SEMI-SOCIALISTS.

 " There is, generally speaking, amongst democrats a leaning towards a kind of limited State Socialism, and it is through that that they hope to bring about a peaceful revolution, which, if it does not introduce a condition of equality, will at least make the workers better off and contented with their lot.

" They hope to get a body of representatives elected to Parliament, and by them to get measure after measure passed which will tend to this goal ; nor would some of them, perhaps most of them, be discontented, by this means we could glide into complete State Socialism.

 " I think that the present democrats are widely tinged with this idea, and to me it is a matter of hope that it is so ; whatever of error there is in it, because it means advance beyond the complete barrenness of the mere political programme. Yet I must point out to these semi-Socialist democrats that in the first place they will be made the catspaw of some of the wilier of the Whigs. There are several of these measures which look to some socialistic, as, for instance, the allotment scheme, and other schemes tending towards peasant proprietorship, co-operation, and the like, but which, after all, in spite of their benevolent appearance, are really weapons in the hands of reactionaries, having for their real object the creation of a new middle class made out of the working class and at their expense ; the raising, in short, of a new army against the attack of the disinherited.

" There is no end to this kind of dodge, nor will be, apparently, till there is an end of the class which tries it on, and a great many of the democrats will be amused and absorbed by it from time to time. They call this sort of nonsense "practical," but it seems like doing something, while the steady propaganda of a principle which must prevail in the end is, according to them, doing nothing, and is unpractical. For the rest, it is not likely to become dangerous, further than as it clogs the wheels of the real movement somewhat, because it is sometimes a mere piece of reaction, as when, for instance, it takes the form of peasant proprietorship, flying right in the face of commercial development of the day, which tends ever more and more towards the aggregation of capital, thereby smoothing the way for the organised possession of the means of production by the workers when the true revolution shall come ; while, on the other hand, when this attempt to manufacture a new middle class takes the form of co-operation and the like, it is not dangerous because it means nothing more than a slightly altered form of joint stocking, and everybody almost is beginning to see this. . . The enormous commercial success of the great co-operative societies, and the absolute no-effect of that success on the social condition of the workers, are sufficient tokens of what this non-political co-operation must come to ' Nothing — it shall not be less.' 

" But again, it may be said, some of the democrats go further than this ; they take up actual pieces of Socialism and are more than inclined to support them.

 " Nationalisation of the land or railways, or cumulative taxation on income, or limiting the right of inheritance, or new factory laws, or the restriction by law of the day's labor— one of these, or more than one sometimes, the democrats will support, and see absolute salvation in these one or two planks of the platform. All this, I admit, and once again I say, there is a snare in it— a snake lies lurking in the grass.

" Those who think they can deal with our present system in this piecemeal way very much underrate the strength of the tremendous organisation under which we live, and which appoints each of us to his place, and if we do not chance to fit it, grinds us down till we do.

 " Nothing but a tremendous force can deal with this force ; it will no suffer itself to be dismembered, nor to lose anything which is really its essence without putting forth all its force in resistance ; rather than lose anything which it considers of importance, it will pull the roof of the world down.

 " For, indeed, I grant these semi-Socialist democrats that there is one hope for their tampering piecemeal with our society, if by chance they can excite people into seriously, however blindly, claiming one or other of these things in question, and could be successful in Parliament in driving it through, they would certainly draw on a great civil war, and such a war once let loose would not end but either with the full triumph of Socialism or its extinction for the present, it would be impossible to limit the aim of the struggle ; nor can we even guess at the course which it would take, except that it would not be a matter of compromise. But suppose the Democratic party were peaceably successful on this new basis of semi-State Socialism, what would it mean ?

 Attempts to balance the two classes whose interests are opposed to each other, a mere ignoring of the antagonisms which has led us through so many centuries to where we are now, and then, after a period of disappointment and disaster, the naked conflict once more ; a revolution made, and another immediately necessary on the morrow — William Morris, "Signs of Change." 

People (Sydney, NSW ),11 November 1905, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138914451

William Morris on Socialism.

 The utterances of William Morris, " poet of the people" and author of  " News from Nowhere " and other works, should be extremely interesting to students of the Labour movement at the present time when some Australasian reformers show such a tendency to resort to so-called Liberalism. Writing in the FORUM, Mr. Morris says : " There is no progress possible to European civilisation save in the direction of Socialism; for the Whig or Individualist idea which destroyed the mediæval idea of association, and culminated in the French revolution and the rise of the great industries in England, has fulfilled its function or worked itself out. The Socialistic idea has at last taken hold of the workmen, even in Great Britain, and they are pushing it forward practically, though in a vague and unorganised manner. The governing classes feel themselves compelled to yield more or less to the vague demands of the workmen. But, on the other hand, the definitely reactionary forces of the country have woken up to the danger to privilege involved in those demands, and are attacking Socialism in front instead of passing it by in contemptuous silence.

 *    *    * 

"The general idea of Socialism is widely accepted amongst the thoughtful part of the middle classes, even where their timidity prevents them from definitely joining the movement. The old political parties have lost their traditional shibboleths, and are only hanging on till the new party (which can only be a Socialistic one) is formed : the Whigs and Tories will then coalesce to oppose it; the Radicals will some of them join this reactionary party, and some will be absorbed by the Socialist ranks. That this process is already going on is shown by the last general election. Socialism has not yet formed a party in Great Britain, but it is essential that it should do so, and not become a mere tail of the Whig Liberal party, which will only use it for its own purposes and throw it over when it conveniently can. The Socialist party must include the whole of the genuine labour movement — that is, whatever in it is founded on principle, and is not a mere temporary business squabble ; it must also include all that is definitely Socialist amongst the middle class; and it must have a simple test in accordance with its one aim— the realisation of a new society founded on the practical equality of condition for all, and general association for the satisfaction of the needs of those equals. The sooner this party is formed, and the reactionists find themselves face to face with the Socialists, the better. For whatever checks it may meet with on the way, it will get to its goal at last, and SOCIALISM will melt into SOCIETY."

Worker (Brisbane, Qld.), 11 July 1896 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70932803

SOCIALISM AND POLITICAL LIBERTY

 ——:o:——

(By J. BRUCE GLASIER in the "Labor Leader.")

Many years ago—I need not count how many—I read in the newspaper that the late Joseph Cowan, M.P., then in the height of his Radical-Republican fame, in opening the Free Library at Newcastle, chose as the first book to be taken from its shelves John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty."

 Holding the little book up, he remarked to those around him that he regarded the book and its subject as being, above all others, worthy of honor and deserving the careful study of his fellow citizens, especially the young men. The incident, made a deep impression on me, for like many other young men who afterwards became Socialists, I was early aflame with enthusiasm for liberty. 

When, however, a few years later, the vision splendid of Socialism burst upon us young libertads, "mere" political freedom lost its potency and lustre in our eyes; and I remember now, not without some self-reproach, how on the early Socialist platform I used this very incident of the choice of Mill's book by the veteran friend of Mazzini and Garibaldi as an example of the fetish-worship of political liberty which betrayed the deep individualistic bent of the old liassez faire school of Radicalism. The point was an effective one when driven home with the fact that Mr Cowan and his great political friends, John Morley, Charles Bradlaugh, Professor Fawcett, Admiral Maxse, Frederick Harrison, and even John Stuart Mill himself (though Mill, changed his mind somewhat in his latter days), were not only implacably opposed to Socialism but to all economic legislation designed to destroy Capitalism or liberate the working class from its tyranny.

 WHAT IS FREEDOM?

 That line of attack was sustained vigorously by us against the Radicals, who were keenest opponents in those days. We contrasted what we called the "negative and barren freedom"—the mere absence of restraint upon political and religious opinions—So glorified by the Radicals, with the positive and fruitful conception of freedom—freedom from poverty and industrial oppression, freedom of access to the land, freedom to the workers to enjoy the wealth they produced—which was the first aim of our Socialist agitation. We quoted with zest the ringing lines of Shelley in the "Masque of Anarchy," in which he portrays the misery of the workers of England, and asks:— 

What are thou, Freedom? . .. 

For the laborer thou are bread 

And a comely table spread,

 From the daily labor come,

 In a neat and happy home.

 Thou are clothes and fire and food

 For the trampled multitude—

 No—in countries that are free

 Such starvation cannot be

 As in England now we see.

 It was an easy platform victory, especially with a working class audience largely leavened with unemployed. But later events have rather modified our dogmatism about the "futility" of political liberty, even when inspired by Socialist idealism. The overwhelming defeat and almost complete extinction of Radicalism at the general election in 1886, followed by 20 years of Toryism (broken only by the brief and precarious Liberal Administration of 1892-5), and the sinister emergence of Imperialism, the South African war, the Tariff Reform agitation, the balance of power alliances with France and Russia, the Big Navy and Conscriptionist agitation, caused many of us to look back with some regret upon the disappearance of the stalwarts—even of doctrinaire Radicalism of earlier days. We began to realise, I think, that, negative as political liberty might be towards Socialism, it was at least positive in its assertions of principles without which Socialism is unattainable.

 WHY FREEDOM MATTERS.

 Political liberty is indeed, not bread; and without bread men die. But political liberty is not on that account valueless or unimportant. Literature, music, and art are not bread, but without them, in some degree, bread and life would have no savor and little desirableness. Sunshine and air are not bread, but lacking them bread would not avail to keep life in; we and all living things would die. Political liberty, therefore, may be a very great—is indeed a very great—possession, though it be but the outer gate to the whole freedom of which Shelley sang, and to which only Socialism can lead us.

 Thoughts of this kind have, I say, been in the minds of many of us, especially since the South African war. The present war, which, as our Labor Ministers pathetically plead, has altered so many things (including, and that, too, quite marvellously, their own political opinions and social status), has not lessened but deepened our apprehensions concerning the peril of public liberty under the rule of recreant politicians, poised on the pinnacles of power by the conscriptionist press.

 For that reason, as well as for its own special merits, Mr Norman Angell's timely book pamphlet, "Why Freedom Matters," deserves to be warmly welcomed by us, and commended, on our platforms. To those who hitherto have not thought seriously about the growing militarist tendency of capitalism, and the bearings of recent war legislation on democracy, its statement will be as a clarion trump of alarm. It is a really important and powerful predication.

 Mr Angell quotes as a foreword John Milton's famous saying, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to urge freely according to conscience above all other liberties," and very splendidly does he reaffirm that principle and apply it to our present situation. I have just been re-reading Milton's "Aeropagitica," and have been afresh lifted upon the mighty wave of his great argument: and yet I avow, fearless of all academic scorn, that in point of intensity of thought and persuasiveness of teaching, Mr Angell's tract is full worthy of a place both in our minds and on liberty shelves with Milton's great utterance and Mill's famous Essay. As a majestic appeal to the intellectual emotions, Milton's tract is unsurpassed in prose or rhyme, and Mills's Essay is without rival as an exposition of the utilitarian principles of Liberty in both its ethical and political ranges. But if Mr Angell's book lacks the lofty eloquence and vehement force of the one, and the philosophical scope of the other, it is excelled by neither in its perception of the vital importance of freedom to democracy and progress, and in the dialectical competence and convincingness of its reasoning. Besides, his pages reflect the light of our own times, and the hot glow of our present struggle with military autocracy at home and abroad.

 MR ANGELL'S ARGUMENT. 

The task which Mr Angell sets himself is to answer the pleas advanced for the suspension of the historic guarantees of British liberty. Briefly stated, his propositions are:— 

(1) That, many of the most dangerous measures taken in restraint of freedom during the war are not indicated by military necessity at all.

 "(2) Their motive is political, and their introduction is prompted not so much by the needs of the present as by a desire to render permanent those institutions that  the temper which war usually provokes.

 "(3) Their gravity does not arise from the individual hardship which they inflict, but from the fact that the habit of subservience to State authority in matters of opinion tends to destroy the capacity for private judgment in politics by which alone democracy is able to rule itself.

 "(4) Unless the temper of freedom which these measures tend so powerfully to undermine can be maintained and developed, the better world-order which was (the alleged) object of the war to bring about cannot be established or made permanent." 

But no mere summary of Mr Angell's propositions can convey a just impression of the largeness of the field of controversy over which he bears his argument, and the closeness of reasoning and fulness of evidence with which he enforces it. Nor, had I space, should I be able to extract the essence of his pages. My object is not to offer a second-hand exposition of his thesis, but to urge my readers to get "Why Freedom Matters'' and read it for themselves. Only two passages will I venture to quote—and these to show the integrity and "searchingness" of his thought. Speaking of the past struggles against tyranny, he points out that it is usual for us to picture these struggles as that of the great mass of the people held down by the superior force of the tyrant. This, he points out, is an illusion, for, as he says:—

 "In that picture which we make of the mass of mankind struggling against the force of tyranny, we must remember that the force against which they struggled was not in the last analysis physical force at all; they themselves furnished the instrument which was used against them. It was their own weight from which they desire to be liberated." How important that is, and how constantly it is forgotten in our democratic orations! Dealing with the "political heretic as the savior of society" (e.g., the pacifist, the conscientious objector, Bertrand Russell, etc.). he remarks:— 

"It is not the mind of the heretic which suffers most, as Mill has reminded us, in the suppression of heretical opinion. "The greatest harm done, is to those who are not heretics, but whose mental development is cramped and cowed by fear of heresy." You cannot have sound political opinion without stubborn and scrupulous private opinion. You cannot have enough liberty without having too much of it. If the English race has developed the capacity for freedom, democracy, and Parliamentary Government a little perhaps ahead of that shown by other peoples, it is because that kind of obstinacy and stubbornness have been found among us, and our Government heretofore has never been quite able, even in the very highest causes, to stamp it out.

 MR CLUTTON BLOCK'S PAMPHLET.

 I shall link with Mr Angell's book another pamphlet—Mr Clutton Block's "Philosophy of Socialism." It has a common bearing on the question of freedom and democracy with much that Mr Angell, and Mr Bertrand Russell in his "Principles of Socialism Reconstruction" put forward. It seeks to disentangle Socialism from the meshes of State autocracy and exalt its aim high above the sphere of economies. In this we see reflected the growing apprehension which militarism and State capitalism is arousing in reflective minds. And this is, I think, a sign of good hope for the Socialist cause. Mr Clutton Brock approaches Socialism from the literary and artistic rather than the political side. He drank early from the fountain of idealism which William Morris' genius enshrined for us. To him Socialism is the hope not only of Labor, but of art, literature, and all the nobler desires of the spirit. His tract is an admirable statement, to put into the hands of our many friends whose pacifist and anti-military sympathies have drawn them into the communion of the I.L.P.

Evening Echo (Ballarat, Vic. : 1914 - 1918), Saturday 29 December 1917, page 3

WILLIAM MORRIS AND SOCIALISM.

 

A GREAT MAN AND A GREAT CAUSE

Mankind is terribly hampered in its language. We use one word for several things, and the common run of people encounter a very real difficulty in discrimination. "Socialism" is one of the most familiar words in the language at the present time, and yet how few people understand what it connotes. To one group of "Fellow-workers" it means the acceptance of the economic theories of Karl Marx. To other classes of people it may mean the benevolent socialism of Robert Owen, or the Christian socialism of Charles Kingsley. Others call themselves Socialists who are collectivists, like Mr. H. G. Wells. There are, again, large classes of people who are desirous of seeing more joy and happiness in the world and less poverty and misery. They cherish this generous impulse apart from schemes of economics and dogmatic beliefs. Such a man was William Morris. He was a Socialist, not because he understood the complexities of Marxian theories, but because he was an artist. His aesthetic nature revolted against the foul and avaricious industrialism of the nineteenth century. 

WAS MORRIS A MARXIAN?

 There is an incident recorded by Bruce Glasier in his book "William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement" in which Morris was heckled as to his Marxist faith, and it sounds even today like a disturbance among fetishistic Melbourne Socialists. Morris was lecturing one night for the "Social Democratic Federation," and at the conclusion had to sustain a battery of questions from one Nairn, then secretary of the local organisation. Nairne was rather a sombre individual, and a stickler for political cliche. By occupation he was a stone-breaker, and it may be guessed that life did not have for him many rainbow hues. It was difficult for such a man to comprehend the dreams, or share the visions of a man like William Morris. As Morris rose to leave the platform, Nairne abruptly halted him with the sullen question, "Does Comrade Morris accept Marx's theory of value?" That was in 1884, and ever since then it has been the rack to test the faith of any who dared to think socialistic ideas at all. With a dogmatism of belief equalling, if not surpassing, any old medievalist, Marx's theory of value has constituted the passport to socialist fellowship among fellow-workers. But intelligent and sensible people have got beyond that now, and realise that many good men, and intelligent thinkers, as much as any book-enslaved Marxist, are desirous of reconstructing the world on a more equitable basis. Morris' reply to Nairne indicates that he was exactly of that type. After describing political economy as dreary rubbish, and the social system of monstrous and intolerable, he said, "What we Socialists have got to work for is the establishment of a system of co-operation where everyone will live and work jollily together as neighbors and comrades for the good of all. That, in a nutshell, is my political economy and my social democracy." "Co-operation," "Work jollily together as neighbors and comrades," are locutions that breathe the essential spirit of Morris' socialism. He had a consuming passion for cleanliness, for artistic freedom, for order and justice. His socialism was a socialism of fellowship, sympathy, warm comradeship; and he didn't care a jot how that end was reached so long as that was the end aimed at. It is well to remember that it was this camaraderie that was the soul of the British socialist movement in its inception, and a deep anxiety that men should act in this spirit towards their fellows was protagonist in the work of William Morris.

 SOCIALISM AND PROCESS.

 But Socialism today has been intellectualised. It is now an affair of solemn cogitative discussions, with a deplorable lack of kindly social feeling, which does nothing to prepare the souls of men and women for that comradeship and sympathy and understanding which Morris so ardently desired, but never lived to see, and without which no new world is possible. He believed that the making of socialists, and the making of society towards socialism, was a process going on through all history. He believed, but in this was ultra-heretic, that even in the Middle Ages there was a definiteness of socialistic teaching and socialistic customs. He meant, of course, that there was a perceptible growth of human fellowship and understanding. That Morris was a socialist because he was an artist is seen in a striking manner of the Art Cogress held in Edinburgh in 1889. He inveighed characteristically against the limitations under which men were compelled to live and work, the lack of all elevating and creative inspiration in the daily task, and the consequent inertness and dull irresponsiveness to any call to higher things. Morris loved work, and held, not that it was to be shunned, but that it should be rendered congenial. He did not therefore view with equanimity the progress of the mechanical inventions that supplanted human energies. In his "News from Nowhere," a Utopian romance, people work without special reward for their labor, which causes some astonishment to the visitors to that economic paradise. The reward of labor is Life, was the doctrine of William Morris; the payment of labor the pleasure of creation. He perceived that there was no hope and no pleasure in modern industrialism. The problem of civilisation was to make labor happy for all. It was the cardinal principle of his Socialist faith. He regarded parliamentarianism as a hindrance rather than a help. It was only by educating the minds of the people, and sowing the seeds of finer thoughts that labor problems would be solved. Morris owed a great deal to Ruskin. But Morris and Ruskin are back numbers nowadays, being submerged beneath the flood of social theories since their time. Yet if mankind had the power to resist the spell of newly-baked nostrums, it would probably admit, with the Utopian idealists, that if a means were discovered of giving men and women a creative pleasure in their work, we would soon solve the industrial problem. It is "pleasureless work," in which myriads of humanity are now engaged that begets so much of the disaffection of our time. When work is made creative and ennobling will the dawn of industrial peace begin to break upon this distracted world. 

THE IDEALISM OF MORRIS.

 This was the idealism that ran through the Socialism of William Morris. It lay at the core of the working class agitation in which he found himself involved. He knew nothing about the science of wealth, but he knew a lot about the art of living. He desired that men should live happy and fruitful lives. It is true that he sometimes used Marxian phrases in his lectures, but one suspects that these were more or less a concession to his Socialist colleagues. From "Socialism Its Growth and Outcome," which he wrote in collaboration with Belford Bax, an impression might be gathered that he was a disciple of Marx, but truth to say, in that volume there is much of Bax and little of Morris. Morris used to say, indeed, alluding to Bax's visits when they were writing the book together, "I am going to undergo compulsory Baxination to-day."

A PARADISE POSSIBLE. 

The inspiration of Morris' company was very wonderful. He had a buoyant and hopeful outlook on life, notwithstanding the many discouragements he received from the short-sighted and unimaginative of his own friends and Socialist comrades. After a day spent in the social intercourse with Morris, doubts of the possibility of a Socialist commonwealth seemed to vanish like drifting smoke. One special occasion, when Morris visited the branch of the Federation in Glasgow along with other illuminati of that quickening period, one member was led to remark as the meeting broke up: "This is the greatest day of my life; I can never hope to see the like again. I no longer doubt the possibility of an earthly paradise."

 ILL-TEMPERED OLYMPIAN.

 But William Morris was not always divine and good-humored. He could be at times disconcertingly and exasperatingly unreasonable. At some unavoidable contingency or pure accident, he would fly off the handle, and pour out the lava of his rage with no regard whatever for the feelings of others. On one occasion, he and a number of others were appointed to speak at a certain meeting; and the train, through a mishap, carried them beyond their destination. Morris got into a frightful temper, and broke out into an infuriated diatribe against the guard of the train, whom he must have known was not to blame. Even his friends were ashamed of the scene, and of their companion's behavior. This explosive inconsiderateness was always a sore trial to his confreres, but their attachment to the Olympian was such that it only increased the difficulty of rebuke. His own cheerful explanation of the guard episode was, "You had to blow up someone."

JOHN McKELLAR. 

Labor Call (Melbourne, Vic. : 1906 - 1953), Thursday 11 November 1926, page 11

GOVERNMENT BY THE WISE.

 The Workers' Educational Association, whose purposes and methods were discussed in these columns last Thursday, may be said to represent one of the two competing ideals which have divided political thinkers since the days of Plato. It is true that neither ideal has ever come within measurable distance of realisation; but it is also true that neither of them has even been wholly suppressed; in the darkest times they have lived at least in the souls of such as see visions and dream glorious dreams of the perfect State. The first of these two ideas—the notion which is at the core of the above mentioned Association—is the idea that the many, to be fit for self-government, make themselves wise; and the opposing idea—expounded graciously and blandly by Plato, and with thunderous emphasis by Carlyle—is the idea that the many can never by the nature of things be fit for self-government, and that the secret of political perfection is to entrust the task of government to the wise few. The former is the idea of an enlightened democracy; the latter is the idea of a bureaucracy of saints and sages. The distinction is clear-cut, and it divides into two classes the imaginary commonwealths which have been painted by various inspired dreamers. For instance, the the "News from Nowhere" of William Morris is a poetic and persuasive picture of a community which has grown wise and good, and which is perfectly capable of managing its own affairs; and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" sketches, in vague outline, a similar happy state of things. In Plato's "Republic," on the other hand, and in the "Modern Utopia" of Mr. H. G. Wells, we are presented with pictures of a community governed by its philosophers. Shelley and William Morris, in short, believe in democracy, for which Mr. Wells can find no words too placidly contemptuous. He believes, with all his heart, in the principle of aristocracy—not a feudal aristocracy of birth, not a Nietzschean aristocracy of virile and violent persons, but an aristocracy of brains and character. In the world-state of the Wells Utopia the whole of the responsible business of government is in the hands of a "Samurai" class—a class which consists of all who are capable of living the pure, the austere, the minutely regular, the exclusively rational, the bodily and spiritually ennobling existence laid down for them by the "Rule" of their order. It is strange to find in so modern a writer as Mr. Wells—a writer, too, who has so often poured contempt on the study of Greek—so close an echo of Plato. Mr. Wells is perhaps a little unfortunate in the name—"Samurai"—which he gives to his ruling class: for the real Samurai, those heroes of Japan whose fellowship will stand throughout succeeding time among the world's grandest memories of moral achievement, lived in an age of faith and feudalism: we, on the contrary, are living in an age of doubt and democracy; and it is the problems of our own age that we are called upon to face. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Wells's vision, or anything like it, will ever be realised; it is highly improbable that any of the dominant nations will ever again acquiesce, for any long time, in the concentration of all political power in the hands of a class, however wise and good that class may be. The nations have tasted blood; they have assimilated the democratic idea. The democratic idea, once fully grasped, is only abjured by a people in the degradation of decay; yet to be able to produce a whole class of pure, austere, devoted, self-sacrificing governors, an entire bureaucracy of saints and sages, a people must be in a condition very far from decadence. The conception of the "Samurai," in fact, contradicts itself. Only a sound race could bring forth these thousands of splendid personalities; only a failing race would submit to their dominion. The fact is that Mr. Wells, like many other writers less brilliant than himself, falls into the mistake of treating democracy as a human plan—like, say, some particular nostrum for some particular malady—which has been made the subject of experiment and has been found useless or too dangerous. They speak of democracy as if it were a political device, like party government for example.

But democracy is not a mere piece of political machinery, it is a part of the material of politics. It is an instinct that comes to communities with growth, as puberty comes to individuals. Mr. Wells finds no difficulty whatever in proving to his own satisfaction that democracy is irrational and absurd; he repeats his demonstration, with a rather wearisome iteration, in half a dozen of his books. He finds it quite easy to show how much better the world would go on if only the people would leave government to the great of heart and strong of will. In like manner M. Emile Faguet, one of the wittiest and most brilliant of modern Frenchmen, has made in a book entitled "The Cult of Incompetence"—a slashing attack on democracy as he sees it in the France of to-day; his main thesis being, that whenever you catch a glimpse of democracy in action you invariably find it, distrusting ability and tending to put power in the hands of the inefficient mediocrity. Nothing could be more skilful than M. Faguet's manner of showing how incompetence in one field of government—the legislature—leads to incompetence every where else, till at last the whole body politic is saturated with inefficiency; how a country which begins by entrusting the duties of Prime Minister to mediocrity ends by entrusting the duties of rural postman to a paralytic. And M. Faguet's solution is the same as that of Mr.. Wells—an aristocracy of wise men; government by the philosophers. It is hopelessly impracticable. A healthy nation trusts its instincts—and, it may be added, distrusts its philosophers. And since no sane person will deny the peremptory need of wisdom in the work of governance, and since government by the wise few is incompatible with the democratic instinct of twentieth-century humanity, it seems to follow that the other idea—the idea of bringing wisdom to the many—is the only alternative, unless democracy is destined to lead the human race into the abyss. If it be objected that wisdom cannot be acquired, we may reply that at least knowledge, which is the basis of wisdom, can be acquired; and that is why such enterprises as the Workers' Educational Association deserve every support, and why the success of such enterprises must be reckoned among the hopefullest signs of the times.

West Australian (Perth, WA ), July 1913,

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26879439

WILLIAM MORRIS.

 ————<>———— 

HIS PLACE IN LITERATURE.

Few, if any of the contributors to Macmillan's " English Men of Letters" library have had a more difficult task to perform than Mr. Alfred Noyes, who has just produced the volume on "William Morris." For such a series it is naturally but one aspect of Morris's many sided nature and career that has to be kept immediately in view. It is as a man of letters that Mr. Noyes has to deal with him, and in many respects Mr. Noyes should have been just the man for this delicate piece of work. He is himself an epic poet of no mean repute. He has entered into the rich literary heritage bequeathed by the great writers of the past century, among whom Morris must always take high rank, and he is a critic of considerable insight, though as it now appears, of somewhat limited sympathies.

Despite his undoubted qualifications, Mr. Noyes, it must be confessed, has just missed what was really a great opportunity. His monograph is full of valuable comment, and it contains illuminating pages which will be most welcome to Morris's many lovers, but it fails to be what it might have been, because Mr. Noyes is patently not of the Morris school, but a devotee of the Tennysonian tradition. He admires Morris unfeignedly, but his ideal is the polished elaborate perfection of phrase which is so characteristic of Tennyson and Virgil, and he cannot do justice to the "native wood notes wild," the blithe Chaucerian spirit of the beautiful tapestry by a narration of Morris. Moreover, he is too prone to take Morris's literary work as something apart from Morris's life, as the creation of mediæval dreams, rather than as the expression of the living man's active existence. We miss in Mr. Noyes's criticism appreciation of the real unity of the poet and the man of action in Morris. In his poetry, in his art designs —wall-papers bookbinding and stained windows— in his militant socialism, and in his daily life Morris was one and the same, not, as Mr. Noyes implies, the visionary who strove to escape to things of beauty through mediæval fancies, but a strenuous reformer who sought to bring beauty into the world of facts.

His position in the great "renascence of wonder," of which Mr. Watts-Dunton has written, cannot yet be defined, but his "Life and Death of Jason," his "Earthly Paradise," his Sigurd, and his exquisite lines make him something far more than his own modest estimate, "The idle singer of an empty day." He viewed life as a great epic struggle of right with wrong, or what to him was the same thing, of beauty with ugliness. Compared with Tennyson, a comparison which Mr. Noyes makes "ad nauseum," and often irrelevantly, Morris was undoubtedly pagan and sensuous, rather than Christian and spiritual in his attitude to life. Fear of death was from his earliest days his great horror, but it was not the morbid fear of the sin-oppressed fanatic, but the ancient tragic sense of a short existence amid light and warmth, flowers, songs, bright colours, and human affections, lived between two dark, shadowy eternities—the long past before birth, and the long future after death. This sense of life's tragedy did not make him sad or pessimistic. On the contrary, it made him, like the Greeks of old time, determined to make the most of his little span, to enter into it all the joy and all the beauty he could, and to help, as far as in him lay, to make the world a place of joy and beauty for his fellow-men. He was the artist in action, and therein is found the key to his poetry, his arts and craft work, and his socialism. Impossible is his socialistic dreams were, as he himself sometimes realised when he had to work with ordinary socialists, they were part and parcel of his love of beauty. He hated the ugliness of the squalid slum, of the dull factory life, of the home without taste, and he wanted to turn the whole social edifice into a piece of art. His "News from Nowhere" is socially and economically all wrong, but its artistic beauty has coloured our whole view of the world. As long as he was dealing with art his reforms were effective, and no man has done more than he to make homes beautiful, while few poets have given more unalloyed joy of life to their readers.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 30 January 1909, page 4

THE ROMANCE OF THE IDEAL

 BY IOTA.

" The World Grown Young " (being a brief record of reforms carried out from 1894-1914) is the title of a book recently issued, and it sets speculation adrift. Not for any particular virtue it may have, but because it comes as a fresh addition to a class, because it typifies a movement. That movement is the straining after the ideal, the pursuit of the Golden Age, the hope of the Millennium.

Society has of late suffered from this mental influenza severely, but like the bodily influenza, the seizure is as old as man. Plato's "Republic," Donnelly's "Caesar's Column," Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," Bellamy's "Looking Backward," Campanella's "City of the Sun," William Morris's " News from Nowhere," on they go, jostling one another in beautiful confusion. Whether it comes from a philosopher like Plato, with the soul of a poet, or in the cold and formal phrase of a Karl Marx whether it be the stilted bombast of a modern political reformer, or a prose idyll of Morris's written in the "plush of speech" that Meredith speaks of, it is still the same. The cry is always for an escape from the unsatisfying Present to the vague but soul-illumined Future. The cry, it has been said, is one that echoes from far-off times, but within recent years it has been heard with peculiar force London that great baby that must have its toy to caress or to rend, has taken to its care H. P. B. (Blavatsky) and her shadowy schemes, and has, as it thinks, beautifully pulled out all the sawdust and stuffing, while the Besantine Kingdom, as a flippant London scribe has styled it, has come in for a like hauling. Mrs. Oliphant's Memoirs of the gifted Laurence Oliphant have brought into the light again the pathetic story of his " Great Renunciation " and his constant striving after his ideal. The Memoirs has also revealed once more the mystic Thomas Lake Harris, saint and seer according to some, rogue and blackguard in the opinion of others with his plans for the redemption of society. The picture of Laurence and the gentle and beautiful Alice Oliphant, with their hard taskmaster, more autocratic than the Czar of all the Russias, it would be hard to parallel in the whole range of fiction. The "new social order" has also been a happy fiction with certain classes in this colony of late, to be brought about by the " downtrodden masses " getting a direct voice in the affairs of the nation. Now they have got it the blissful change seems as far off as ever. True they have made a step by seeking to fine and imprison a man who works a longer time than they consider he should, but beyond that they have not gone far.

Milton, in some of his earlier poems, has shown his skill in gaining a happy effect from the mere iteration of a string of names. What impression, think you, would the names of the romances of the ideal convey? We have the "Coming Race," "Old Order and the New," " Utopia,"' "New Atlantis," " City of the Sun," " Golden Age," " Mundus Alter et Idem," News from Nowhere," "Looking Backward," "Looking Further Forward," " A Social Tangle," " Cæsar's Column," "The Crystal Button," " Life in Utopia," &c. The man who prides himself on his "common sense" mutters, " Chatterings of unhinged minds, the effervescence of of over-stimulated brains." To the enthusiast, the complacent optimist, they convey the hope, the promise of the long-expected "New Order." To him they mean the truth of Whitman's words—

In this broad earth of ours,

Amid the measureless grossness and the slag,

 Enclosed and safe within its central heart,

 Nestles the seed perfection.

The historian that is alive to feel the beats of the nation's pulse notes these efforts, and gives them their due significance.

In Rip Van Winkle style pass for a while into the land of dreams, only instead of it being unconsciously on the mountain side as with that worthy, let it be consciously among the romances of the ideal. Your feelings on awakening will be every whit as strange and perplexing as his ; your mind will be as ragged and disorganised as were his garments. This, of course, provided you soak yourself sufficiently. " I'm overdosed with the ideal," said a friend, R——, to me, who ought to know, having taken it like a course of Turkish baths, "and piously crave a return to the everyday world, unlovely though it is." His mental haze was not surprising, for your Utopian writer gives to his work an air of vraisemblance. If you are at all in harmony with his general principles, if you are a disciple of the "new order," saturated with the " new spirit," you are swept along by the tide of his enthusiasm, and revel in a world of possibilities. Your ideas of the real and the ideal run into one another and tie themselves in a knot, your present existence becomes shadowy, your imaginary life the real. From the pinnacle of your "Nowhere" you look askance at ordinary mortals and at ordinary things. " Was it a dream ?" asks William Morris's "Rip Van Winkle." " If so, why was I so conscious all along that I was really seeing all that new life from the outside, still wrapped up in the prejudices, the anxieties, the distrust of this time of doubt and struggle ? All along, though those friends were so real to me, I had been feeling as if I had no business amongst them as though the time would come when they would reject me and say, as Ellen's last mournful look seemed to say, 'No, it will not do; you cannot be of us, you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that, in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day, there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before.' " All here below seems so flat, stale, and unprofitable, and this " time of rest in store for the world " is so captivating. The Is—" the time before Equality of Life," Morris calls it—appears an unsightly wench ; the Might Be a maid that a wondrous fair, inviting a closer acquaintance.

In these schemes for knocking the universe into shape we can but admire the resolute grasping of the nettle, the rude breaking in where the proverbial angel fears to tread. With what airiness are crooked things here made straight! How the stubborn problems that have been troubling the world are muzzled, knocked on the head, and finally kicked aside. Here are provided remedies for all the ills that flesh is heir to, and for that matter, also for those that mind is heir to. It is a small matter, that to some the remedy seems to be worse than the disease. When property and money are no more, when greed and strife are at an end, what then ? As love feeds on hate, content on discontent, so conflict is the salt of life, the spice of labour. The abyss of consuming monotony yawns before us. Save us from the Millennium, a tiresome existence. Some we can conceive as preferring the orthodox hell to the tedium of the orthodox heaven of certain folk. Are we in future to lack first-rate villains ? Are we to have no more sad examples to hold up as awful warnings! Happily " man never is, but always to be, blest." Thus the evil day is staved off.

In a conversation once with Robert Buchanan, G. H. Lewes said, " Man is pre-doomed to aspiration as the smoke flies upward." And this is well. Humanity has its safety valves, and the romances of the ideal are of them. These singers of the Golden Age fail to grasp the significance of Lowell's words, " 'Tis heaven must come, not we must go."

Meanwhile it is certain that we will continue to have Cities of the Sun, more budgets of News from Nowhere (the "where" may in time be located), more Looking Backwards, and Looking Forwards, until this world no longer be a stage to feed contention in a lingering act.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW 1891)http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article13849819

"Twelve Types,"

 by G. K. Chesterton (London: A. L. Humphreys).

One of the most brilliant of living essayists of the younger school is Mr. G. K. Chesterton. In airiness and ease the flights of literary fancy he has brought together under the above title may not compare with Andrew Lang's best efforts, or with Stevenson's, which, perhaps, they more nearly resemble. But Mr. Chesterton yields to no recent writer in originality and suggestiveness, and if the twelve types he has selected for critical study are not likely to be unfamiliar to any person at all decently read, the author may fairly claim to have introduced the reader to a mode of treatment which is certainly not common. It would be extraordinary if essays dealing with such diverse characters as Savonarola, Charles II., St. Francis of Assisi, Pope, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rostand, and Tolstoi were equal to one another in power throughout, but there is not one from which the reader will not draw some profit and pleasure, or which does not bear the stamp of a thoughtful and vigorous mind. Thus Mr. Chesterton takes Savonarola out of the category of theologians pure and simple. The great teacher of Italy, we are told, "was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fall. He was preaching that severity which is the sign manual of youth and hope. He lived at a time when, following eagerly, though blindly, the phantom of an extinct civilisation, the citizens of Florence had gathered about them the little fragments of what might seem a Greek city—its architecture and sculpture, its Platonic banquets, and Aristophanic revelry. He set himself to combat the profligacy of a day when men were parodying the old liturgies with the borrowed phrases of Pagan philosophy, or polluting Italian morals, with exotic mysteries, which could scarcely be whispered in a confessional. He transformed a vicious and effeminate people into an austere and simple society; he replaced tyranny by the most popular institutions; and he governed Florence without giving any orders, and without having as much as a single soldier under him. "Men like Savonarola," says Mr. Chesterton, "are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of man."

The misfortune, which Mr. Chesterton does not seem to see, is that men, like Savonarola in the effort to spiritualise society, are apt to think that human virtue is bound up with conformity to the standard of an idyllic past. Savonarola, like the Puritans of England, craved for an earthly commonwealth, of which Christ should be King. The younger and more impressible citizens of Florence were constituted a moral police, who enforced sumptuary laws in the streets, or entered fearlessly into private houses. Country merrymakings assumed the form of devotional processions, or meetings, where crucifixes and pictures were something more than religious ornaments. The marriage feast had nothing left of a secular character—it was purely sacramental, and (as Gibbon tells us was the case among the early Christians of Rome) often followed by vows of chastity between husband and wife. Savonarola, indeed, looked forward to the day when such unions would cease altogether, and Florence become one vast monastery. Presently, the irresistible logic of his convictions carried him yet another step backwards towards a visionary past. All the secular progress of his day, the first promise of the new morning of thought, was anathema, and must be shut out of the church. So a pyre was erected in the great square of the city, and upon it the noblest works of the greatest masters laid—the dangerous love poems of Petrarch, the impure novels of Boccaccio, and the fresh flowers and voluptuous forms of the pictures where Venus and Cupid had supplanted the saints. Perhaps Europe has never since witnessed the deliberate offering up of so costly a holocaust; and yet not one of the governing party shrank from the sacrifice. But Savonarola's triumph was of short duration. His Commonwealth vanished before the touch of time, just as that did which was founded by the English Puritans, and which was intended by many of its founders less as an assertion of the political rights of the people than as an expression of mediæval religion in its highest form.

The attempt to impose upon a nation the ordinances of a self-denying asceticism is foredoomed to failure, whether it be made by a Savonarola in the interests of religion, or by a John Ruskin in the interests of art. For a buried past there is no day of resurrection, and we can no more recall the blank cheerlessness of a time when the aesthetic sense was undeveloped than we can think of stopping the industrial machinery because it is pleasanter to breathe the ambrosial air of glade and meadow than the blackened and dust-laden atmosphere of a city. The aim of the true reformer should be not to abolish but to make the best of our civilisation. It can hardly be said that William Morris, to whom Mr. Chesterton devotes one of the most impressive of his essays, had a full grasp of the problem. For his "glorious, if not conquering, fight against the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries," he merits nothing but praise. His limitation is chiefly apparent in his inability to apprehend anything excepting by his one sense —that of beauty. What charmed him in the noble legends and the noble fancies with which he dealt in his poetry, was the way in which they lent themselves to the purposes of art—their beauty as beauty. Reading his verse is like living in the dreamland of a syren's isle, a place where it is always afternoon. Fair women and brave men pass before us in stately show, and we seem to see them in the half-light of some cloistered isle. It is all a piece of tapestry—a splendid collection of detached episodes. The mediæval era was to Morris an age of gold; as though selfishness and misery did not exist then as much as, perhaps more than, now. He appeared to think a child-like simplicity indispensable to virtuous living. His socialism was not a protest against an unjust distribution of wealth, but merely a sense of beauty working in an economic medium. He saw that the masses are not, and under existing conditions cannot be ruled by artistic perceptions. He saw that unless those conditions were radically changed, and the means were provided for ensuring to all who would work the means of a decent livelihood, his passionate appeals to handicraftsmen to show themselves artists in every stroke of their work, must fall upon deaf ears. He spoke in a dialect strange to the ears not merely of political economists, but of ordinary men, and the result is that his prophetic message has largely miscarried. What will preserve his memory, Mr. Chesterton thinks, are his services as a reformer of the aesthetic taste of his countrymen:—

If ever the gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not backwards, but forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colors, and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

The falsehood of extremes was never more strikingly exemplified than in the teachings of Carlyle and Tolstoi, which furnish material for two of Mr. Chesterton's most instructive essays. The blunder of both writers was identical, though it led them to opposite conclusions. The means by which a principle is asserted are gradually confused with the principle itself, until at last they become inextinguishable. Carlyle saw that righteousness was furthered by earnestness, and in dwelling upon the need for earnestness he got at last to look upon it as an end in itself, so that to his mind to be earnest was to be righteous. Earnestness is another name for strength of character, which expressed in action usually takes the form of force. It is easy to understand that a mind carried away as Carlyle's was, would gradually come to see virtue in tyranny and vice in subjection, and so we find Carlyle defending negro slavery and extolling despotism. "In an "Occasional discourse on the nigger question," published in "Fraser's Magazine" in 1849, we find him urging sharp measures to compel Quashee, "up to the ears in pumpkin," to labor for the enrichment of the white planter in the West Indies. Governor Eyre who, in the mild language of Mr. Justice Blackburn, had adopted the "unreasonable course" of keeping up martial law in Jamaica for a period of thirty days after an armed insurrection had been put down, taking during that period, as Mill said, "hundreds of innocent lives by military violence," and flogging men and women in batches, becomes in the eyes of Carlyle "a just, humane, and valiant man." Democracy, as one might expect, is to such a mind "utterly evil," and the proper position of the masses is one of enslavement to the "best man," who should have the power to "beat them" if they will not toil, and shoot them if they still refuse. The error which Carlyle made springs from a defect in his logical faculty, which, as Bagehot showed, is by no means uncommon. For as, according to the lastnamed authority, there are people constitutionally incapable of belief where their reason is unconvinced, and thereby compelled through "the make of their mind" to remain outside ecclesiastical organisations, so there are minds on which no argument based on mere logic can make any impression. The same infirmity is exhibited in another way by Tolstoi. Wrong is inevitably associated with force, therefore force is wrong — so wrong that resistance, even to wrongdoing, becomes a vice. "The theory of Christian duty enunciated by Tolstoi," says Mr. Chesterton, "is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer by persuasion." Interpreting the Scriptures in the light of the ordinary dictionary, and assuming that "resist" means withstand, that "not" means negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition, and that "evil" means something injurious, pernicious, having bad qualities of a moral kind, the Tolstoians have come to believe that the famous exhortation, "resist not evil," means that no step should be taken to prevent mischief or wrong being done. That people can be found in thousands attaching an everyday meaning to the language of Christ, and rejecting the interpretations which it undergoes in the pulpit, is to Mr. Chesterton the most Tremendous tribute ever paid in the world's history to the vitality of an ancient creed. Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the phenomenon that a ste of revolutionists whose contempt for all the ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilization, cannot rid themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

No church, says Mr. Chesterton, could keep its congregation together if it offered the tribute Tolstoi pays to Christianity. "The Christianity of Tolstoi is, when we come to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars." This is not the place to discuss the accuracy or otherwise of Tolstoi's interpretation of the Gospels; but a word may be said as to the strange meaning Tolstoi and Carlyle attach to the term "force." It is regarded by both as in itself a moral or an immoral quality, whereas it is, of course, entirely without ethical significance. Where a child is killed by a blow from an axe the same degree of force may have been employed, whether the blow be accidental or deliberate. To form an opinion as to the culpability of the deed we have to look behind the force to the state of mind which directed its use, and where intention is absent, there is no culpability. If force as force were immoral, morality would require the stoppage of all human exertion, muscular or other. If, however, intention be everything, then force might justly be used to prevent the commission of a wrong, and we should be justified in effecting the "conquest" of an intending murderer by something more than persuasion. The inference deduced from so much of Carlyle's teaching that all force is right is, however, no more defensible than Tolstoi's doctrine of inflexible non-resistence. The force that would have stayed an Armenian massacre hardly comes within the same category as that employed by Carlyle's favorite hero when he plunged Europe into war in order to effect the wanton subjugation of Silesia.

Advertiser (Adelaide, SA :), 20 December 1902, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4908823

REMINISCENCES OF H. M. HYNDMAN

THE GRAND OLD MAN OF ENGLISH SOCIALISM

The English cables announced that the coffin of H. M. Hyndman was followed by a crowd of mourners quite a half-mile in length. We were not surprised, for Hyndman was respected by his opponents on account of his evident sincerity and his great devotion, to Social-Democracy.
Strange to say Hyndman was treated as a suspect for years when he took the platform on behalf of Social Democracy. There was no valid reason to doubt his sincerity, for his record was a good one, advocating as he did free education in Australia when a young man. The fates, however, decreed that he was for ever to be a stormy petrol.

William Morris.

When I first heard Hyndman speak in public William Morris I think was in the chair. A few weeks after a notice was put in "Justice" calling a congress to consider urgent important business. The business was never gone into.
As soon as the meeting was opened Comrade Morris rose and gave it as his opinion that it was useless to stay and be slandered, and he asked those who agreed with him to follow him out of the room, and have a meeting elsewhere. And out Morris went, followed by Belfort Bax, Dr. Aveling, Eleanor Marx and others. The meeting was sparsely attended, when all were there.
John Burns, Hyndman, Jack Williams, and others then addressed the meeting, when it was determined to carry on the paper "Justice" and the S.D.F.

Disputes.

The chief factor in the dispute, I believe, was the caustic letter writing of Hyndman. Hyndman, I should say, made more personal enemies by his letter writing than by all the speeches he ever made. Though he worked like a Trojan Hyndman continued to be treated by the middle-class Socialists as a suspect. The only reason we can account for the false idea was the possession of his numerous talents. He was a middle-class man, and of good family. He was a good speaker, both in attack and defence. He had a good platform presence, and being as poor as a church mouse he had all the attributes necessary for a politician. "That he should neglect a promising future to attack all Governments and all political parties was evidently a temporary device. Hyndman was ambitious and aimed high."

Karl Marx.

His critics were wrong. Hyndman was a man of sincerity and strong emotions, and after reading Karl Marx he saw a way out of the economic social entanglements of the capitalist system. I well remember him saying that he had heard all the classical economists, and was dissatisfied with them. When he read Marx he at once formed the opinion that he was the writer to follow. Hyndman was at heart a democrat. He only needed the knowledge to become a Social-Democrat

Agitations.

Hyndman had some experience of journalism and he naturally became the chief writer of the paper. "Justice,"' and accepted editor. H. H. Champion, who had been in the army, was looked upon as Hyndman's lieutenant, and as he was a printer "Justice" was kept going until a committee was found and type bought. Voluntary labor set up the type, and to the surprise of all concerned the paper was kept going. To get some sort of circulation public parades were held on Saturdays. Hyndman attended, but did not sell the paper. John Burns, Harry Quilch, H. H. Champion, John Adams, amounting to over a dozen, stood in the gutter at Holborn, Oxford-street, and Liverpool-street, and quite a respectable number were got rid of. Hyndman was in high glee. Good propaganda meetings were held in the public places. The great John Burns drew enormous crowds in the big park, with his deep resonant voice and witticisms.
The Hyndman "gang" popped up everywhere and were demons for deputising. The Social-Democratic Federation soon commenced to form branches.

A Tireless Worker.

Hyndman was at work every day. He used to come to the printing office and inspired the volunteer workers with new zeal He recounted funny stories to us at one moment, and at the next denounced the selfishness of the middle-class, and all politicians.
He encouraged the workers to write articles, and when they sent in any contribution would correct and "make it read," as he used to call it. If the article was too green, he touched it up for a letter. The work he did in this respect was remarkable, and was a credit to him.
Though suspected by his own class Hyndman succeeded in gaining the complete confidence of the working class. A working man Socialist would go up and address him with the utmost confidence, and pass the time of day, and put questions to him. Though dressed quite different to the working class he was always at home with them. To cast a doubt upon Hyndman's honesty was to meet with immediate resentment.

Harry Quelch.

Hyndman found that lecturing and writing and attending the printing office till late at night interfered with his livelihood, for he was a poor man, relatively speaking. He entrusted the editorship to H. Quelch, a promising writer, and even better speaker, who carried on the editorship till his death. The paper is now under the editorship of H. W. Lee, who was the first secretary of the resurrected S.D.F.
Hyndman was anxious for S.D.F. members to have a sound knowledge of economics, and for this purpose he issued a series of lectures which were well attended. Marxian economics became the order of the day, and classes were formed to which I had the honor of forming and addressing many. Hyndman also published a book on economics.

Old Associates.

Many speakers, after they found the Revolution was not going to happen for a while left the movement—"all owing to Hyndman," it was said at the time. The most serious loss was H. H. Champion and John Burns, the latter seeking a career for himself. Burns raised himself in public estimation on the unemployed question, and singular to relate he never really survived a slanderous speech he made on the unemployed in the House of Commons, he being a Cabinet Minister at the time. He is now regarded as an extinct volcano. H. H. Champion had many friends and great influence. There were misunderstandings between him and Hyndman in dealing with the unemployed. Champion ultimately came to Melbourne, where he has played a generous part in connection with the Socialist Party.

A Renegade.

John Ward, a promising speaker, now Colonel Ward, who volunteered to fight the Bolsheviks, was once a member of S.D.F., but early left the movement, He is still secretary of a Navvies' Union. His influence was never of any account, and he was rightly regarded as a renegade.
Hyndman regarded these lapses with regret, and whatever animadversions he may have made against the individuals at the time of their secession, he was always careful to be within the four corners of the constitution of the S.D.F.
Hyndman was admired for his boldness in defending Socialism. It required some pluck, for instance, to meet Charles Bradlaugh (the greatest speaker, perhaps, of his age), and debate with him, which he did, and with a great degree of success.

Henry George.

He also had a memorable debate with Henry George, in the St. James' Hall, on the Single Tax versus Socialism. There was a crowded audience, Henry George had a good reception, for the Socialists held him in great esteem. Probably every member of the S.D.F. had read George's book entitled "Progress and Poverty," and they were delighted with his defence of Labor and more so with his attack on the Malthusian theory, which formed the subject of many addresses at the time. The Socialists were pleased with Hyndman's speeches, and the Single Taxers were pleased with Henry George. I do not think a debate would alter the opinion of a Henry George land reformer. People obsessed with land reform will never be argued out of the views they hold; they will only disappear with natural process.
The most prominent, the most useful, and most far-reaching characteristic of Hyndman was his buoyancy of spirits—his optimism, in fact. No reverse ever damped his optimism. Branches invited Hyndman to address them purposely to get a "cheer up," and he never failed to give it to them. "Socialism was bound to win; it was the outcome of a social law which would operate as surely as a natural law." And every member of the S.D.F. became imbued with the same certainty.
"India would go bankrupt." The fates were a bit spiteful towards him on this matter. But I have no doubt Hyndman was as confident on this matter when he died as he was forty years ago.

A Great Speaker.

Hyndman was a fluent speaker and spoke good English, and could always turn his sentences well. With him it was a gift. His voice could reach large audience, but it was none of the best, and prevented him from being a notable orator.
He was an easy writer, sitting down and writing off-hand a whole newspaper page of notes in an incredible short space of time—perhaps without a single correction. He was also good reader of manuscript. We have seen him take a letter of many pages and just turn them over and put them down. It seemed impossible for him to have read them; but he had, for the next moment he would hold forth on the various items contained in the letter.

Anti-German.

Hyndman was an anti-German from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. The international relations between the S.D.F. and the German Social Party were never cordial, despite the fact that Liebknecht the elder was a most loveable man, and Kautsky a man always for peace. Engels was often described as the "Grand Llama of Regent Square."
Despite his democratic leanings, Hyndman was a bit masterful by nature, and also very suspicious; the latter failing unfortunately receiving no check at the domestic fireside.
Hyndman was not a heaven-born leader. He was far too impatient and irascible to coax people to his way of thinking. The consequence was people took umbrage at his method of dealing with them, and we lost many men of mark, who would have worked for the S.D.F. had he adopted the suavitor in modo of argument. It is easy to magnify differences in a fighting organisation.

Morris and Bax.

Comrades William Morris, Belfort Bax, and Eleanor Marx eventually became on friendly terms with him. William Morris could never get on with Marx's book on "Capitalist Production." He said that it gave him an headache to read it. Of course, Morris understood how the workers were exploited, but he preferred more idealistic reading.

Anti-Bolshevik.

Hyndman was anti-Bolshevik. The title "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" would not be a pleasing phrase to him. When I read Lenin's book entitled "The State and Bolshevism," wherein he classes Hyndman among the "opportunists opposed to revolution," I could easily imagine that Lenin had, figuratively, committed the unforgiving sin against the Holy Ghost. Lenin, unfortunately, seems to have pursued the policy of dividing Socialists into two divisions: one which favour him and the other which fail to support him. Lenin has through this policy made many enemies, and also made the noble task he has set himself in Russia the harder.
Hyndman was no opportunist, and they who charge him with that frailty must be ignorant of his character and his work. He was, with all his failings, a thorough Social Democrat, and when his life is written, which I hope it will be, it will be shown that he lived an earnest and clean life for Social Democracy.

-A. P. Hazell.

Westralian Worker (Perth, WA : 1900 - 1951), Friday 6 January 1922, page 6

MR. MORRIS AND THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE

The cable informs us that Mr. William Morris, the poet, has severed his connection with the Socialist League. As Mr. Morris was himself the founder of this particular organisation, after seceding from a greater body called the Social Democratic Federation, we may expect soon to hear that he has passed on to establish yet another sect of social Utopians. The fact seems to be that Mr. Morris, being a man of culture and sensibility, and zealous to lead a body which shall share in and exhibit those qualities, finds nothing but disappointment wait upon him. He has judged other men's motives, culture, and sentiments by his own, and has estimated them all too highly. The special feature of the new league, whose author was the author of The Earthly Paradise, was to be its attitude of philosophic theorising, while other organisations made it their business to strive and cry. It was to be, in short, Socialism served up a la Matthew Arnold. Such was Mr. Morris's conception, and such also was the conception of a certain more enlightened class of Socialist apostles, who had fled from the wrath to come in Germany and elsewhere. Persons thus well endowed with liberal culture, however ill endowed for the rest with economic penetration, have the not unnatural idea that people ought to learn before they act. The great function of the league was therefore to instruct mankind in Socialistic principles and fascinate mankind with Socialistic ideals. If Matthew ARNOLD had been a Socialist he would have been one of precisely this class. He would have talked much of the prior necessity of attaining "clear ideas," while he would have basted with a gentle unmercifulness those who, like the general run of social reformers, are waspishly obstreperous in the resolve to realise ideas which are both turbid and crude.

Unfortunately a league of any dimensions cannot, even when it is made up of Socialists, consist entirely of poets, or poetic souls, or artists with delicate sensibilities, or cultured persons who can possess their souls in patience. Mr. Morris has found this out. The lectures and essays of the leader and his apostles may have imparted the new principles, but they could not therewith impart the philosophic temperament. Accordingly the league, which would have nothing to do with the empirical tinkering politicians whom men call Radicals, and whom the Olympians call quacks, has become rampant to forthwith realise the new gospel and hurry up the millennium. Its reasonable enough distrust of the retail Radical proves to be the outcome, not of philosophic cultivation, but of a preference for the wholesale revolutionary. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the league has incontinently adopted a no-rent and general strike manifesto, and that Mr. Morris, poet, artist, and scholar, has shaken the dust of it from off his feet, and set forth once more on his pilgrimage in search of an ideal socialism, wherein culture and sensibility shall be as contagious as are the superficial "principles " themselves. His experience reminds one of Sir Percivale in quest of the Holy Grail—

" But even while I drank the brook, and ate
The goodly apples, all these things at once
Fell into dust, and I was left alone,
And thirsting, in a land of sand and thorns."

But whereas Sir Percivale did ultimately see and was glad, it is contrary to all we know of human nature that Mr. Morris should ever find his fair ideal this side of Cockaigne or Nephelo coccygia.

The question has often been impatiently asked with regard to our poet, que diable fait-il dans cette galère [what the hell is he doing in this galley] at all ? But this inquiry usually proceeds from those who fancy all Socialists dynamitards and all Socialism Jack-Cadism. Mr. Morris is beyond question a poet, and equally beyond question he is a man who desires to behold life pervaded with art and beauty. The Earthly Paradise and the well-known artistic wall-papers are evidence of these facts. And in his volume of lectures, called Signs of Change, it is manifest that what chiefly saddens him in his contemplation of human society is the lamentable poverty of art and scarcity of the beautiful. And this depressing state of things he imputes to the defects of our present economic structure. Therefore, society must be revolutionised. And if society is revolutionised according to Morrisian plans and specifications, art and beauty will flourish after Mr. Morris's own heart. As thus. Supposing the average man to be rid of his cruellest and most brutalising labour conditions, he will have time to educate himself, to develop his best faculties, and to enjoy the things of the mind. He will obtain an intellectual quickness and a sureness of taste at least equal to those of the cultured man of to-day. Therefore, he will insist on beautiful surroundings. Art will be a necessity and not merely a luxury to him. The æsthetic instincts which are now dormant in the vast majority of men, and partially trained in a very few, will then (in the great THEN) be everywhere developed, and therewith will come a truly millennial exuberance of art and beauty in every kind.

This apparently is what Mr. Morris dreams, and the vision is decidedly attractive. Mr. Bellamy has dreamed the same dream, with incidental variations in the shape of houses with music laid on, sidewalks projected by a co-operative umbrella, and other delights. Unhappily one does not see quite how all these enticing conclusions are sure to follow from the Socialist premises. Herbert SPENCER has long ago pointed out how different the result of an institution is apt to be from its intentions. Human nature is a tough thing to grapple with, and yet to Socialism human nature is apparently a "negligeable quantity." It is quite conceivable of course, that wings might suddenly sprout from the shoulders of man in the socialistic state, and that so the ideal of Mr. MORRIS might be realised. But it is unfortunately quite as conceivable that, if the new régime did not result in the chaos which seems most likely, it would at least result in a life which was one dead colourless level, and whose significance might be expressed in one gigantic and eternal yawn. The cramping of all individual merit, aspiration, and effort on the Procrustean bed of the average member of the plebs might not result in a particularly beautiful or expansive life. Meanwhile, the fact that Mr. MORRIS'S quondam followers have thrown off their allegiance to the broad philosophy of culture and art in favour of a policy of universal dishonesty and universal strike, cannot be taken as indicating that Socialism in that particular form spells the millennium.

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 15 November 1890, page 9

TWO LECTURES ON SOCIALISM.

I. A SEVEN YEARS' RETROSPECT BY MR. WILLIAM MORRIS.

Mr. William Morris addressed the members of the Hammersmith Socialist Society at their annual meeting, on Aug. 30, at Kelmscott House. He said the theme of his address would be "Seven Years Ago and Now." Although seven years ago seemed a very short time to look back upon, yet the events that had characterised that period made the state of affairs which obtained then almost ancient history. Although this country had then passed through some remarkable crises, the ordinary politicians, working-class or aristocratic, would have considered the people thoroughly contented, having nothing to ask for as they had all they could wish, and having nothing to grumble at in the polity of the time. True, nature had ordained that some were up and some were down, but that was accepted as inevitable, so much so that the ups had forgotten to find even compulsion for the downs. Important events such as the Paris Commune and the Chartist movement had been forgotten, and even trade unionism was over-looked. In fact, the only thing that seemed of interest in social matters was as to which of the two great parties should govern, as it was jocosely so-called. (Laughter.) As far as general organised social progress was concerned everything had come to a dead stop. In the midst of all this came the beginning of the Socialist movement, which was at first looked upon as a joke ; in fact, he remembered an evening paper referring to the Social Democratic Federation as something which Mr. H. M. Hyndman would persist in calling himself. (Laughter.) In fact, the whole of modern life seemed depressing to some of them, and art, literature, and pleasant society seemed like the bricks they tried to grasp in a dream which crumbled away in their hands. At first the teachers of Socialism were revived with not exactly amiability ; but gradually people began to find something in it which was not mere mid-summer madness, and, strange to say, the first wave of assent came, not from the lower classes, but from certain knots of people in the middle classes. The lower classes had joined the movement later on, but by quite a different road, and then gradually at first, by some extraordinary process, all the old world workman's associations discovered that they must of necessity find themselves in the midst of the Socialist movement, and it was discovered by everybody at once that there were two definite classes throughout civilisation. It seemed almost extravagant to talk about the suddenness of this change, which had been brought about by the work of a few obscure persons and the distribution of a few thousand leaflets, and the publication of a paper that didn't pay. They had, then, in almost the very words of Matthew Arnold, a stupid upper, a vulgar middle, and a brutal lower class.
Coming to the present, they found then was absolutely no difference between the two political parties, it was always a toss up upon any given occasion as to which would go the farthest in the direction of social reform. The only thing that could be said was that the Tories required a little more pushing but did the work more thoroughly when they were pushed. In fact, he thought they might say that the England of to-day was entirely changed from the England of seven years ago. Then the ordinary educated Englishman thought that working men were well enough paid, and that whatever poverty and misery existed was entirely the fault of the sufferers. But it recognised that society was sharply divided into two classes. There was a mere change of opinion only, the people were no better off, and the present condition of oppressors and oppressed must before long lead to something which looked like the break up of the whole thing. They had once thought that a change would have been brought about by more catastrophic means than now appear possible, but as opinion grows with extension it losses in intention. They were asked where was the present movement to stop? His answer was at the absolute equality of all classes, which meant that there should be not classes at all. Some people talked about greater equality ; this was a loose grammatical term, something like Cobbet's idea of a man who had been moderately cheated, or whose wife was moderately chaste. They, as Socialists, recognised that this was the only goal. At present the workers were wasting their energies in strikes here, there, and everywhere, and at last these spasmodic attacks would so injure the commercial machine, and make it so racketty about the joints, that it must fall to pieces. In fact, he thought capitalism would come to an end because the position of the capitalist would become so bad that nobody would be willing to accept it. At present the position seemed slightly humdrum, and progress appeared slow or at a standstill, yet it might be that with an appearance of powerlessness their movement was like a sword whirled in the air so fast that its movements could not be seen. It might be that some present would have an opportunity of proving their manhood, and he thought, with his friend Shaw, that the loss of three or four thousand lives would be but a drop in the bucket compared with the millions of lives now thrown away for nothing, in bringing about the defeat of the human race.

II.— PRINCE KRAPOTKINE'S UTOPIA.

 Prince Krapotkine delivered a lecture on August 31 at the Athenaeum Hall, Tottenham-court-road, on "Brain Work and Manual Work." The lecturer, in his opening remarks, said in the present state of things it was of the greatest importance for the Socialists to have a special school for their children. The race hatreds which existed were due in great part to the want of knowledge of the languages and habits of the different countries, and this was exploited to a very great extent by those who had an interest in supporting race hatreds. To eradicate this want of mutual knowledge the International School was established, and in it was given also that kind of education which was free from those religious prejudices which helped to support the feuds of nations. But whatever might be the intelligence and devotion of the person under whose management the school was placed it was important that the parents themselves should take a warm interest in the school, so that they and the teachers and the children should be a kind of great family, and in this direction the Socialistic school must be entirely different from any of those which had ever existed in the world.
With regard to the subject proper of his lecture, the distinction between brain and manual workers had been growing for centuries, so that it could not go further, and a movement in the other direction was necessary. It was remark able that many Socialists who criticised everything else were extremely cautious when they approached this division of brain workers and manual workers. They did not seem to realise that there might come a time when there was no such distinction, when every man of science would be a manual worker, and every manual worker a man of science. He need not mention to them the writings of Tolstoi, who advocated the union of labor, and who had carried it out in his person. All over the world, indeed, there was a great movement in favor of developing technical education in all possible ways, and they would find in the elementary schools of France, Germany, and Russia, and, in this country, also, to some extent, manual teaching had been introduced, and it was sought to inculcate into children the habits of manual work. All these were indications of the direction in which society was travelling, and when they considered the question they must come to the conclusion that the next step was to organise a state of society in which every one would receive a good university education and at the same time be a skilled workman. He was fully persuaded that this was possible, because it had already been done by hundreds of young men, and it was strange that the first steps in this direction had been realised at Moscow. To give such an education would be a real economy in society. Let them remember what was spent every year in maintaining the gaols, judges, and hangmen, and the like; but in a society where everyone had been accustomed to work with his own hands they would not have any person who would try to live by avoiding work. In such a community they would not have the division and hatreds which existed between the different classes of society, because all of them would belong to the same class of society, and a community of this kind would be able to produce wealth. In such manner that each would have enough and no one would have to work more than he was willing to do. It was sometimes said that certain countries suffered from over production, but that was an absolute absurdity, for there could never be over production from which our societies suffered, but if everybody became a producer there would never be any of that. It might be said, perhaps, that this state of society would be the death of science and art and literature. Yet he held that science would benefit immeasurably from the change. The progress of industry was the development of science— inventions were made by the workers and then scientific theories manufactured to explain them. Science wanted workers, and literature and art would benefit no less if every man was a labourer. Would it not be a very good thing, for instance, if the poet, who considered himself a person who mustn't work in the fields, should take part in the work of those who laboured in the fields? Would not a poet be a better poet if be were a fisherman himself, a tiller of the soil himself, and a toiler in the mines himself ?

Maryborough Chronicle, Wide Bay and Burnett Advertiser (Qld. : 1860 - 1947), Thursday 15 October 1891, page 3