# The Life of William Morris/Chapter 16

CHAPTER XVI
THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE
1885-1886
"I cannot yet forgo the hope," Morris had written in July, 1884, when the disruption of the Democratic Federation was already looming ahead, "of our forming a Socialist party which shall begin to act in our own time, instead of a mere theoretical association in a private room with no hope but that of gradually permeating cultivated people with our aspirations." After the first spasm of disheartened disgust at the break-up of December was over, he was not disinclined to set to work again to form such a party out of what he believed was a thoroughly loyal remnant. To this task he now set himself in fresh courage and with even higher hope. The conflict had made him examine his own ground more carefully: he was more satisfied than ever of the truth of his principles, and of the reasonableness of his position. But the prominence now forced upon him as a leader at once exposed him to a redoubled storm of misrepresentation and obloquy. Socialism had once been regarded by ordinary middle-class opinion as a thing that went on abroad. When there was no longer any doubt that it had reached England, it was still looked on for a time ​as a silly or perhaps even an interesting craze. But now it had roused a genuine fear among a large body of people. The attitude of Gallio was passing away, and a strong feeling arising in its place which regarded the new Gospel, in the words applied by the Rome of Nero to the not wholly dissimilar doctrine of the early Christian Church, as a destructive superstition which drew upon itself the natural hatred of the human race.
But this was not all. In the curious imbroglio into which politics were then drifting, the name, and some at least of the doctrines, of Socialism had been seized by various parties as weapons of attack and defence. The famous speech in which Mr. Chamberlain laid down the doctrine of "ransom" was delivered a few days after the foundation of the Socialist League. On the part of both the Radical and the Tory-Democratic wings of the two great political parties there was a tendency to believe that Socialism in some sense or another was a real force, and a desire to attack that force and use it for all it was worth. Overtures were made from both sides by persons who might fairly be regarded as responsible politicians. Attacked by some and courted by others, the Socialist party became an object of widespread and increasing interest. It was enough to upset many Socialists who were not old hands in politics, and make them believe that a great movement of public opinion was about to take place towards Socialism.
On Morris personally the attack was a double one. It consisted on the one hand in renewing, with additional zest and less attention to ordinary manners, the familiar sneers at the strange figure of a poet-upholsterer; and on the other, of denouncing him for inconsistency or hypocrisy in being a Socialist who ​was also a capitalist manufacturer. In his first public utterance after the formation of the Socialist League, he had expressed his hope and his aim in words of studied moderation. He spoke of the social re-organization which he advocated as something not only desirable in itself, but involving a high conception of duty, and containing in it the elements of solid permanence. "When the change comes, it will embrace the whole of society, and there will be no discontented class left to form the elements of a fresh revolution. It is necessary that the movement should not be ignorant, but intelligent. What I should like to have now far more than anything else, would be a body of able, high-minded, competent men who should act as instructors. I should look to those men to preach what Socialism really is—not a change for the sake of change, but a change involving the very noblest ideal of human life and duty: a life in which every human being should find unrestricted scope for his best powers and faculties." The Saturday Review, with characteristic suavity, seized this occasion to point its finger at "this spectacle of the intellectual disaster of the intelligence of a man who could once write 'The Earthly Paradise' and can now formulate these two propositions about the disappearance of all discontented classes and the change involving a life in which every human being finds unrestricted scope for his best powers and faculties." This last phrase, indeed, to judge by the number of times it, recurs in the article, was found humorous to an uncommon degree. That such a life should be conceived of as possible, that any attempt should be made to realize it, seemed quite preposterous to the critic and to the large body of opinion which he represented. The laws of nature were invoked to sustain the conclusion that a state ​of things in which the larger number of the human race were permanently poor, ignorant, and brutal was certainly necessary and in all probability desirable.
The inconsistency of Morris's own position as a capitalist employer of labour was a matter on which he might more reasonably be challenged by a criticism which was not either purposely unfair or obviously unintelligent. It had formed the ground of the earliest attacks made on him when the Oxford address of November, 1883, had excited general attention to the case. To an attack made by an anonymous correspondent in the Standard, Morris had then replied in simple and dignified words, which come near the truth of the matter, though, as Morris himself felt, they require further definition.
"I think I may assume," he then wrote, "that your correspondent had no wish to cast any personal imputation on my motives, but wished to call attention to the position of those who, like myself, are well-to-do employers of labour (as I am) and hold Socialist views.
"I freely admit that this position is a false one, but it seems to me that its falseness is first felt by an honest man, not when he begins to express his opinions openly, and to further openly the spread of Socialism, but when his conscience is first pricked by a sense of the injustice and stupidity of the present state of society. Your correspondent implies that, to be consistent, we should at once cast aside our position of capitalists, and take rank with the proletariat; but he must excuse my saying that he knows very well that we are not able to do so; that the most we can do is to palliate, as far as we can, the evils of the unjust system which we are forced to sustain; that we are but minute links in the immense chain of the terrible ​organization of competitive commerce, and that only the complete unriveting of that chain will really free us. It is this very sense of the helplessness of our individual efforts which arms us against our own class, which compels us to take an active part in an agitation which, if it be successful, will deprive us of our capitalist position."
"I have been living," he writes a few days afterwards from Merton Abbey, "in a sort of storm of newspaper brickbats, to some of which I had to reply: of course I don't mind a bit, nor even think the attack unfair. My own men here are very sympathetic, which pleases me hugely; and I find we shall get on much better for my having spoken my mind about things: seven of them would insist on joining the Democratic Federation, though I preached to them the necessity of really understanding it all."
What is quite certain is that the reproach of inconsistency was never made against Morris by any of his own workmen. The attacks on this score which he had to meet came in the main from educated people, who attached their own meaning to the term Socialism, and were confident in their condemnation of doctrines the purport of which they had never taken pains to ascertain. The fixed idea which most of them had was that Socialism meant the redistribution of individual property in equal shares. From this point, however, they pursued divergent lines of argument. Some contented themselves with remarking that if individual property were divided equally to-day, inequality would have begun to reinstate itself before to-morrow. Others argued that any employer who believed in the principles of Socialism could carry them out in practice by sharing the profits of his business equally among himself and each of his workmen. ​But among the latter class of objectors were some for whose good opinion Morris had a respect; and it was implicitly in answer to them that he drew up, in June, 1884, a memorandum going into the matter, not only on the principle, but in detailed figures.
The business was then organized as follows. Morris himself, George Wardle his chief manager, and four other sub-managers or heads of departments, shared directly in the profits of the business. Two others, the colour-mixer and the foreman dyer, shared in them also, but indirectly, in the form of a bonus on the goods turned out. The rest of the staff were paid fixed wages; the greater number (including all the most efficient workmen) by the piece; a smaller residuum, partly consisting of men who were getting past work on the one hand, or on the other as yet imperfectly trained, by the hour. Both piece-workers and time-workers were paid on a scale somewhat over the ordinary market price of their labour. "Two or three people about the place," he adds, "are of no use to the business, and are kept on on the live-and-let-live principle, not a bad one I think as things go, in spite of the Charity Organization Society."
On an analysis of the figures, Morris found that if he gave up his own share of the profits, which, of course, included not merely the remuneration for his own labour as manager, designer, and artificer, but interest on the whole capitalized value of the business, by that time representing some £15,000, and took in lieu of it a foreman's or a highly-skilled workman's wages of ₤4 a week or £200 a year, there would be a sum divisible which would represent ₤16 a year, or about six shillings a week, for each of the workmen. "That would, I admit," he adds, "be a very nice thing for them; but it would not alter the position of any one ​of them; it would leave them still members of the working class, with all the disadvantages of that position. Further, if I were to die or be otherwise disabled, the business could not get any one to do my work for £200 a year, and would in short at once take back the extra £16 a year from the workman."
"I have left out," he goes on with admirable sincerity, "a matter which complicates the position, my family. We ought to be able to live on £4 a week, and if they were quite well and capable I think they ought not to grumble at living on the said £4, nor do I think they would." There are perhaps few families of the richer middle class to whom so splendid a compliment could be paid.
But what, the memorandum goes on, would be gained by taking such action? A small knot of working people would be somewhat better off amidst the great ocean of economic slavery, but with what probable or necessary result? Like himself, the workmen were imprisoned in an existing social system. "If the manufacturer were to give up his gains to them, they would set to work to save, and would become, or try to become, small capitalists, and then large ones. In effect this is what mostly happens in those few factories where division of profits has been tried. Now, much as I want to see workmen escape from their slavish position, I don't at all want to see a few individuals more creep up out of their class into the middle class; this will only make the poor poorer still. And this effect of multiplying the capitalist class (every member of which is engaged in fierce private commercial war with his fellows) is the utmost that could result from even a large number of employers giving up their profits to their workmen. The men would not know how to spend their newly gained wealth. Even now ​there are at times artisans who receive very high wages, but their exceptional good luck has no influence over the general army of wage-earners, and they themselves have in consequence only two choices: the first, to rise out of their class as above; the second, to squander their high earnings and remain in the long run at the ordinary low standard of life of their brethren. The really desirable thing, that, being still workmen, they should rise in culture and refinement, they can only attain by their whole class rising."
But this, as things go, he continues, is impossible; because the competition for subsistence keeps the standard of life, taking labour all round, from rising seriously for any long period. Trades Unions have in England raised it, for a time, for skilled labour. But their effect can in the nature of things be only partial and temporary: for on the one hand the movement, not being an international one, allows other nations to undersell us; and on the other, it does not include the unskilled labourer, whose wage of subsistence finally determines the rate of the wages of labour all round, and who is scarcely in a better position than he was fifty years ago.
The choice, then, which lies before a capitalist, or before the hanger-on of the capitalist class known by the name of a professional man, whom reflection has turned into a convinced Socialist, is this. Shall he ease his conscience by dropping a certain portion of the surplus value which reaches him, in order to bestow it in charity on a handful of workers (for it is but charity after all, since their claim is not on him personally, but on the class and system of which he is a mere unit)? or shall he, continuing his life under existing conditions, do his best, by expenditure of his money and his whole powers, to further a revolution ​of the basis of society? If he can do both, let him do so, and make his conscience surer. But if, as must generally be the case, he must choose between suffering some pangs of conscience and divesting himself of his power to further a great principle, "then, I think," Morris concludes, "he is right to choose the first."
It is true that there is a third alternative, that of complete individual renunciation, which, illogical as it may be, has often, as with the earliest Christians, with the mendicant friars of the great religious revival of the thirteenth century, and since then in many splendid isolated instances, affected mankind more powerfully through the imagination than they have ever been affected by arguments or enactments. If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and come, follow me. Such a course would have accorded with Morris's own early dreams at Oxford of a monastic life, lived by friends in common in the single pursuit of poverty and art. But now it seemed to him to mean practically, though not formally, abandoning the principles for which Socialists contended, and giving up the struggle in a spirit not far removed from cowardice. "If these were ordinary times of peace, I might be contented amidst my discontent to settle down into an ascetic, such a man as I should respect even now. But I don't see the peace or feel it: on the contrary, fate or what not has forced me to feel war, and lays hands on me as a recruit: therefore do I find it not only lawful to my conscience, but even compulsory on it, to do what in times of peace would not perhaps be lawful, and certainly would not be compulsory. If I am wrong I am wrong, and there is an end of it. Whatever hope or life there is in me is staked on the success of the cause. Of ​course I don't mean to say that I necessarily expect to see much of it before I die, and yet something I hope to see."
This, then, was the conclusion to which Morris came as to what was right for him to do with his income as a capitalist. To distribute it among his own workmen would be to waste it; he could as little satisfy his conscience by wasting as by hoarding: his duty was to spend it; to devote it, as he devoted all else that belonged to him, to the furtherance of one great purpose.
How it could be so spent was sufficiently plain. The newly-founded Socialist League was practically without funds except so far as he supplied them. That it should spread its doctrines by means of a newspaper was taken for granted from the first, and preparations for bringing out the "Commonweal," the first number of which appeared at the beginning of February, were begun the first moment that the League was constituted. "I intend," he wrote on the 4th of January, "to turn it into a weekly if possible: but paying for 'Justice' has somewhat crippled me, and I shall have to find money for the other expenses of the League first."
The Manifesto of the Socialist League, which was printed at full length in the first number of the Commonweal, declares in uncompromising terms for a complete revolution in the basis of society. Co-operation, Nationalization of Land, State-Socialism which left the existing system of capital and wages still in operation, are reviewed and dismissed as equally useless with merely political movements such as constitutionalism or republicanism. The League is stated to have been founded on the 30th of December, 1884, and to have taken temporary offices at 27, Farringdon Street. Morris is named as having been appointed Treasurer ​of the League and Editor of its journal, the control of the journal, however, being in the hands of the Council. The twenty-three persons whose signatures, as members of the Provisional Council, are appended to the manifesto, were mainly members of the little group of Socialists, English and foreign, settled in London: but they included also an old veteran of the Chartist movement, a few members from the great manufacturing centres of Leeds and Glasgow, and among them all, the one friend who had followed Morris unfalteringly through all his life from the Oxford days till now, as member first of the Brotherhood, then of the Firm, and now finally of the League, Charles Faulkner.
The beginnings of the venture were not discouraging. "They have sold 5,000 and are in a second edition," Morris writes on the 10th of February: "I have written a poem for the next number, not bad I think." This poem, "The Message of the March Wind," which appeared in the March number, has touches in it of the natural magic which had filled his early poetry. It opened a series of poems, forming a more or less continuous narrative, which, under the title of "The Pilgrims of Hope," appeared at irregular intervals in the Commonweal for upwards of a year. With all its faults, this series of poems is perhaps the only contribution to the first year's issue of the Commonweal which appeals to a wide circle or has any permanent value as literature. It contains passages of extreme beauty: the two sections reprinted in "Poems by the Way" under the names of "Mother and Son" and "The Half of Life Gone" stand high among his finest work. But the narrative of which they form parts has much of the same weakness and unreality as his prose novel of fifteen years earlier: and like it, dwindles away and finally stops with the unfulfilled promise "To be ​Concluded" in July, 1886. Of his prose contributions, signed and unsigned, and ranging from carefully written leading articles down to brief notes hastily set down to fill up a column, there is little to say except that he no more than other men escaped the vices of journalism when he took to being a journalist.
Another visit to Oxford in February was more eventful than the one of fifteen months before, so far at least as the behaviour of the meeting went. The Clarendon Rooms had been refused for this meeting on account of the fear of disturbance, and it was held in the Music Room in Holywell. Opinion on both sides had stiffened; and Faulkner had, two or three weeks before, for a speech he had made to a little Socialist meeting in Cowley, been stigmatized in the sedate columns of the Oxford Magazine as an alehouse anarchist. The social enthusiasm which had been so strong in 1883 was beginning to cool down among a fresh generation of undergraduates. But for the healthy young Tory Morris had always a lurking sympathy, and he writes the account of his experiences in the highest spirits.
"Wednesday I went to Oxford with the Avelings: we went by the early train, and all turned out well, and even amusing: we walked about Oxford a good deal, and even with all the horrors done to it, it looks very well and beautiful on such a bright afternoon as we had. There were terrible threats about what the lads were going to do, which I didn't suppose would come to much: we met, some of us, in University Common Room to settle the meeting, and it seems the enemy sent in a spy, which however we survived. Charley had asked a great many very young persons to dinner, and their ingenuous visages made me feel rather old. So to the meeting we went, in a room in ​Holywell, which I daresay you have forgotten: it used to be the room of the Architectural Society when I was a boy, and is now a music room: it is just opposite where Janey used to live—Lord, how old I am! Well, we had a fine lot of supporters, town and gown both, who put on red ribbons and acted as stewards, but the 'enemy' got in in some numbers, and prepared for some enjoyment. Charley was in the chair and led off well, and they heard him with only an average amount of howling: you must understand that there were but some 20 or 30 of those enemies, and perhaps 100 declared friends, with some 250 indifferents who really came to listen to us; the hall was quite full. I had to get up when Charley sat down; I was rather nervous before I began, as it was my first long speech without book, but the noise and life braced me up, and after all I knew my subject, so I fired off my speech fairly well I think: if I hadn't, our friends the enemy would have found it out and chaffed me with all the mercilessness of boys. Of course they howled and stamped at certain catchwords, and our people cheered, so that it was very good fun. Aveling came next: they had really listened to me, even the noisy ones; but it seems they had agreed that A. at any rate should not be allowed to speak; but he began very cleverly and won their ingenuous hearts so that they listened to him better than they did to me. Then came question-time, and that was more than they could bear; after two or three questions asked and answered, the joke of the evening came off by one young gentleman letting off a bottle of chemical which made a horrible stink, and the respectables began to leave and both the fighting [bodies] to draw nearer to the platform. Then by Aveling's advice Charley, who was by the ​way getting a bit nervous, broke off the meeting, and we 'got'; which I suppose was the best thing to do, as more horseplay might have made what was serious enough ridiculous. After all the best joke was what we heard next day, viz., that the disturbers were so angry with their ringleader for not making a better job of it that they broke all his windows that same night. I hope this piece of frankness touches your hard heart as it did mine. We had some serious talk at our inn after the meeting with the best of the lads; and then some of them took us into New College cloisters to see their loveliness under the moon."
From Mr. Edward Carpenter's house at Millthorpe he writes on the 28th of April, on his way home from giving Socialist addresses in Edinburgh and Glasgow:
"I have been getting on pretty well in Scotland, but whether pock-pudding prejudice or not, I can't bring myself to love that country, 'tis so raw-boned. But I had my reward by the journey (the first time in daylight) from Carlisle to Settle: 'tis true that the day was most splendid, but at any rate 'tis the pick of all England for beauty. I fared to feel as if I must live there, say somewhere near Kirkby Stephen, for a year or two before I die: even the building there is not bad; necessitous and rude, but looking like shelter and quiet. There is a good deal of this lovely country; the railway goes right up into the mountains among the sheepwalks: there was a little snow lying in bights of the highest crags. I needn't enlarge on an entry into the Yorkshire manufacturing country after this; but I was so elated by the beauty we had passed through that I did not feel it as much as usual. I read a queer book called 'After London' ​coming down: I rather liked it: absurd hopes curled round my heart as I read it. I rather wish I were thirty years younger: I want to see the game played out."
"After London," the unfinished masterpiece of Richard Jefferies, was a book that Morris afterwards was never weary of praising. It put into definite shape, with a mingling of elusive romance and minute detail that was entirely after his heart, much that he had himself imagined; and he thought that it represented very closely what might really happen in a dispeopled England. The effect of the book is perhaps visible in another letter of the 13th of May:
"I am in low spirits about the prospects of our 'party,' if I can dignify a little knot of men by such a word. Scheu is, I fear, leaving London again, which is a great disappointment to me, but he must get work where he can. You see we are such a few, and hard as we work we don't seem to pick up people to take our places when we demit. All this you understand is only said about the petty skirmish of outposts, the fight of a corporal's guard, in which I am immediately concerned; I have more faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of 'civilization,' which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies. With this thought in my mind all the history of the past is lighted up and lives again to me. I used really to despair once because I thought what the idiots of our day call progress would go on perfecting itself: happily I know now that all that will have a sudden ​check—sudden in appearance I mean—'as it was in the days of Noë.'"
On the 27th of May he writes again, giving in a few touches a vivid picture of what the little meetings, over which he was spending so much time and energy, were really like.
"On Sunday I went a-preaching Stepney way. My visit intensely depressed me, as these Eastward visits always do: the mere stretch of houses, the vast mass of utter shabbiness and uneventfulness, sits upon one like a nightmare: of course what slums there are one doesn't see. You would perhaps have smiled at my congregation; some twenty people in a little room, as dirty as convenient and stinking a good deal. It took the fire out of my fine periods, I can tell you: it is a great drawback that I can't talk to them roughly and unaffectedly. Also I would like to know what amount of real feeling underlies their bombastic revolutionary talk when they get to that. I don't seem to have got at them yet—you see this great class gulf lies between us."
The numbers of the League grew only very slowly. In July, when stock was taken of the progress made, they only amounted to a little over two hundred all told, over all the branches in both England and Scotland. But they were working on hard in the hope of an ampler harvest from some sudden movement of popular feeling. In June they had taken new premises in Farringdon Road, which included a printing office and a large lecture room. The output of leaflets and pamphlets, as well as their monthly journal, was carried on to the utmost limit of their means; and it had been determined to turn the Commonweal into a weekly paper as soon as sufficient guarantee could be procured against the further loss of money on it that ​was then certainly to be expected. Morris himself, beyond his other work for the League, had set on foot a branch at Hammersmith, to whose use he gave up the large room where he had begun his carpet-weaving. Sunday evening addresses were regularly given there by himself or others of his colleagues; and as regularly on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings he spoke at outdoor meetings in different parts of London. At these, as a rule, knots of working men and casual passers-by listened with a languid interest. But in September the action taken by the heads of the Metropolitan Police with regard to an open air meeting in Limehouse raised the Socialistic movement into increased notoriety, and gave it the greatest access of popular support that it had yet found.
A space in that part of London, at the corner of Dod Street and Burdett Road, had long been in common use for public gatherings and open-air speaking on all kinds of subjects, especially on Sundays, when there was practically no traffic. The Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist League had both held meetings there repeatedly. Of late there had been some friction with the police, and notice had been given that the meetings must be stopped. The joyful expectation of a disturbance drew a crowd estimated at about a thousand people to the place that Sunday. Against this crowd, which was quite determined not to be dispersed so long as there was the chance of seeing any fun, the dozen or so of police who had been drafted to the spot found themselves almost helpless. Several ineffective attempts had been made to get at the group of speakers who were on a drag in the middle of the concourse, and the police, jeered at and hustled by an unsympathetic crowd, began to lose their tempers. Meanwhile one ​o'clock struck; and the signal of the opening of the public houses caused the greater part of the crowd to disperse. Hot, weary, and angry, and not wishing to think that all their unpleasant morning's work had effected nothing, the policemen charged among the remnant, knocked down two banners, and marched eight men off to the nearest police station, where they were charged with obstructing a public thoroughfare and resisting the police in the execution of their duty.
When the prisoners were brought up at the Thames Police Court next morning, there was the usual amount of confused and contradictory evidence given as to the amount of obstruction that had really happened, and the degree of violence used by or against the police. Finally, after some rather irrelevant remarks about the nationality of the prisoners and the contents of the bills announcing the meeting, Mr. Saunders, the sitting magistrate, sentenced one of them to two months' hard labour and imposed fines all round on the rest. What is known as a scene in court followed; there were loud hisses and cries of "Shame!" In these Morris, who was in court with other members of the League, joined: there was some hustling before order was restored, and he was arrested and charged on the spot with disorderly conduct and striking a policeman. To this charge he gave a direct negative. No evidence was called on either side, but the following curious dialogue ensued.
Mr. Saunders: What are you?
Prisoner: I am an artist and a literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe.
Mr. Saunders: I suppose you did not intend to do this?
Prisoner: I never struck him at all.
​Mr. Saunders: Well, I will let you go.
Prisoner: But I have not done anything.
Mr. Saunders: Well, you can stay if you like.
Prisoner: I don't want to stay.
He was accordingly discharged, and left the court. It was the one instance in which he was stung into asserting his own reputation in public, and the incautious words were long remembered against him. But the whole proceedings were a substantial victory for him and his party. The right of free speech is of all the privileges of citizenship the one which the ordinary Englishman guards most jealously: and interference with that right, when it seems to encroach on customary limits, is fiercely resented by the most orderly classes. More especially is this so in London, where the police are under the direct control of the Imperial Executive, and where any suspicion that they have been used by the party in power to suppress hostile criticism is enough to shake the strongest Government. The London Radicals rallied to the defence of a threatened privilege, and letters of protest poured into the newspapers from opponents as well as friends of Socialism. Many people who took no interest in politics at all were indignant: "already," one of them wrote to the Daily News, "police interference has caused more obstruction and disturbance than twelve months of Socialistic lecturing." A weak Conservative Government was then in office: a General Election was imminent: and angry charges were made that this attack on a Socialist meeting was an insidious attempt to prepare the way for interference with open-air Parliamentary meetings. The Socialist League rose with a bound to something like popularity. The following Sunday a procession of many thousands of people, organized by the East London United ​Radical Club, held a meeting on the forbidden spot (the few policemen present, under fresh instructions, not attempting to interfere), and then dispersed in a quiet orderly way, good-tempered with victory. "All goes well," Morris wrote: "we Socialists have suddenly become popular, and your humble servant could hardly have received more sympathy if he had been racked by Mr. Saunders. All this has its absurd, and even humiliating side, but it is encouraging to see that people are shocked at unfairness and persecution of mere opinion, as I really think they are."
Unfortunately for the prospects of the League, the ground thus gained was soon lost by the old trouble of ill-assorted colleagues and internal jealousies. Morris himself, who had been working and travelling much beyond his strength, was laid up immediately afterwards for a month or six weeks with the severest attack of gout he had yet had, and in his absence the others fell to quarrelling with one another. On the 31st of October, while still completely crippled by his illness, he wrote to Mrs. Burne-Jones:
"Here I am still more or less on my back, though I am getting better; I have not had any very bad pain, but have been so dead lame that till yesterday it has been a month of wheeling me in on a sofa from my room to the dining-room. I think I was much like this at Venice, only not so lame. There, enough of symptoms. It has been beautiful weather here till to-day, and I am glad of that for your holidays' sake: also I have enjoyed it myself: it was quite a luxury to lie here in the morning and let the sun creep over me and watch the clouds. I am afraid that when I get about again I shall find myself very lazy; I have picked up terrible habits of novel-reading and doing nothing this spell. I don't think it comes from my ​knocking about to meetings and the like, but rather from incaution as to diet, which I really must look after. You see, having joined a movement, I must do what I can while I last, that is a matter of duty. Besides, in spite of all the self-denying ordinances of us semi-anarchists, I grieve to have to say that some sort of leadership is required, and that in our section I unfortunately supply that want; it seems I was missed last Monday, and stupid quarrels about nothing took place, which it was thought I could have stopped. All this work I have pulled upon my own head, and though in detail much of it is repulsive to the last degree, I still hold that I did not do so without due consideration. Anyhow, it seems to me that I can be of use, therefore I am impelled to make myself useful.
"It is true, as I think I have said before, that I have no great confidence in the stability of our party: but in the stability of the movement I have every confidence; and this I have always said to myself, that on the morrow of the League breaking up I and some half-dozen must directly begin a new organization; and I believe we should do so.
"You see, my dear, I can't help it. The ideas which have taken hold of me will not let me rest: nor can I see anything else worth thinking of. How can it be otherwise, when to me society, which to many seems an orderly arrangement for allowing decent people to get through their lives creditably and with some pleasure, seems mere cannibalism; nay worse, (for there might be hope in that,) is grown so corrupt, so steeped in hypocrisy and lies, that one turns from one stratum of it to another with hopeless loathing. One must turn to hope, and only in one direction do I see it—on the road to Revolution: ​everything else is gone now. And now at last when the corruption of society seems complete, there is arising a definite conception of the new order, with its demands in some sort formulated. In the details of that I do not myself feel any great confidence, but that they have taken so much form is hopeful, because unless the new is near to the birth, however rotten the old may be, rebellion against it is mere hopeless grumbling and railing, such as you used to reproach me with.
"Meantime what a little ruffles me is this, that if I do a little fail in my duty some of my friends will praise me for failing instead of blaming me. I have a pile of worry about the party ahead of me when I am about again, which must excuse me for dwelling on these things so much."
"They made it up last night," he writes a few days later of the particular quarrel which was then agitating the party. "Even such things as this—the army setting off to conquer all the world turning back to burn Jack's pigstye, and tumbling drunk into the fire—even this don't shake me: means one must use the best one can get; but one thing I won't do, wait for ever till perfect means are made for very imperfect me to work with. As to my not looking round, why it seems to me that no hour of the day passes that the whole world does not show itself to me."
Such was the courage with which Morris met apparent failure. He was soon to be more seriously alarmed by a sudden though elusive prospect of premature success. It was being borne in on him by bitter daily experience how unripe the Socialist party was; how discordant in its aims, how unfixed in its principles, how incapable of forming or guiding any large popular movement. On the 8th of February, ​1886, a meeting of the London unemployed in Trafalgar Square had been followed by a riot which caused an immense sensation, and to the imaginations of many persons seemed the beginning of a really revolutionary movement. When the meeting was over, a mob made its way through several of the main streets of the West End of London, hurling stones at the windows of the club-houses, stopping carriages and demanding money from the occupants, and breaking into and plundering several shops, less it would seem from any distinct plan of robbery than as a rough practical joke. Morris's own shop, or at the least its windows, only escaped destruction by a few minutes; the shutters were put up and the door locked just as the crowd began to pour into Oxford Street out of North Audley Street. But by that time they had become a mere rabble, and were easily dispersed by the police. "Contemptible as the riot was, as a riot," Morris wrote of it, "it no doubt has had a great effect, both here and on the Continent." Nothing of the sort had happened in London for many years. Parliament had just met and a change of Ministry was in progress. The rumours of Mr. Gladstone's proposed Irish legislation had raised politics to a high tension, and there was all abroad a general uneasiness and excitement which needed little to inflame it. To the Socialists, at least to the more thoughtful among them, excitement was mingled with a sort of terror. They had been working for a revolution, hitherto with little belief that anything could be effected for a long time to come. Was the revolution, beyond their expectation and almost beyond their hope, already at the door? In the next number of the Commonweal, Morris took the opportunity to issue a weighty statement of policy.
​The article opens in a tone that gives little promise of applying either light or wisdom to the situation. It was the time when the vices of that debased journalism with which he had deliberately associated himself infected Morris most deeply. The description of the riot itself, and the forecast of what might ensue from it, are not free from qualities most deeply alien from his own nature, tumid metaphor and tawdry declamation. So far the writing is characteristic not of himself, but of his party, or of any party of undisciplined and half-educated men, whether reactionaries or revolutionaries. But once he has paid this sacrifice to the taste of his colleagues, he speaks in his own voice with grave good-sense and temperate foresight.
"I should like to say a few words with the utmost seriousness to our comrades and supporters, on the policy of the Socialist League. I have said that we have been overtaken unprepared, by a revolutionary incident, but that incident was practically aimless. This kind of thing is what many of us have dreaded from the first, and we may be sure that it will happen again and again while the industrial outlook is what it is; but every time it happens it will happen with every-increasing tragedy. It is above all things our business to guard against the possible consequences of these surprises. At the risk of being misunderstood by hot-heads, I say that our business is more than ever Education.
"The Gospel of Discontent is in a fair way towards forcing itself on the whole of the workers; how can that discontent be used so as to bring about the New Birth of Society? That is the question we must always have before us. It is too much to hope that the whole working class can be educated in the aims of Socialism in due time, before other surprises take ​place. But we must hope that a strong party can be so educated, educated in economics, in organization, and in administration. To such a body of men all the aspirations and vague opinion of the oppressed multitudes would drift, and little by little they would be educated by them, if the march of events should give us time; or if not, even half-educated they would follow them in any action which it was necessary to take.
"Let me ask our comrades to picture to themselves the consequences of an aimless revolt unexpectedly successful for the time; we will even suppose that it carries with it a small number of men capable of government and administration, though that is supposing a great deal. What would be the result unless the people had some definite aim, however limited?
"The men thus floated to the surface would be powerless, their attempts at legislation would be misunderstood, disappointment and fresh discontent would follow, and the counter-revolution would sweep them away at once. But, indeed, it would not even come to that. History teaches us that no revolts that are without aim are successful even for a time; even the failures (some of them glorious indeed) had a guiding aim in them, which only lacked completeness.
"The educational process, therefore, the forming a rallying point for definite aims, is necessary to our success; but I must guard against misunderstanding. We must be no mere debating club, or philosophical society; we must take part in all really popular movements when we can make our own views on them unmistakably clear; that is a most important part of the education in organization.
"Education towards Revolution seems to me to express in three words what our policy should be; ​towards that New Birth of Society which we know must come, and which, therefore, we must strive to help forward so that it may come with as little confusion and suffering as may be."
In issuing this manifesto Morris, while not taking any step that brought him nearer the other wing of the Socialist party, the Parliamentarians and opportunists with whom he had broken a year before, also cut himself definitely away from the more violent section of his own supporters, who were already beginning to class themselves as Anarchists. It became a question whether the midway course he had chosen would attract towards it the best men of both extremes, or whether, on the other hand, he and his following would find themselves a mere thinning remnant between two divergent and increasing camps.
To Burne-Jones, who had written to him after the riot of the 8th of February asking him not to do anything rash, he answered:
"Many thanks, my dear Ned, for your anxiety, but lay it aside for the present. I shall not shove myself into assemblies that are likely to turn into riots; and for the rest I don't think that the Government will be such doited fools as to attack mere opinion. If they do, all liberal-minded persons will be on our side and they will be ignominiously beaten. At the worst as far as I am concerned it cannot come to much more than a mere joke of a Police-Court case; and that not till the summer. I think the present excitement (it is little more) will die out; or rather be flattened out into a sort of dull discontent favourable to our propaganda, but not likely to lead people into mere aimless rioting. So I am not a bit anxious about myself. My mind is quite made up as to my position; I daresay you would not agree with me as to my views on ​that matter, but you would have to admit that I was right, judging the thing from my starting point, namely that I am impelled to take action of some sort.
"I will talk of this matter when we meet: meantime, old chap, I send my best love to you for troubling about me.
"I wish I were not so damned old. If I were but twenty years younger! But then you know there would be the Female complication somewhere. Best as it is after all."
"I have often thought," he says in another letter of the same date, "that we should be overtaken by the course of events—overtaken unprepared I mean. It will happen again and again: and some of us will cut sorry figures in the confusion. I myself shall be glad when this ferment sinks down again. Things industrial are bad—I wish they would better: their doing so would not interfere with our propaganda, and would give us some chance of getting at working men with intelligence and some share of leisure. Yet if that will not come about, and the dominating classes will push revolution on us, let it be! the upshot must be good in the end. If you had only suffered as I have from the apathy of the English lower classes (woe's me how low!) you would rejoice at their awakening, however ugly the forms it took. As to my capacity for leadership in this turmoil, believe me, I feel as humble as could be wished: yet after all it is my life, and the work of it, and I must do my best."
The ferment sank down; and though his forecast of trouble with the police in summer was to be literally verified, he had soon resumed the regular routine of his work. "We had a very crowded meeting here on Sunday," he writes to Mrs. Morris on the 3rd of April: ​"I am going to Croydon to-morrow. Murray is in town, come back to Graham's sale: I saw him at Charing Cross the other day. I go to Dublin on Thursday evening. I see people are making a great fuss about Walker's pictures: I don't much sympathize, but the one that they have bought for the National Gallery is the best he did. Ned's and Gabriel's are to be sold to-day. Millais's Vale of Rest fetched a long price: but at any rate 'tis worth a cartload of the wretched daubs he turns out now."
"I came back from the Irishry all safe last night," he resumes on the 15th; "but I am off to Leeds and Bradford on Saturday and shall not be back thence till Tuesday: after that, peace as far as travelling is concerned till the end of June. I had a good passage back, and did 50 lines of Homer on the boat. Dublin on the whole I rather like: there is a sort of cosy shabbiness about it which, joined to the clear air, is pleasant. The last meeting on the Tuesday evening was peaceful and even enthusiastic. The day I had spent up among the Wicklow mountains, and found it very beautiful. On whatever other points the Irishry are wild, they are quite cool, sensible, and determined on the Home Rule question. I met some very agreeable middle-classers there and had much talk—far too much in fact; I doubt if there is an iron pot in Dublin with a leg on it by this time.
"I was very glad to get home and am very loth to leave it I can tell you. However, the wine is drawn and must be drunk."
The translation of the Odyssey to which this last letter alludes had been just begun; and its inception marks the point at which the extreme tension of the last three years began to relax. For as long a period to come he continued equally active and conscientious ​in the work of spreading Socialist doctrine, but creative work in art and letters began now to resume its normal place in his mind. The effect on his spirits and temper was soon obvious. In May, when the fortunes of the first Home Rule Bill were still swaying heavily in the balance, he could take note of the wild words that were flying in the air with a humorous side glance at the hardly wilder words of the extremists among his own colleagues. "Rebellion is getting quite fashionable now; I shall have to join the Quakers. I wonder if the Queen will order herself to be arrested after having hoisted the flag of rebellion on Buckingham Palace. I don't think, mind you, that there is much else than brag about the Orangemen; I suppose it would end in a riot or two. But you really should read the St. James's now and then; Hyndman at his wildest is nothing to it."
Indeed he seems now and then to have found it necessary to brace himself up against a moderation that was stealing over him almost against his will. "I do not love contention; I even shrink from it with indifferent persons. Indeed I know that all my faults lie on the other side: love of ease, dreaminess, sloth, sloppy good-nature, are what I chiefly accuse myself of. All these would not have been hurt by my being a 'moderate Socialist'; nor need I have forgone a good share of the satisfaction of vainglory: for in such a party I could easily have been a leader, nay, perhaps the leader, whereas amidst our rough work I can scarcely be a leader at all and certainly do not care to be. I say this because I feel that a very little self-deception would have landed me among the moderates. But self-deception it would have been."
That recovered sweetness of temper (which no one but himself would ever have thought of describing as ​sloppy good-nature, or good-nature of any kind but the simplest and soundest) is apparent in a series of his letters to his daughter during June.
June 2. "Such a knockabout day as I had on Monday! I saw in the Daily News that our men had been 'run in' at Stratford, and expected what followed; namely that as soon as I got home I had to go off to West Ham Police Court (which is the Lord knows where) and see about cash for paying their fines: for we foolishly let too many men be run in, so that though the fines were small, it came to ₤5 17s. in all. I am very busy lecturing all this week, and have plenty of regrets for the rest of Kelmscott and your dear company; but what will you? it is part of the day's work."
June 5. "Stories I have none to tell you: 'tis all meeting and lecture, lecture and meeting, with a little writing interspersed. It was Margaret's birthday on Thursday when I went to the Grange I found. She is ever so old, 20 actually, just think, and she the baby of the lot! Both the Hammersmith and the Merton gardens are looking very nice now, though even the latter is commonplace compared with Kelmscott. A lady who came on Thursday sent us yesterday a lot of peonies, single ones of various kinds, very handsome: they are Chinese flowers and look just like the flowers on their embroideries.
"Your old Prooshian Blue (only 'tis indigo)."
June 15. "There is a good deal to tell you about since I wrote last. Though I forget if I told you how I went to speak on the disputed place at Stratford on Saturday week. Well, I went there rather expecting the police to 'run me in.' In which case I should have been fined the following Monday after a wearisome morning. However the meeting was so orderly that ​they didn't venture, perhaps all the more as two of the Radicals spoke also; the meeting also was somewhat short. Last Saturday however they did 'run in' Mowbray and fined him 20s. and costs yesterday, which seemed to me absurd; I mean to say that they let us alone and got him. We are not going to give it up however yet, but shall try to get the Radicals to go into it heartily, as really an ordinary meeting makes no obstruction at all. In any case I shall not go there on Saturday, because on the Monday after I am to go on the Scotch journey of which I told you, and shall be away for a week. As to my coming to see you, my darling, if I possibly can this week I will; though it will have to be but a short visit.
"As to other events, we had our Conference on Sunday; all day long it lasted; May and I getting home about 11.30 p.m. It was rather a weary job that Conference, and as I was not a delegate, I had not got to speak; though that was after all rather a blessing, as the main subject in dispute was the alteration of the Constitution—not of the British Empire, but of the League. However all went well; the alterers were defeated and bore their defeat with good temper; but I am very glad that there is a respite of a year before we can have another. Yesterday (Monday) we had our outing and I rather enjoyed it, though we did not distinguish ourselves by much organization in it, wandering about rather aimlessly: also the day was not brilliant, as in the afternoon there was a sort of cloudy drizzle on the hills: yet we escaped a good ducking. The place, Box Hill, is really beautiful, with a famous box-wood at the top: you and I must go there when you are back in London. We finished off in Dorking, not however at the Markis of Granby, but the Wheatsheaf, where we had tea, beer, singing and ​recitation. I regret to state that in the town generally we were taken for a detachment of the Salvation Army. In fact Dorking is a very quiet place, and I don't suppose they have yet heard the word Socialist. I forgot to say by the way, that though I didn't speak at Stratford on Saturday I did so at Hyde Park near the Marble Arch. I was quite nervous about it, I don't know why: because when I was speaking at Stratford I was not nervous at all, though I expected the Police to attack us. At Hyde Park we had a very quiet and rather good audience, and sold four quires of Commonweal: and I spoke twice, the second time not at all nervously.
"As to the Bill, my dear, we expected it to be defeated, though not by so large a majority. The question now is what the country will say about it. Again I expect Gladstone will be beaten, though this time he ought not to be, as he is in the right. I thought his last manifesto (of yesterday) was good and straightforward: there will be all sorts of trouble if the Home Rule matter is not soon settled. I am rather enjoying myself to-day after the last two days' excitement, in being quietly at home on a nice fine fresh day, though I am obliged to work very hard."
June 23: Arbroath. "I am here all safe and well: not a bad sort of a town for Scotland: all stone built, and all the older houses roofed with stone slates, right on the sea: it is in fact Fairport of 'The Antiquary.' The remains of a very fine Abbey Church and buildings stand for St. Ruth, the Musselcraig is identified, and so forth. I slept a good deal on the road: woke as the train went out of Stirling and showed a very raw-boned town but a lovely country: plain and mountains with Forth amidst it very lovely. Perth also blue-boned, but a most beautiful situation, especi​ally down the water of Tay. I have been walking on the sea-shore not trying to remember Miss Isabella Wardour; and now want my dinner."
Even the long-looked-for collision with the police over the matter of open-air meetings, when it came, came in the mildest and most good-humoured form. On Sunday morning the 18th of July, in accordance with advertised arrangement, Morris was addressing an outdoor meeting in a street off the Edgware Road. An Inspector of police appeared on the scene; the crowd groaned, but made way for him. He came up "mighty civil" and told Morris to stop speaking: Morris refused; his name and address were taken, and the Inspector went away again. Morris was summoned two days afterwards at the Marylebone Police Court; the technical offence of obstructing the highway was, of course, indisputable, and he was fined a shilling and costs. This was his last encounter with authority in the cause of freedom of speech. Public interest in the matter had for the time died away. Since their experience in Limehouse the year before, the police had been acting more sensibly, and avoided purposeless friction. The public were getting a little tired of the meetings on waste grounds or at street corners, which they vaguely classed with those of the Salvation Army as probably well-meant but certainly foolish, and best treated with neglect. The Radical clubs, which had rallied to the cry of free speech the year before, now hung back, and very reasonably suggested that if there were to be any common action, the Socialists had better first make up their own differences, which had for long been no secret. Always eager for peace, Morris took on himself once more the task of approaching the Social Democratic Federation to try to patch up the quarrel.
​The attempt at peacemaking proved quite futile. Morris found the leader of the other faction "stiff and stately, playing the big man, and complaining of being ill-treated by us, which was a Wolf and Lamb business." Indeed most of the grievances, on whichever side the cause of offence first arose, seem now as they seemed to Morris then, "preposterously petty." At Dod Street—so the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation insisted, and made this the front of the offence—there had been a distinct breach of faith as regards the order of speeches on the 27th of September the year before. Angry words had passed at the time about this, and the Council of the Socialist League had passed a resolution expressing its "pity for Mr. Hyndman's tools." The insult was never forgotten. Since then each party had roundly accused the other of trying to break up its local branches by open abuse and underground insinuations. "How can we make common cause," they asked, "with people who are perpetually calling us all liars, rogues, intriguers?" For Morris personally indeed his opponents expressed unaltered regard. To accuse him of intrigue would have been plainly preposterous in the most heated adversary: and little as they took a lesson by it, the simple goodness of his nature impressed itself on even the most jealous, the vainest, the most vindictive of the men whom he longed to call his comrades, and for whose faults and vices, so long as he believed they had the root of the matter somewhere in them, he had a patience that was all but inexhaustible.
"Well, I think I have done with that lot," he writes when this last negotiation had broken down. "Why will people quarrel when they have a serious end in view? I went to Merton yesterday and worked ​very hard at my patterns and found it amusing. I have finished the 8th book of Homer and got into the 9th, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, and so on. How jolly it would be to be in a little cottage in the deep country going on with that, and long walks interspersed—in the autumn country, which after all I love as much as the spring."