WHICH IS THE IGNORANT PARTY ?

AN INTERESTING COMPARISON OF CLAIMS AND DEEDS.

 It is stated by many conscious and unconscious enemies of the truth, and or social and political evolution, that the aims and objects of the Labor party are the conceptions of ignorant or vicious people. That statement is untrue and unjust.
 It is unfair to many women and men in whose minds are blended all the elements of true religion under whatsoever name it may go, and who have made it the principal business of their lives to search out the facts of their and economic existence, and it a humorless libel on the greatest teachers and writers of all the ages and all the worlds.
The ideals of the great phase of society's development, known as the Labor movement, are not of yesterday, nor of many yesterdays. They are the natural accompaniment of society's necessity for self-protection and mutual aid, and have been ever present in all minds capable of directing the course of the community, the better to ensure its survival, since the dawn of instinct and the communal sense. In every stage of biology and natural history they may be observed, and up to the machinery age of mankind's history, when the first day of private ownership of the capital for the production of common necessities introduced that taint which is to-day crystallised in the forces opposed to the Labor platform.
 The ideals of the Labor movement are common to the works of all the poets, dramatists, novelists, artists, and teachers our political Philistines affect to revere, and today sound the grandest protest against our unnatural governmental system. Not only so, but scores of the most inspired and impassioned utterances of the mighty thinkers might stand as finer expressions of the very planks of the platform of the Labor party, and they still burn with a lambent flame that will light the people down the centuries.
 When glory and grandeur dwelt in Greece and Rome the aspirations of our abused reformers of to-day were, already flourishing in Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates ; and met with the same treatment from the enemies of progress then as they do now.
Socrates went abroad in the thoroughfares, in all weathers, talking who would listen, and instilling into all a love of justice, and of truth ; of quacks and pretenders he was the sworn foe, and cared not what enmity he provoked if he could persuade the people to think and to do what was right. "He was so pious," said Xenophon in his "Memorabilia," "that he did nothing without the sanction of the gods; so just, that he never wronged anyone, even in the slightest degree."
 But that sort of man said unpleasant things of the powers that were. He criticised the social and governmental systems, and said things that hurt the upper classes, who persecuted him unto death, and executed him, even as they would, if they could, the reformers in this year of Our Lord, between whom and Socrates, Carlyle saw but little difference. That same Conservatism which Socrates fought, and which we fight, Carlyle denounced as "a portentous embodied sham, accursed of God, and doomed to destruction, as all lies are."
 Euripides, the Greek dramatist, and his predecessor, Sophocles, said many things that might have fallen from the lips of Labor men, so that across the years the bond of faith exists between the hopes of the modern, and the beliefs of the ancient, thinkers.
 When we consider the giant intellects of recent generations, the confirmation is made of our contention that behind the modern movement for the emancipation of the workers, and the moralisation of the rich, stand in splendid mental array the grandest minds of humanity. The Labor party has built its objective on the teachings of such men as Ruskin, of whose, words, in his "King's Treasuries," let us take a few :—
 

"A great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian having done a single murder, and for a couple of years see its own children murder such other by their thousands or, ten thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to gaol for stealing six walnuts, and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their doors 'under circumstances over which they have no control,' with a 'by your leave,' and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth . . . .
"Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords . . .
 "And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its powers by pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring at the same time that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and by no other love."

Could a Labor man deliver any more partisan reproach at the evils of class-constructed judiciary or land monopoly, or landlordism, or social hypocrisy ?
And Ruskin was one of England's greatest philosophers, and our would-be cultivated opponents pretend to admire him. Is he by himself? Is he the only heretical demagogue who dares assail the citadel of respectable political hypocrites and ignoramuses ? Besides him stand Carlyle, Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge, Darwin, Wallace, Sydney Olivier, Swift (whoever delivered such sabre cuts at England's old nobility as are to be found in the pages of "Gulliver's Travels"), Lecky, Draper, Bunyan, Lord Avebury, and, nearer, Blatchford, Blind, Mrs, and Mr. Sidney Webb, Thorold Rogers, Professor Bikerton, Morrison Davidson, and, in other lands, Havelock, Ellis, Mills, Gronlund, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the gentle Comte, and their fellow-supermen !
 It would require much printer's ink to give half the wealth of thought we have inherited from these few philosophers alone, but hear what comfortable words Thomas Carlyle, of Ecclefechan, hath to say:—

"Men talk of 'selling' land. Land, it is true, like epic poems and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be presented in the market for what it will bring, and, as we say, be 'sold,' but the notion for selling, for certain bits of metal, the 'Iliad' of Homer, how much the land of the World Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility . . .
 "Properly speaking, the land belongs to these two: to the Almighty God and to all His children of men that have ever worked well upon it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can, or could, with never such solemnity or effect, sell land on any other principle. It is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have ever worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it."

Would that quotation better support the result of the government we have known, whereby 720 people "own" half the alienated lands of New South Wales, or the wish of the Labor party that it should be leased to all who need and desire it? Why, did Labor say half so much, it would be called "confiscator." And yet Liberalism does know well that Carlyle was no mob orator, but one of Britain's grandest sons. Listen yet more.
I say, you did not make the land of England . . . True government and guidance ; not no-government and laissez-fair ; how much less mis-government and corn-law! "There is not an imprisoned worker looking out from these Bastilles but appeals, very audibly, in Heaven's high courts, against you, and me, and everyone who is not imprisoned, 'Why am I here?' His appeal is audible in Heaven, and will become audible enough on earth too, if it remain unheeded here. His appeal is against you foremost of all. You stand in the front rank of the accused, you by the very place you hold, have first of all to answer him and Heaven ! . . .
 "Nature and Fact asks not, Do something, but, Cease your destructive misdoing. Do ye nothing."

 Surely this was an unpretty thing for Carlyle to say to the "Liberals" of his time. Would he be against, or for, the Labor party in to-day? And Carlyle is not generally called ignorant. Yet again :—
 

"My starving workers," answered the rich mill owner, "did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?" "Verily mammon worship is a melancholy creed, when Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel and was questioned, "Where is thy brother!" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?"

 Do these sayings not point what side the Ecclefechan savant was on ? And whoso reads his "Bribery Committee" will conclude his thoughts might not have been strictly confined to his own day :—
 "Pure election was a thing we had seen the last of . . .a conclusion not a little startling. . . . It seems, then, we are henceforth to get ourselves constituted legisators, not according to what merit we may have, but according to the length of our purse, and our frankness, impudence, and dexterity in laying out the contents of the same."
 The Labor purse, alas ! is not the long one, and Carlyle knew it ! And to finish : —

"Giant Labor, truest emblem there is of God, the World-maker, Demiurgus and Eternal Maker; noble labor, which is yet to be king of this earth, and sit on the highest throne, staggering hitherto like a blind, irrational giant, hardly allowed to have his common place on the street pavements, idle dilletantism, Dead Sea-apism, crying out. "Down with him ! He is dangerous " Labor must become a seeing, rational giant, with a soul in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, leaving his mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said throne."

 Ignorant? Mob orator? Demagogue? Perhaps there is a doubt!
 Thus in parting from the philosophers, the earnest inquirer admits that, welded and embodied with the aims of Labor, are the truest science of Haeckel, Darwin, and Wallace, for with clearest understanding this party has recognised that only that nation best developed in mind, body, and morals is fittest to survive, and that poverty, ignorance, and vice tend backward. Only they have shown by action that they believe slum-herds to be a danger and brothels a disadvantage. Labor is the one organised political force which has seriously read its Lord Avebury and its Havelock Ellis, and discussed eugenics as an objective factor in social religion and national policy. If the word eugenics and the appellation eugenist becomes part of the stock vocabulary of politicians, it will assuredly be due to the "ignorant" party which introduced it at Labor conferences, for only they—so far as this country is concerned—have realised, with Galton, the supremely religious project of making nobler people.
And now let us have a look at the novelists and writers. Again we hold the cards. Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Blatchford, George Eliot, Maxwell, Gray, Kingsley, Blackmore, Marryat, Wells, Jerome, Mark Twain, Emerson, Lowell, Sinclair, London, Bellamy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Maxim Gorki, Tolstoi— where shall we stop?
 Every genius of them voiced the hope and aspiration of a free people, of sympathy, for the poor and ignorant, hatred of the tyranny of the rich and of vice, its fruit. Take the firstnamed and consider, "Hard Times." His Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby are of the clearest types and sweetest satires yet given of your "Liberal" partisan.
 

"They were ruined when they were required to send laboring children to school ; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery: they were utterly undone when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. . . . Another prevalent fiction was very popular in Coke Town. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for some of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace that he would sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.' This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life on several occasions. However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all that they never pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been patriotic enough to take mighty good care of it."

So it would appear that the "driving away capital" tarradiddle was heard many years ago, and Dickens' words are quite as apposite in the days of his centenary as when he wrote them, and every Labor journal has employed the same satire.
 All his works likewise abound in recognition of the virtues of the lowly and cauterisings of the vices and hypocrisies of those who call themselves the upper classes. Similarly Thackeray, who gave us "Vanity Fair" with Becky Sharp and Hawdon Crawley—everlasting pictures; who castigated the idle rich in Lord Deuceace, Old Crabs, and Lady Griffin, and who taught us the proverb, "An Englishman would sooner be kicked by a lord than not noticed by him."
 A few words from Robert Blatchford, one of the most lovable humanists the world has known; the Socialist whose brain the anti-socialists use when their own fails, and then we must read the poets.

 "What are the things," said he, "that matter to wise and manly men? Health, and liberty, fresh air, clean water, wholesome food, and knowledge and art and useful human work. What are the things that matter most of all? Good women, sweet children, friendship, and love. These are the things that matter. And none of these things are dear. There would be health and freedom and water and air and food for all, if only we were wise enough to know what things do matter and what things do not. . . . Nature is bounteous, and there is room in the world for all. With society organised upon a reasonable and humane basis, it would be easy to create wealth enough to make the general welfare sure."

 This is the writer who, said G. K. Chesterton, is perhaps the greatest exponent of style in English prose. These are some of our precursors and sponsors, and there are scores we cannot quote nor even name, for want of space; these are the rocks on which builded, and in all the masterpieces of our language it is difficult to find one wherein the privileges of the rich are proposed against the rights of the worker.
 And the poet, is he against us? The thing is unthinkable ! Fancy a poet dedicating an ode to a Dividend or writing a sonnet to my lady's 3 per cent. ! Imagine the poet,

A soul above earth; a mind,
 Skilled in the characters that form mankind.

 inditing a prelude to a watered-stock balance-sheet with an epilogue on beauties of shirts, at 4/6 the dozen.
 No, the sordidness of the money loving and money-hoarding class has never inspired a great thought, but the injustices heaped upon the workers, the claims of the poor, the larger hope for freedom, the instinct of mutual aid, and race preservation by its means, have raised many a genius to ecstatic heights.
Elizabeth Browning's "Cry of the Children" and Tom Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs" have immortality that requires no quotation, and they stirred the public conscience as no bank director may, work he never so wisely.
 Shakespeare's heroes were, almost to a man, of the people; his kings and aristocrats he made disreputable. Milton was still more a poet of the lowly, and showed no admiration for emperors, Byron and Shelley were rigorously republican, and wrote burning lines in defence of democracy. Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote stanzas in admiration of the worker and of the democratic ballot, which should be quoted on every Labor rostrum, and he despised the rich. He hated slavery, which the "Liberals" of his day desired.
 William Morris, the grand Socialist artist and poet, and designer, whose ideas are in every artistically furnished home to-day, who loved the people so that he gave his life and fortune for them, who led them in the streets, and was persecuted for it, whose grandeur of character and conception frightened the Liberals of England; the writer of "News from Nowhere" and "The Earthly Paradise," stands firm in our ranks.
Swinburne, whose "Songs Before Sunrise" rang with the aims of the Labor movement in every line; whose passionate periods won him the love of the people and of the literary world, and excluded him from the laureateship, only because it is the gift of the rich, he is ours.
 The three Rossettis were essentially on our side, in their poetic and artistic concepts; they could not have been otherwise, for the sordid to them was hateful.
 And let us cross the Pacific, where in burning emotion they hoped they had birthed a free nation, only to find it taken from them by the wealthy few.
 Would ever a "Liberal" have the temerity to quote Lowell's "Parable" in support of his cause? 

Have ye founded your thrones and altars then
On the bodies and souls of living men.
 And think ye that building shall endure
 Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

 Then Christ sought out an artisan,
 A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
 These He set in the midst of them.
 And as they drew back their garment hem
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said He,
 The images ye have made of Me."

 Lowell has given us some of the most soul-stirring polemics on the political and social system moulded by the "Liberals" of every age, for none can say that Labor Government has had a hand in making this vast horrid sins of industrial and social life; these have existed long, and Labor is not yet come to its own. He said:—

 Hearing afar the vandal's trumpet hoarse,
 That shakes old systems with a thunder fit,
 The time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for change;
 Then let it come: I have no dread of what
 Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
 Nor think I that God's earth will fall apart 
Because we tear a parchment more or less.

He said the time was rotten ripe for change! Change from what? Lowell witnessed no Labor Governments, though he knew "Liberal" and Conservative, otherwise "Democratic" and Republican. It could not, therefore, have been the Labor press he wrote of in "The Pious Editor's Creed." 

I du believe in Freedom's cause,
Ez fur away ez Payris is. . . .
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed faintly from her want and sin.

Thet don't agree with niggers,
I du believe in bein' this
But libbaty's a kind o' thing
Or thet, ez it may happen ;
One way or t'other, hendiest is
To ketch the people nappin'.

In short, I firmly du believe
In humbug generally,
Fer it's a thing thet I perceive
To hev a solid vally;
This heth my faithful shepherd been.
In pasturs sweet heth led me,
An' this'll keep the people green,
To feed ez they hev fed me.

 And let any "Liberal" say if it was the Labor movement Lowell split the skull of in "The Debate in the Sennit."
 But all Columbia's finest sons are on our side as well. Read the words of Edwin Markham, the writer of that solemn warning to the Conservative forces, "The Man with the Hoe." He cried for the people's generals in "The Toilers." 

Their blind feet drift in the darkness, and no one is leading ;
Their toil is the pasture where hyena and harpies are feeding ;
In all lands and always, the wronged, the homeless, the humbled,
Till the cliff-like pride of the spoiler is shaken and crumbled.
Till the pillars of hell are uprooted, and left to their ruin,
And a rose garden gladdens the places no rose ever grew in,
Where now men huddle together and whisper and hearken,
Or hold their bleak hands over embers that die out and darken. . . . .

The leaves shower down and are sport for the winds that come after;
And so are the toilers in all lands the jest and the laughter
Of nobles—the toilers scourged in the furrow as cattle.
Or flung as a meat to the cannons that hunger in battle.

 On what political banner to-day would those words be most fitting?
 Or these, from "The Man with the Hoe," a poem further immortalised by the painter-democrat, Millet. 

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ?

Down all the stretch of hell, to its last gulf, 
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tinged with censure of the world's blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul, 
More fraught with menace to the universe. . .

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings,
With those who shape him to the thing he is,
When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries ?

 There can be but little joy to "Liberalism" there, but much that has been said in prose by Labor !
 Advance Walt Whitman, the Carlyle of poetry ! Magnetic, magnificent, audacious! Let him, too, proclaim himself, as on the side of the common people; a giant of frame and of intellect, and on the people's side! Grand, and rugged, let him call out that he is with us !

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme ;
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

 Have you heard that part of his "Song Of the Broad Axe," known as the Great City?

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretched wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce, merely,
Nor the place where money is plentiest, nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards . . .
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence in its place,
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons . . .
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and president, mayor, governor, and what-not are agents for pay . . .
Where women walk in public processions in the streets, the same as the men,
Where they enter the public assemblage and
 Take places the same as the men,
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
There the great city stands . . .
What is your money-making now? What can it do now ?
What is your respectability now?

 We have read those lines often enough in Labor journals, but never in "Liberal," which seem somewhat diffident about quoting; "The Good Grey Poet."
 Coming again home, we find no poet worth his ink who can write a strophe or a stanza for the profitmaker's praise, or get from his heart a throb for the party which calls us ignorant, and which itself John Stuart Mill called "stupid."
Every word of Bernard O'Dowd's, the Australian Whitman, a Whitman whose poetic march is steady, is ours. As here, "Proletaria." 

Wherever Plenty's crop invites
 Our pitiful brigades,
Lurk cannoneers of vested rights,
 Juristic ambuscades ;

And here hangs Rent, that squalid cage
 Within which Mammon thrusts,
Bound with the fetter of a wage.
 The helots of his lusts.

With palsied Doubt as guide, we wind
 Among the lanes of Need.
Where meagre Hunger's scouting find
 But slavered baits of Greed. . . .

And our reward? In this wan land.
 In clientage of Greed,
Despised, polluted, maimed, and banned,
 To wander and—to breed.

 Beside O'Dowd stand our chosen bards. Not a line can be found in the Australian poets in defence of the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, the profit-makers against the product-makers. It is all the other way, as you know who have read Brady, Hebblethwaite, Quinn, Gordon, Evans, Daley, Lawson, and the poetic brotherhood. Can you hear the roll of Lawson's "Drums of Battersea"? 

Where the hearses hurry ever, and where man lives like a beast.
They can feel the war-drums beating—men of hell, and London East. . . .

And the drummers ! Ah, the drummers, stern and haggard men are these,
Standing grimly at their meetings; and their washed and mended clothes
Speak of worn-out wives behind them, and of grinding poverty ;
But the English of the English beat the drums of Battersea.
 More drums ! War drums;
 Drums of agony—
The big bruised heart of England's in the drums of Battersea.

For they beat for men and women, beat for Christ, and you and me;
There is hope and there is terror in the drums of Battersea.
 More drums ! War drums;
 Drums of destiny—
There's hope—there's hope for England in the drums of Battersea.

 But as the genius of the world is not confined to the pen, so are Labor's champions not so limited, but we claim the Brush and the Stage also. The Royal Academician, Walter Crane, was a Socialist of the Socialists, and all his art has been used for Labor; William Morris also.
 Who can look on Dollman's picture. "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" and claim that dreadful portrait of our social system for a "Liberal" triumph? or Mostyn's picture, "The Dross House." Seymour Lucas and other academicians are with us, and rarely is a picture of merit found extolling the system of government we know or its sordid and unbeautiful results.
 The Theatre is the constant—and too seldom used—medium of showing the people reason and unreason in our social worlds, and a few of the masters of drama and comedy here named will prove our comradeship with them. Gilbert and Sullivan's immortal satires on the upper classes make them ours; Sheridan and Beaumont and Fletcher, likewise Shaw's sword thrusts. Pineroid's and Sydney Grundy's sabre slashes, were delivered not on the Labor movement, but on its political enemies. Wilde, the splendid genius, who met a strange unpoetic injustice in ruination by the classes he chastised, hurt no friend of the people in "A Woman of No Importance," or "Lady Windemere's Fan." but those scintillating examples of dialogic paradox are said to have touched some people on the raw who are politically unfriendly to us, Ibsen also, in "Brand" and "The Pillars of Society," gave our opponents furiously to think.
 A. M. Thompson, the sub-editor of the Socialist "Clarion," ran his "Arcadians" for three years at the Shaftesbury Theatre, It was a sweet and gentle satire, and his "Mousme" has been running ever since.
 George Paston ("Nobody's Daughter"), Clyde Fitch ("The Woman in the Case"), Somerset Maugham ("Lady Frederick"), Charles Klein ("The Lion and the Mouse"), Cicely Hamilton ("Diana of Dobson's"), Henry A. Jones ("The Hypocrites") are all authors we unhesitatingly claim for democracy, for their works have been democratic polemics that cut "Liberal" hypocrisy to the marrow, and laid bare the relations between the people and those who govern them.
 Music gives us Wagner, Saint Saens, and many others; and the Church, to come no nearer home, contributes to the Labor cause, the Bishops of London, Birmingham, Wakefield, etc., and the Church Socialist League, of many hundreds of clergy, while at the last Pan-Anglican Congress, the cream of the assemblage declared unequivocally for Socialism.
 And lo ! it is said that the Labor party is composed of ignorant persons, with ignorant or vicious ideas. Whoso says this, says the thing which is not; for the thoughts of those named are the thoughts of the Labor party. The aims of the one are the ideals of the other; we have proved our claim to the poets, the philosophers, the novelists, the dramatists, and the artists (the clergy are coming presently).
 It cannot be proved that any genius ever wrote or did anything in praise of "Liberalism." John Stuart Mill called the "Liberal" party "The Stupid Party."
 "Which is the ignorant party"?

Co-operator (Sydney, NSW), 1912, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article238817054