbon-development along the coast—“But ‘tis an old story!” The Hammersmith Socialist Society continued the work in his absence; the unbroken series of Sunday lectures went on; and candidates were put up, in alliance with the I.L.P., for the vestry elections. But attendance at business meetings had fallen to an average of twelve; and throughout the whole summer, from May to October, only five open-air meetings were held—a falling-off which revealed only too clearly how dependent the Society was upon the driving force of its founder.
In August, 1896, Burne-Jones was writing to Swinburne, describing the progress on the Chaucer: “I abstained from decorating certain of the Canterbury Tales… Morris has been urgent with me that I should by no means exclude these stories from our scheme of adornment—especially he had hopes of my treatment of the Miller’s Tale, but he ever had more robust and daring parts than I could assume.”
“It has been a wretched sight all this year to see him dwindling away… I am old and though I work away it is with a heavy heart often, as if it didn’t matter whether I finished my work or not…”1
In July Morris had been recommended by his doctors and friends to take a sea voyage. He had a yearning to return to the North, and chose to go to the coast of Norway and as far as Spitzbergen. He was already “so ill and weak that is impossible for me to do any work”.2 “I am going with what amount of hope I can muster, which varies, to say sooth, from a good deal to very little”, he wrote to Swinburne, when sending him a copy of the at-last-completed Chaucer.3 It seemed possible that he might have to make the journey alone; but at the last moment his old Socialist friend, John Carruthers, was able to join him. Hyndman visited him before he left, and recalled that he said:
“If it merely means that I am to be laid up for a little while it doesn’t so much matter, you know; but if I am to be caged up here for months, and then it is to be the end of all things, I shouldn’t like it at all. This has been a jolly world to me and I find plenty to do in it.”4
The journey was not a success, and aroused none of his old enthusiasm: although he appeared to pick up a little in his health.5 On his return in mid-August it was clear that he was gravely ill—too ill to be removed to Kelmscott Manor, as he desired.
From Norway he had sent a telegram of greetings to the International Socialist Workers’ Congress in London, at which Tom Mann and Keir Hardie gave fraternal addresses, but which in its result was dominated by the Anarchists. Now he was too weak to do more than design a few letters for the Press, and to dictate a conclusion to The Sundering Flood. “Come soon”, he wrote to Geòrgie, “I want a sight of your dear face”.1 To Glasier he wrote, on September 3rd, in a pitifully shaky hand:
“So many thanks to you for your kind notes. I am really very ill but am trying to get better… Fraternally, W.M.”2
“Morris is dying slowly”, Cobden-Sanderson wrote in his diary, shocked for a moment, out of his own self-absorption:
“It is an astonishing spectacle. He sits speechless waiting for the end to come… Darkness… soon will envelop all the familiar scene, the sweet river, England green and grey, Kelmscott, Kelmscott House, the trees… the Press, the passage, the Bindery, the light coming in through the windows… the old books on the shelves… ‘But’., he said to Mary de Morgan, ‘but I cannot believe that I shall be annihilated.’ “3
In his weakness, his strong emotional control was relaxed. When Geòrgie said something of the life of the poor, he broke into tears. Arnold Dolmetsch brought his virginals to the house, and at the opening phrase of a pavan and galliard by Byrd Morris cried out with joy, and, after the pieces had been repeated, was so moved that he could bear no more. He took the greatest delight in some illuminated manuscripts, lent to him from the Dorchester House library. On October 3rd, near the age of sixty-three, he died peacefully: almost his last words were, “I want to get mumbo-jumbo out of the world”. His family doctor pronounced with “unhesitation” that “he died a victim of his enthusiasm for spreading the principles of Socialism”. Another doctor had a different diagnosis: “I consider the case is this: the disease is simply being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.”4
So often had the Socialists met with Jane Morris’s disapproval that they feared to intrude upon her at the funeral at Lechlade. The Hammersmith comrades were there, of course; and a few others—John Burns and Jack Williams, Walter Crane, Kropotkin and some foreign refugees. Perhaps the absent comrades were mistaken. Certainly Cunninghame Graham, old comrade of “Bloody Sunday”, half aristocratic adventurer and half Socialist, thought they were. Morris had liked the man: but—he had complained—“he’s too bloody politeful”.1 In the Saturday Review next week Graham threw politeness to “the North-West Wind”:
“Seen through the gloom at Paddington… were gathered those whom England had sent forth to pay respects to the most striking figure of our times.
“Artists and authors, archaeologists, with men of letters, Academicians, the pulpit, stage, the Press, the statesmen… all otherwise engaged.
“Philanthropists agog about Armenia, Cuba, and Crete, spouting of Turks and infidels and foreign cruelties, whilst he who strove for years for Englishmen lay in a railway waggon…
“So we reached Oxford, and found upon the platform no representatives… and no undergraduates to throng the station. True, it was Long Vacation; but had the body of some Bulawayo Burglar [Cecil Rhodes] happened to pass, they all had been there… Sleeping but stertorous, the city lay girt in its throng of jerry buildings, quite out of touch with all mankind, keeping its sympathy for piffling commentators on Menander…”
There was no mere rhetoric here: for Cunninghame Graham broke down next week, while speaking at a memorial meeting, and was unable to continue. But, for all that, the final ceremony was not unfitting. The coffin was borne to the church in an open haycart, festooned with willow-boughs, alder and bullrushes. Among the small group of mourners were his close friends, like Ned Burne-Jones, workmen from Merton Abbey, the villagers from Kelmscott, and members of the Art Workers’ Guild. “Inside the church was decorated for a harvest festival, the lamps all wreathed with ears of oats and barley, whilst round the font… lay pumpkins, carrots, and sheaves of corn.” Throughout the whole day there raged the storming wind from the north.
It was not to be expected that the Hammersmith Socialist Society would survive his death. Some members were Fabians, some art workers drawn by Morris’s influence alone, some inclined towards the I.L.P. or the S.D.F. The Clubroom had to be vacated, anyway, for Jane Morris would hardly have wished it to remain in their hands. In November, readings were given from “Monopoly” and A Dream of John Bail Thirty-six members were present at the special meeting which agreed to discontinue the activities which Morris’s energies had driven forward for over twelve years. On December 11th the last lecture was delivered, and the Clubroom, where every Socialist leader in Britain must have spoken, was closed.
“Well do I remember that grey October morning”, recalled Alf. Mattison, the Leeds engineer and Leaguer, “when—amid the rattle of riveters’ hammers [and] the whirl of machinery… a fellow shopmate, who shared my admiration for William Morris, shouted the sad news to me through the tube-plate of a boiler… that he, the inspirer of my youthful ideals, had passed away.”1 Hundreds and thousands of workers, comrades known and unknown to Morris, sorrowed at the news. In Portland Gaol, Fred Charles, still serving his long sentence for the “Walsall Case”, met Edward Carpenter with tears in his eyes.2 The Hammersmith comrades, who had spoken side by side with him so often at Hammersmith Bridge, discussed him on their way to the funeral:
“Kindly but choleric, the verdict was, apt to break into fury, easily appeased, large-hearted, open-handed, and the ‘sort of bloke you always could depend on… ‘ ”3
“The greatest man that ever lived on this planet”, wrote one of them afterwards, a postal worker.1 “He is my greatest human topic”, wrote Leatham, of Aberdeen.2 “To me he was the greatest man in the world”, wrote Glasier: and in his diary, on the day he heard the news he entered: “Socialism seems all quite suddenly to have gone from its summer into its winter time. William Morris and Kelmscott House no more!”3
Justice and Freedom wore black, but it was Blatchford in Clarion who voiced the mood of the thousands:
“I cannot help thinking that it does not matter what goes into the Clarion this week, because William Morris is dead… He was our best man, and he is dead…
“I have just been reading the obituary notices in some of the London papers, and I feel sick and sorry. The fine phrases, the elaborate compliments, the ostentatious parade of their own erudition, and the little covert sneers at the Socialism Morris loved: all the tawdry upholsteries of these journalistic undertakers seems like desecration… Morris was not only a genius, he was a man. Strike at him where you would, he rang true.”
If he had failed to bring unity in his life, yet in the moment of his death the whole Socialist and progressive movement stood united in sympathy. From the Labour Prophet to Freedom, from Edward Carpenter to Cunninghame Graham and Harry Quelch, the same heartfelt tributes came. “We have lost our greatest man”, wrote “Marxian” in the Labour Leader. “He was really our greatest man”, Blunt noted in his diary. Resolutions came from every quarter in the next few days: from the Walthamstow Branch of the Navvies and General Labourers’ Union and from the Christian Socialist Union; from a mass meeting of cab-drivers in Trafalgar Square, addressed by John Burns; and from a hundred other parts of the labour movement. One tribute, from a Lancashire branch of the S.D.F., may stand for all:
“Comrade Morris is not dead there is not a Socialist living whould belive him dead for he Lives in the heart of all true men and women still and will do so to the end of time.”1
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1 The last sound Branch—Aberdeen—followed Hammersmith out (Hammersmith Minutes, January 9th, 1891).
2 Hammersmith papers.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 240.
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1 Glasier MSS.
2 Mackail, II, p. 256.
3 Letters, pp. 338–9.
4 Ibid, pp. 341 ff.
5 Mackail, II, p. 261.
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1 See Vallance, op. cit., pp. 376 f.; Mackail, II, pp. 247 f.; William Morris, “The Ideal Book” (May Morris, I, pp. 310–17); Three Papers on William Morris, ed. Holbrook Jackson (Shenval Press, 1934); The Kelmscott Press and William Morris, Master-Craftsman (1934), by H. Halliday Sparling; An Annotated List of All the Books Printed at the Kelmscott Press, by Sir Sydney Cockerell (Hammersmith, 1898); A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press Together with a Short History and Description of the Press (1898), by Sir Sidney Cockerell; De la Typographie et l’harmonie de la Page imprimée. William Morris et son influence sur Les Arts et Métiers (1898), by C. Ricketts & L. Pissarro.
2 H.H. Sparling, op. cit., p. 77.
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1Frank Colebrook, William Morris, Master Printer, p. 10.
2 Letters, p. 361.
3 Frank Colebrook, op. cit, p. 30.
4 Glasier MSS.
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1 Gerald Crow, William Morris, Designer (1934), p. 101.
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1 Of seventy-five business meetings between January, 1891, and June, 1892, Morris was present at forty—a high percentage if his illness and his visit to France are taken into account (Hammersmith Minutes).
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1 Discussing a possible general Socialist newspaper with Glasier on December 16th, 1890, he wrote: “I would do nothing in it as long as… Commonweal exists; I would rather support that if I could” (Glasier, op. cit., p. 206).
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1 W.C Hart, Confessions of an Anarchist (1906), p. 41.
2 Associates of these three men always spoke very highly of their personal qualities, e.g. for Mainwaring, see Tom Mann, Memoirs, p. 47: for Fred Charles, see Carpenter, My Days and Dreams, p. 132: “No surrender or sacrifice for the ‘cause’ was too great for him; and as to his own earnings [as clerk]… he practically gave them all away to tramps or the unemployed.” Nicoll paid a similar tribute to Charles’s generosity and single-heartedness in The Walsall Anarchists.
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1 Commonweal, August 30th, 1890. The incident reveals the whole truth about the futility of the League in its last days: “Several of our comrades attended the Dockers’ Demonstration… At this meeting we had a strange experience. A meeting was started by us, and some reference made by us to the fact that the New Unionism was due to the work of the Socialists, but that now those who have benefited by their work shrink from the name of Socialist, and would wear anything but red as a badge, the dockers intolerantly refused to hear this lecture and broke up the meeting.”
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1 D.H. Nicoll, The Walsall Anarchists—Trapped by the Police.
2 Birmingham Daily Post, February 10th, 1892.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 238.
2 Vallance, op. cit., p. 357.
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1 Morris prepared two lectures on Communism in 1892 and 1893. One was published after his death as Fabian Tract No. 113, and in Works, Vol. XXIII. The other is in Brit. Mus. Add, MSS. 45334.
2Information from the late Mr. Ambrose Barker.
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1 See David Nicoll, The Greenwich Mystery and The Ghosts of Chelmsford Jail, strangely earnest and unbalanced accounts of persecution and treachery.
2 Recollections of the late Mr. Ambrose Barker, and Guy Aldred, Dogmas Discarded, II, pp. 67–8.
3 Frank Kitz remained active on the extreme left wing of the movement until shortly before his death in 1923, at the age of about seventy-four; his last years were spent in poverty (obituary in Justice, January 20th, 1923). John Turner was well-known for his work as Secretary of the Shop Assistants’ Union. Sam Mainwaring removed to Swansea in 1891, formed the Swansea Socialist Society, and later returned to London, where he died while addressing an open-air meeting on Parliament Hill Fields on September 29th, 1907 (Mann, Memoirs, p. 47). Tochatti edited Liberty in the 1890s.
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1 Several days after Carnot was assassinated in Paris, the Prince and Princess of Wales opened Tower Bridge (June 29th, 1894). Cantwell and Charles Quinn held an open-air meeting near the bridge, selling a pamphlet, Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb. When arrested, Cantwell, the compositor of Commonweal, had letters on him showing the paper to be on its last legs (The Times, July 31st and August 1st, 1894).
2 First published in A. Compton Rickett, William Morris: A Study. The MS. in the Walthamstow collection.
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1 Published in May Morris, II, pp. 524–7.
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1 Letters, p. 349.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45334.
2 Notebooks of Alf. Mattison and Labour Echo, November, 1896.
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1 Engels to Sorge, December 7th, 1890, Marx-Engels Sel Cor., p. 460.
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1 Ibid., April 8th and June 10th, 1891, Labour Monthly, April, 1934.
2 Glasier, op. cit, p. 207.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 287. But Gladstone rejected the idea anyway, finding that Morris was “an out and out Socialist”, while he was warned by Lord Acton that he was a Communist “with unpleasant associations”: see M.P, Pariser, “The Poet Laureateship, 1892”, Manchester Review, VIII, Winter 1958-9, p. 226.
2 Letters, p. 352.
3 Clarion, November 19th, 1892.
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1 H.H. Sparling, op. cit., p. 7.
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1 Hammersmith Minutes, January 13th, 1893.
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1 May Morris, II, pp. xxxv–xxxvi.
2 G.B. Shaw to Emery Walker, July, 1912. Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45347.
3 May Morris, II, p. xxxvi.
4 Clarion, October 10th, 1896.
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1 The main immediate measures advocated were: An Eight-hour Law: Prohibition of all Child Labour; Equal Pay for Equal Work; A Minimum Wage in State Services; Abolition of Sweating; Universal Male and Female Suffrage; Payment for all Public Service.
2See E.R Pease, History of the Fabian Society, p. 202.
3 Eleventh Annual Report of… the Fabian Society, p. 11.
4 May Morris, II, p. 353.
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1 Tom Maguire: a Remembrance, p. xii.
2 G.B. Shaw to May Morris, April 24th, 1913, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45347.
3 Hammersmith Minutes, February, 1893, J. Keir Hardie, “The Labour Movement”; Shaw Maxwell, “Programme of the Labour Party”; March, 1893, Shaw Maxwell, “Aims and Objects of the Labour Party”.
4 Justice, January 14th, 1893.
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1 Justice, April 1st, 1893. Hyndman’s editorial in the same issue complained: “At his little Paris Commune meeting in the supper-room of the Communistische Arbeiter-Bildungs Verein… the other night, Frederick Engels proclaimed that this same Party [the I.L.P.] with his special favourite [Aveling] at the head, would sweep on to victory for the petty Marxist clique.”
2 Report of the Sixth Annual Conference of the I.L.P. (1898), p. 34.
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1 Morris to J. Edwards, May 5th, 1893 (Labour Prophet, July, 1893). o
2 Marx-Engels Sel Cor., p. 507.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 48334.
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1 Morris and Bax, Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome (1893), p. 271.
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1 Morris and Bax, Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome (1893), pp.278–9.
2 Ibid, p. 285.
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1 Justic e, January 27th, 1894.
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1 Justice, January 27th, 1894. The 1892 election had returned Keir Hardie, John Burns, and J. Havelock Wilson, together with eleven Lib.-Labs. Perhaps the fifteenth in Shaw’s mind was Michael Davitt, the Irish Land Leaguer, who was later unseated.
2 Glasier, p. 137.
3 May Morris, II, p. 340.
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1 Mackail, II, pp. 308–9.
2 Entry in his diary for February 15th, 1895, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45410.
3 Justice, February 24th, 1894.
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1 James Leatham, William Morris, Master of Many Crafts (1908), pp. 124, 127-8.
2 Hyndman, Record of an Adventurous Life, pp. 361–2.
3 Morris headed the subscription list for Hyndman’s fight at Burnley, and gave the largest individual subscription to Lansbury’s fund, Justice, July 13th, and 20th, 1895.
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1 See J. Carruthers, Socialism and Radicalism (1894).
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45334.
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1 Daily News, May 2nd, 1895.
2 Justice, May Day Special, 1895.
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1 Glasier, op. cit., p. 139.
2 H.H. Sparling to E. Radford, December 24th, 1892, Radford MSS.
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1 Labour Leader, October 10th, 1896.
2 F.M. Ford, Return to Yesterday, p. 110.
3 See Blunt, My Diaries, Part One, pp. 28, 65, 70.
4 Mackail, II, p. 284.
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1 Cambridge Review, November 26th, 1896.
2 See Letters, pp. 354, 358, 363-9, and Mackail, II, pp. 314 f.
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1 Letters, p. 374.
2 It is related (Stirling, op. cit., p. 210) that on the evening previous to Burne-Jones receiving his baronetcy he dined with Morris, but was too nervous to inform his friend. The subject was never mentioned between them thereafter.
3 Memorials, II, p. 268.
4 Ibid., p. 216.
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1 Memorials, p. 268.
2 Mackail, II, p. 319.
3 Letters, p. 378.
4 Mackail, II, p. 320.
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1 Hammersmith Minutes.
2R Page Arnot, William Morris: a Vindication, p. 21. For a report of the funeral, at which Keir Hardie, John Burns, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, and Kropotkin also spoke, see The Times, December 30th, 1895.
3 Labour Leader, January 25th, 1896, quotes Morris as describing Hyndman’s election campaign at Burnley as a “remarkable event”. “As he was not a member of the S.D.F. he could praise them for holding aloft the real flag of revolution.”
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1 Justice, January 11th, 1896.
2 Diary for 1896, Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45411.
3 Mackail, II, p. 322.
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1 Letters, pp. 382–3.
2 Ibid., p. 382.
3 Justice, January 18th, 1896.
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1 Justice, May Day Special, 1896. Reprinted in part in May Morris, II, pp. 361–3.
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1 Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45346.
2 Memorials, II, p. 277.
3 Morris to Philip Webb, June 14th, 1896, Letters, p. 383.
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1 Edward Burne-Jones to Algernon Swinburne, August 8th, 1896, Brotherton Collection, Leeds University.
2 Morris to A.J. Wyatt, July 13th, 1896, Letters, p. 384.
3 Letters, p. 384.
4 Justice, October 6th, 1896.
5 MS. recollections of the journey, by John Carruthers, are preserved in Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 45350, but recount little of interest.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 332.
2 Glasier MSS.
3 Journals of T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, entry for September, 1896.
4 Mackail, II, p. 336.
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1 See A.S. Tschiffeley, Don Roberto. Cunninghame Graham’s opinion of Morris was that he was like “a bull bison surrounded by a pack of wolves.”
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1 Papers of Alf. Mattison.
2 Freedom, December, 1896.
3 Cunninghame Graham, “With the North-West Wind”, The Saturday Review, October 10th, 1896.
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1 R.A. Muncey, in The Leaguer, October, 1907.
2The Gateway, January, 1941.
3 Glasier, op. cit, p. 141.
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1 Mackail, II, p. 347.