MIA > Archive > Hyndman > Adventurous Life
The defeat of the Conservative administration in 1880 not only put an end to my hopes of the success of my policy in regard to India, but broke up all the old relations in the Pall Mall Gazette. Mr. George Smith, the owner, sold the paper to his son-in-law, Mr. Yates Thompson, on the ground, as he told me, that he could not stand Greenwood’s attacks upon Gladstone any longer. As I had never been a Tory or a Conservative and, in fact, could not be, I did not see my way to following Greenwood into that camp. The new editor was Mr. John Morley, then at the height of his reputation as a publicist and by his past record justly regarded as the most important writer on the advanced side. I do not deny that I felt the severance from Greenwood very much, as our relations had been a great deal closer than that of mere editor and contributor.
I suppose I showed this when I expressed my sorrow at the change. For, sitting with my wife at the opera next to Mr. Davidson, the musical critic of the Times, whom we happened to know very well, and talking over the matter he said, “You really mustn’t take these matters to heart. They come about in the natural course of things,” which, indeed, was true enough. Shortly afterwards Mr. Yates Thompson, who was an old Trinity man of considerable academic distinction, asked me to dinner in Bryanston Square. There I met Mr. John Morley, Mr. John Robinson of the Daily News, Mr. Andrew Lang, and Mr. W.T. Stead. I have often thought of that dinner since. It was the first time Mr. Stead had appeared in London, where he was quite unknown. He was to be the sub-editor of the Pall Mall Gazette under Mr. Morley. Mr. Lang, Mr. Robinson and myself, who all knew one another before, walked away together. Curiously enough, different as we were in many respects, we all three had formed precisely the same judgment – not a very flattering one – of Mr. Stead. And, what is still more remarkable, that judgment has been borne out completely by events.
However, I did not at that time do much if any writing for Mr. Morley. I had arranged to take a trip to the United States, as the director of a company in which I was much interested, and in which Mr. John Stanley, then a close friend of mine, held shares. By this time, as a result of my studies on India, my conviction as to the hopelessness of Liberalism and Radicalism, my reading up of the Chartist movement, and my acquaintance with foreign revolutionists, I had come very near to being an avowed Socialist. My hatred of the capitalist system, whose mischievous effects upon society I had now fully recognised all over Europe, in America, and in England, in the East and in the West, was still more sentimental than historic or scientific. In fact, the downfall of the Chartist organisation, which had been a vigorous and capable protest against the revolting brutalities of the capitalist class in this island, and then the complete destruction of the Commune, followed by the break-down later of the International, had all led me to the belief that the horrors of existing human life were inevitable, and that mankind was in the grip of a slave-owning class which, in one shape or another, must hold permanent sway over the majority of mankind. Nothing beyond mitigating its abominations seemed possible, though the revolutionary instincts, which I suppose I inherited from one of my revolutionary forbears, were still strong in me.
It so happened that my change from this attitude of mind came indirectly from an unexpected quarter. Among those whose acquaintance and then friendship I had made, in consequence of my opposition to the philo-Russianism of the Liberals and Radicals, was Butler-Johnstone, for many years member for Canterbury, and at one time the hope of the Conservative Party. He had, indeed, made the best first speech heard in the House of Commons since Single-Speech Hamilton’s; due to the fact, as he himself informed me, that he had just written a long article on the subject for Fraser’s Magazine, and had the proofs in his pocket. He also became very intimate with Lord Salisbury, and at one time admired him very much. I doubt, nevertheless, whether he ever understood that extraordinarily able man, whose policy was quite Venetian in its subtlety and patriotic unscrupulousness, and whose sole defect in my opinion was that he never fully acted up to his intentions. In fact, as Sir George Kellner, who had a great admiration for his chief, and who was at our house very frequently in those days, while he was acting as the âme damné of Lord Salisbury at the Foreign Office, told me, “Lord Salisbury never writes one of his brilliant despatches, which come down to me to be set up in print without a single correction or erasure, but that he turns round to see how he can get out of it.”
In all human affairs it is necessary for vigorous action to pull down the shutters on one side of the intellect. To see too much always is weakness.
But that is part of another story about which, possibly, I may say more later. At any rate, Butler-Johnstone took sides vehemently against the supposed philo-Russian policy of Lord Salisbury during the whole of the Russo-Turkish War, was present in Constantinople when our Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs went there on a special mission and showed himself specially friendly to Count Ignatieff, actually went so far as to intrigue with the Ottoman Porte and the Pashas against his former friend, and even when the war began lent the Sultan Abdul Hamid £300,000 – Butler-Johnstone inherited two huge fortunes – to enable that wily potentate to stir up a revolt in the rear of the Russian army; though, needless to say, the Sultan used the money for quite other purposes.
Believing Lord Salisbury’s policy to be wholly erroneous and Lord Beaconsfield’s to be entirely right, Butler-Johnstone was delighted to find any independent writer who, as he thought, shared his views, and who really in great part did. So he asked Greenwood who wrote a certain article, and, having found out, took a house with his dying wife close to us. Through him I got to know Dr. Rudolph Meyer, who had for a long time been one of Bismarck’s private secretaries, and also that curious combination of men having all existing treaties at their fingers’ ends, as well as a number of secret conventions about which they had more or less accurate information, who were known as “The Temple Club.” Their methods were at times laughable, and they tried to hatch out more than one mare’s nest; but they studied both facts and documents most carefully, which is a good deal more than some do who pose as diplomats and statesmen to-day. As to Butler-Johnstone himself, with all his wealth, his knowledge of the world, his close acquaintance with foreign affairs, and his great natural talents, he made a sad end of his promising life; because he would believe that intrigue was more useful than it ever can be in great matters, and because he would not take account of events or recognise inevitable changes. But to me he was at this period a most genuine and valuable friend, in spite of all his drawbacks, and I learnt from him much of what to do and more of what to avoid in order to achieve any great object. I look back still with sadness to the memory of our friendship in those days when his wife, the Countess Vimercati, who died in my wife’s arms, was slowly wasting away with consumption in our desperate climate.
But the greatest debt I owed to Butler-Johnstone was the gift he sent me of the French edition of Marx’s Capital just as I was starting for the United States. By an accident we missed the tender for the Cunarder Algeria. It was blowing hard, and we took a wherry to catch the liner, which was beginning to up anchor for sailing. We were just in time, and were regarded by all on board as a runaway couple, until an old lady, who took my wife to task for running away from her family and friends, was informed that we had been duly married for more than four years. On the passage over, on the cars, and during my stay at Salt Lake City, which was my destination, I read hard at Marx; and although I did not at the time fully grasp all the significance of his theories, which indeed are rarely apparent to the student who reads him for the first time, I came to the conclusion that the only way out of the existing social difficulties was the inevitable development from capitalism to socialism, and that this could never be peacefully brought about except by a thoroughly educated industrial democracy.
At this time the effects of the great industry, with its bitter class antagonism, relentless oppression of the wage-earners, frequent crises and consequent wholesale unemployment, and simultaneous growth of vast trusts and combines, were being felt more keenly in the United States than ever before. I had myself witnessed the devastating crisis of 1874, when flourishing centres of industry, but now in the full swing of active and profitable work, had become in a few weeks like cities of the dead, and whole districts suffered as if from a catastrophe of nature or a stringently enforced Pontifical Interdict in the Middle Ages. In 1880 all this began to be felt and taken account of in a serious manner.
The Great Republic, for all its democratic forms and vast unsettled territory, was as little immune from these economic scourges as the monarchies of Europe – suffered from them, indeed, relatively more – while wealth was accumulating in the hands of the few to an extent quite unprecedented even in the most lavish days of the Roman Empire. The United States was, I thought, rapidly developing into a huge unscrupulous plutocracy. Without, therefore, neglecting the business which had brought me again to Salt Lake City, and which in its way was important enough, alike to myself and to others, I was able to watch in the newspapers and magazines while I was alone out West, having left my wife in the Catskill Mountains with the intention of meeting her at Buffalo, the tremendous economic and social evolution that was going on throughout America. At this period, also, the agitation on the sand-lots in San Francisco was active, and the influence of Henry George with his Progress and Poverty was making itself felt. So that, with Marx’s analysis of capitalism in my hand, I had a good opportunity of comparing his theories with the actual facts I had left behind me in Europe, and with those which I could now see around me in America.
Strange to say, too, I met out West a vehement Irish Nationalist who put me on the track of the great Home Rule conspiracy, with its two branches of pacific organisation and desperate violence, which led me to a clear conception of what active support the growing agitation for Home Rule for Ireland would receive from the American Irish of both schools. It was thus an eventful trip for me in every way, and though I succeeded in the business object with which I set out, that was of little moment in comparison with what my last visit to the United States taught me as to the likelihood of trouble – economic, social, and political trouble – in the coming time.
Being then on very good terms with Mr. John Morley, I wrote to him in a private letter something of what I saw, or thought I saw, which had a very amusing sequel – amusing then and still more amusing now. I wrote that in my opinion the clash of class interest was becoming so vehement that no long time could elapse before it took shape in open conflict. Not even the enormous potential wealth of the Republic still remaining undeveloped could save her from this violent class struggle, which I held would be both bitter and continuous. Mr. Morley printed this anonymously in the Pall Mall Gazette – it was afterwards set out at greater length in my article on The Lights and Shades of American Politics in the Fortnightly Review – and thus came back to the United States again. So it happened that, just as I returned to New York from Utah, this passage appeared in the New York Tribune, then edited by Mr. Whitelaw Reid, now American Ambassador in London, with the following comment: “England sends many fool-travellers to the United States, but never before such a fool as this.” As the terrible fight at Homestead occurred a few months afterwards, when Mr. Andrew Carnegie turned loose the Pinkerton “Thugs,” armed with Winchester rifles, to shoot down the workmen out of whose unpaid labour he had piled up his colossal fortune, and not long thereafter the Chicago Riots and other great strike disturbances astonished the world, I think I may claim that the fool-traveller saw a little more clearly what was going on than the home-keeping wiseacre who posed as the omniscient editor. I do admit, nevertheless, that, owing to reasons which I can see very clearly to-day, the class war has not reached the stage of revolutionary class crisis so quickly as I then anticipated. The wheels of economics do grind slowly though they grind exceeding small.
On coming back from the West, where I had a few exciting and rather exceptional experiences, I met my wife in the delightful city of Buffalo at the house of some friends, who had treated her with a hospitality and kindness remarkable even in hospitable America. Crossing over from Buffalo to Toronto we went down the St. Lawrence in magnificent weather, which made this little voyage through the Rapids and the thousand islands one of the finest trips in the world, visited Niagara, Montreal, Boston, Harvard University, and so back to New York. There we met, thanks to kind introductions, some of the ablest Americans of the day; and William Henry Hurlbert, one of the most brilliant men I ever encountered, who came later to so sad a downfall, was specially hospitable. It was at a dinner given by him at Sherry’s that I met Messrs. Evarts, George William Curtis, Thorndyke Rice, editor of the North American Magazine, for which I was then writing, Captain Gorringe, who brought over the obelisk to New York, and others, including Archibald Forbes, the famous war correspondent, whom I then saw for the first time.
It was a most delightful gathering to begin with, and ought to have been so throughout. But Forbes thought proper to make a remark about American sailors which was a gross insult to every American present, and particularly to Gorringe. What was worse, he repeated it, in still more offensive shape. I never admired men more than I did the Americans at that table. Their behaviour was quite perfect. The other Englishman who was there, Mr. Dudley Ryder, and myself did our utmost to remove the effect produced by Forbes’ brutality, by pretending that his words had no meaning; but the man who saved the situation for us all by his tact and firmness was our host. To this day I don’t quite know how he did it, but he performed the marvellous feat of completely shutting up Forbes, pacifying Gorringe, and restoring the general good feeling. I have witnessed several unpleasant scenes, notably one at Venice between George Augustus Sala and George Meredith, but I never felt quite so much humiliated and inclined to crawl away under the table as I did on this occasion. Most of us walked up to a club together after dinner, without Forbes, and one of the Americans said in talking the matter over, “That is the sort of man we did not know you bred over on the other side. We have not a few of them here, unfortunately,” which I thought was a nice way of putting it.
Hurlbert was the first man to point out to me what he believed to be the inevitable tendency of his country towards aggression and Imperialism, a tendency which, I think, very few detected more than thirty years ago. He was of a Southern family, but he had been educated at Harvard, knew Europe well, and was one of the few Americans I ever met who spoke French perfectly. Talking to me about the future of the United States, long before Mr. James Blaine formulated his policy of combining the various American Republics, he said: “You will see that as this Republic becomes more wealthy and more powerful she will spread herself out, not only commercially but militarily. The old ideas of non-interference will rapidly fade away, and the necessities for new markets, combined with a desire to make themselves felt, will influence both rich and poor Americans in their external policy. We shall sooner or later go South and East, and our vast industrial and agricultural resources will be turned to the purposes of war. That will in its turn break down democracy, for the time being at any rate, and it would not in the least surprise me if we were to develop into Caesarism in course of time. There are all the makings here of a new and formidable aggressive power, while the obstacles to such a development are neither strong nor numerous. The very fact that we are not prepared for war, as you justly say we are not, will make us the more dangerous. A reverse or two to start with would rouse the whole nation, and then our inexhaustible resources would be drawn upon to the last ounce in order to win.” His predictions have been fulfilled to a much greater extent already than I thought possible at the time, and we are obviously only at the beginning of the movement. Theodore Roosevelt represents the average American’s ideas far more accurately than it is pleasant to contemplate for the sake of the United States and the world at large.
There are some men in life one always wants to meet and never does. Laurence Oliphant was such a man in my case. Five times we were to have met at the same table, and five times we missed. I never saw him. To-day he is almost forgotten, and yet surely Piccadilly and Altiora Peto, his letters and his conversation, possessed qualities which ought to have preserved them. His eccentricities were as remarkable as his talents, and his versatility was exceptional – altogether a singular admixture of littérateur, man of the world, man of business, man of pleasure and mystic. At this date he was performing in the role of man of business, and had come over to New York on the important matter of a French Transatlantic Cable in company with a little Jew named Aarons, the agent of the French house of Lazard Frères. All was going on extremely well in New York, and the Lazards of San Francisco were expecting a visit from – singular combination! – Oliphant and Aarons to complete important subscriptions on the Pacific Slope, when one morning little Aarons came, in great haste and in obvious trepidation, to call upon Hurlbert. “What is the matter?” asked Hurlbert. “Ah, monsieur,” said Aarons, “que faire? Ce monsieur Oliphant, it est vraiment impayable. Il est parti sans mot. Voila sa lettre. Qu’est-ce que ça signifie?” Hurlbert took it and read it. It was in French and ran thus: “Dear Mr. Aarons, I feel that my moral nature will no longer support the atmosphere of intolerable iniquity and turpitude which pervades New York. My entire soul is degraded by contact with such vileness, and to remain here would finally corrupt what little of good still remains within me. I am going to the remote West for at least six months. There, in commune with the great solitudes, and by the help of a noble friend, I hope to be able to disburden my mind and conscience of the foulness and sin with which it is now besmirched. You will therefore see me no more for six months.” “That means,” quoth Hurlbert, “exactly what it says; you will not see my friend Monsieur Laurence Oliphant for at least six months. He has gone off to the prophet Harris for six months.” “Quoi, le prophète Arrice” stammered the little Jew, whose face had turned green, “tout est donc tombe dans l’eau.” Oliphant duly remained away in the West for his six months and cleansed his soul of New York’s abominations, but in the meanwhile the financiers contrived to patch up the business without him, and poor M. Aarons recovered his equanimity as he pocketed his cash.
On the last night before we left New York on our return trip by the Servia, Hurlbert and Gorringe and Thorndyke Rice dined with my wife and myself at Delmonico’s, and the former told us the following anecdote of Napoleon III, which he himself had heard from Dr. Corvisart and which I have never seen in print. The Emperor had just finished his Life of Caesar, and the manuscript was ready to go to the printers, when he bethought him he should like to take an independent opinion upon it. So he sent for Dr. Corvisart and asked him what Frenchman was best qualified to criticise his great work. “Well,” said Corvisart, “there is no doubt about who is the very best man to advise your Majesty, but I can scarcely venture to mention him to you here.” “Why not?” asked Napoleon; “what is his name?” “His name is Duruy, M. Victor Duruy.” “Oh ho!” said Napoleon, “the man who has just been turned out of the Sorbonne for his revolutionary views?” “That is he, your Majesty.” “What does that matter? Why shouldn’t he give me his judgment on a purely literary subject?” “I am a little afraid, Sire, he might be disrespectful.” “Nonsense,” replied Napoleon; “you kindly go to M. Duruy, Corvisart, present to him the compliments of Louis Buonaparte, and tell him that as I cannot, under the circumstances, give myself the pleasure of calling upon him, I shall feel it an honour if he will come and call upon me, privately, here in the Tuileries, and give me the advantage of his profound learning in Roman history as one man of letters to another.”
Off went Dr. Corvisart on his mission, saw ex-Professor Duruy, and induced him to go to the Tuileries. Napoleon greeted him cordially and had the MS. all ready to submit to him, as Duruy had undertaken, after a few complimentary words, to look it through. “Before I hand you the parcel to take back with you, however, M. Duruy, it would give me great pleasure to hear your own views upon the Roman Empire as a whole, if you will kindly give them to me.” Nothing loth, Duruy laid himself out to criticise the history of that great Imperial organisation, not forgetting to slip in a number of side sarcasms at the expense of the Empire under which he himself was then living. The criticisms naturally became more caustic and the satire more severe as the defects and weaknesses of the decaying Empire of Rome became more apparent, and, at the close of his brilliant survey of the most famous despotism of antiquity, M. Duruy was evidently much pleased with the opportunity that had been given him and the manner in which he had taken advantage of it.
“And how long, M. Duruy, do you consider that this Empire, whose inherent weakness you have so scathingly exposed, how long do you reckon that this colossus with the feet of clay maintained itself upright and fairly vigorous?” asked Napoleon. “I suppose,” replied Duruy, “you would reckon the actual period of Roman Imperial supremacy from the proclamation of Augustus as Emperor in Rome to the removal of the seat of Empire from Rome to Constantinople by Constantine the Great?” “Yes,” said Napoleon, “that would be a fair view of its duration, and that would be?” “About 400 years,” put in Duruy. “Eh bien, savez-vous, M. Duruy,” retorted Napoleon, “que dans les affaires humaines vous avez là ce qu’on appelle un grand succès?”
William Henry Hurlbert, whom I saw so much of in America from time to time, and with whom we became intimate in England, was unquestionably one of the most interesting, well-informed, and brilliant Americans it has ever been my good fortune to meet. He had also nothing of what we are accustomed to entitle the American accent – no nasal intonation and no special prominence given to small and unimportant words. Though he was editor of the World, his faculties as a journalist and man of letters were not those which to the world at large seemed most important. Yet I myself saw him perform a literary tour de force which I consider one of the most remarkable I ever remember. An ode of Victor Hugo’s had just appeared in France and arrived in New York by the mail on Saturday morning. It was a long ode with many variations of rhythm and metre. Hurlbert took it and translated it into excellent English verse, which followed for most part the changes of the French, in time for it to appear in the World Sunday edition. I congratulated him warmly on this extraordinary performance, but he did not appear to think very much of it himself. There was one trait of Hurlbert’s which always surprised me. Although a Southerner and a Democrat and a man whom the Republicans specially detested for having been a “Mugwump” during the Civil War, he contrived to keep on excellent terms with the Republican leaders, though they declared he was a very unscrupulous man. It was, indeed, through Hurlbert I got to know several of them, as well as General Hancock and other foremost men of the Democrats.
I have seen two American Presidential Elections and I still live, and the drums of both my ears, so far as I know, are quite sound. What is it makes the Americans, who come in the main of the cool phlegmatic stock of northern Europe, so tremendously excitable at election times? An ordinary set election address delivered by one of the leading party orators they will listen to with attention and in reasonable quietude. Interruptions at such functions are not allowed to nearly the same extent that they are in this country, as I particularly noticed when I heard a very able and telling address by Mr. Evarts quite undisturbed at the Cooper Institute in New York. But when it gets near to election time and delegates meet to choose other delegates or nominate candidates and so on – well, Babel was a Quaker’s meeting to what goes on.
It was at such a meeting at Indianapolis, a respectable well-to-do city in Indiana, where I saw and heard electoral enthusiasm in full blast for the first time. Blast it was indeed. Upon entering and being given a good seat, as a stranger, I looked round the platform and the audience, and to all appearance a more level-headed, self-controlled set of people I never beheld. There was my mistake. In business they were, I doubt not, level-headed, in social matters, I am quite sure, self-controlled. But in politics, Oh my! You bet! It all came like a flash. I never witnessed anything so sudden in my life. Some campaign reference by a favourite speaker, which I did not in the least understand, started the outbreak, and within sixty seconds the whole of that big audience went stark, staring mad. They cheered, they howled, they waved hats and handkerchiefs; they danced, they jumped on the chairs, they invaded the tables. Old gentlemen, white-haired and of venerable appearance, shouted till perspiration streamed down their faces and they were as hoarse as crows. And so it went on, enthusiasm deepening into positive hysteria, until this amazing effervescence gradually wore itself out, and quiet was restored in consequence of sheer exhaustion.
This was my first experience of a genuine whole-souled party meeting at the time of a Presidential Election. I was present at several similar scenes afterwards, having been in America, as I say, at the time of two such elections. But they always came upon me with a sense of novelty. I could not detect sufficient reason, though I followed American politics at the time pretty closely, for this furious and unrestrained excitement. Frenchmen and Italians are credited with far greater tendency to explosive electoral passion than Americans. But they are not in the same field with citizens of the Great Republic out on the political warpath. There must be some electrical influence in the atmosphere to account for this remarkable tendency to the unrestrained display of emotion and passion. I asked Hurlbert what it meant. He had become so accustomed to it all that, in spite of his wide European experience, he seemed surprised that I should regard such behaviour as exceptional. When he thought it over, however, he agreed with me that the causes of these strange ebullitions of feeling are probably climatic.
Hurlbert’s end was almost as sad as Oscar Wilde’s. Call no man happy till his death. With all his brilliancy, his cynical view of his fellow-humans, and his profound knowledge of the world, he allowed himself, when already almost an old man, having married a most agreeable Catholic wife, to be dragged into a wretched intrigue which led to an ugly case, and the story of “Wilfred Murray” drove him into retirement until his death. We speak of people as we find them, and having always been on friendly terms with W.H. Hurlbert I greatly regretted his misfortunes, however much they may have been his own fault.
After a very pleasant day spent with a charming family at Harrison and visits to other friends, including Mr. “Sam” Tilden of the barr’l, who undoubtedly was cheated out of the Presidency when Mr. Hayes was elected, we dined on our last evening in New York with Mrs. St. Jullien to meet a number of well-known people. I never felt so sorry for any hostess in my life, and I don’t suppose such a thing ever befell in a wealthy household in a metropolitan city before or since. We had to wait nearly two hours for dinner after our arrival. The efforts of all present to make the best of the situation were alike splendid to witness and honourable to take part in, and when at last we did sit down to table we made up for lost time in every direction. It was a most joyful party, and it broke up late. We learnt afterwards that a tremendous accident had occurred, and that the entire dinner had had to be cooked over again.
We returned by the Servia to London in the late autumn, found our house, left suddenly in charge of young servants, in perfect order, and political affairs, left deliberately in charge of elderly statesmen, turned upside down. The latter had become quite interesting. The Liberals had introduced a Compensation for Disturbance Bill for Ireland; an excellent measure as far as it went. The House of Lords on that account, of course, threw it out. Hence serious trouble in Ireland, and the usual “great” Liberal agitation against the veto of the Peers. Mr. Gladstone was “in earnest” this time, the House of Obstruction would have to give way, it must be “mended or ended,” such an anachronism must be swept aside, the whole course of progress was blocked by these coroneted impossibilists! And so on. To all this the Tories replied that the constitution was in danger and that the rights of property were being destroyed. Quite the nice old sham fight, in fact, in 1880 that we have seen in 1909-11.
But to these historic political sham-fighters enter men, and women too, of a very different kidney, some of whose friends and supporters I had met on the other side of the Atlantic. The Land League appeared shortly on the scene as the more moderate section of the revolt in Ireland; dynamiters then rushed to the front as the irreconcilable element. Immediately I got back I went to Morley, and told him what I thought was approaching from the American Irish. Morley, in his fine, superior, practical manner, pooh-poohed the whole thing. There would be trouble in Ireland, no doubt, if the Lords did not give way, but as to any serious organised violence from the United States, that was absurd. At any rate, the upshot of the talk between us was that I should write for him in the Pall Mall Gazette and, later, when Coercion came on the ground, that on no account should there be any surrender on that issue.
I may as well mention here that this last portion of the bargain Morley broke in a very strange way, and that his conduct in regard to this, his behaviour afterwards as Chief Secretary for Ireland and his championship of the crushing of Arabi Pasha, as exposed by literal citations from his articles of the time by Mr. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, have proved that his policy in India has been only the natural outcome of his previous tendencies; for which reason in particular I recall these strange “Radical” proceedings.
It was to advocate real Radicalism in its better sense that at this period a little journal called the Radical was started by three able Scotsmen, only one of whom is now living, and supported by others who afterwards did good service in different directions. It is not too much to say that though not Socialists, and indeed opposed to Socialism, Messrs. Samuel Bennett, William Webster and Morrison Davidson, with them W.M. Thompson, did their full share by their work on the Radical to rouse a sense of independence among the workers, when the great majority of the Liberal Party were grovelling before Mr. Gladstone and his pet Whig Coercionists.
Towards the close of 1880 and the beginning of 1881, there was a growing feeling that an effort should be made to rally together into a party the really advanced men and women who were in revolt against the obvious betrayal of all democratic principles at home and abroad by Mr. Gladstone’s Government. The question was upon what basis such a party should be constituted. At this time there was no effective Socialism whatever in Great Britain. Without belittling in any way the work of the handful of Socialists at the old Communist Club, who raised a splendid cry of protest against the atrocities committed by the Versailles troops on the people of Paris when the Commune was crushed in 1871, or the propaganda of the Labour Emancipation League, it is safe to say that in the autumn of 1880 the principles of what is to-day the greatest and, indeed, the only growing international party in the world had made no serious impression whatever on this side of the Channel.
Public opinion was not only indifferent, it was bitterly hostile in every way. The gross misrepresentations of the objects of the Commune of Paris and of the men who had taken part in that desperate attempt to realise ideals of emancipation and administration for which the time was not ripe, and to which the position of Paris itself at the end of the siege was hopelessly unfavourable, had so affected the minds of the English people that every Socialist was regarded as a bomb-thrower and an incendiary, and Socialism itself was constantly referred to as an Anarchist revolt against civilisation, social organisation and humanity at large. Moreover, there was then no literature to refer to, no books in English which could be obtained and read, either by the educated class or by the workers. At most, a few ill-printed copies of the famous Communist Manifesto of 1847 by Marx and Engels done into English could be found by searching for them in the most advanced revolutionary circles.
It is not too much to say, indeed, that the whole movement was dead so far as Great Britain was concerned. The Socialist conceptions of the old Chartists, which Marx systematised, coordinated and put on a scientific basis, had quite died down and nothing had arisen to take their place: the very names of their leaders were forgotten. Even the few convinced Socialists then in England did not all know one another. Not until the new movement was in full swing was I myself aware, for example, that Adolphe Smith was a thorough-going Socialist, and had been a supporter of the Commune of Paris; that Belfort Bax – then as now the only original philosophic thinker in Great Britain was as complete an advocate of scientific Socialism as he is to-day; that Carruthers was an out-and-out Communist and had written a book in support of his views; or that Stewart Headlam and his friends in their Christian Socialism had advanced far beyond the Christian Anarchism commonly preached.
It would have been quite useless, therefore, even to attempt to create at once an avowed Socialist Party. That was speedily apparent, and the steps which I took early in 1881 followed, I still think, the best course that could have been chosen.
On January 1, 1881, my article entitled The Dawn of a Revolutionary Epoch appeared as the leading paper in the Nineteenth Century and created a little stir. This was the public beginning of my attempt to establish a really independent democratic party of the people, apart from and opposed to the two capitalist factions, which had held sway in this country for so many generations. The article was not, certainly, such an one as I should write now. It contains many errors and displays a disinclination to speak out plainly in favour of Socialism which surprises me as I now read it. Evidently, although theoretically a convinced Socialist, the underlying prejudice against the ideals of Socialism existing in my own mind still had its effect and prevented me from giving in the Nineteenth Century a proper survey of the situation. In fact, I, unnecessarily as it seems to me now, accepted the limitations imposed by my surroundings. The following passage, however, shows that, in spite of a timidity which was regrettable, I recorded a little of what I saw:–
“At a period such as ours anything may happen. One of the features of the time is the prevailing incredulity among the educated of all civilised communities. Religious sanctions are shaken in every country, political institutions are themselves in a state of fusion – for who shall say Parliamentary government has proved fully successful? – the growing knowledge and power of the masses leads them to consider more and more seriously the strange inequalities of our existing arrangements, the spread of ideas from one centre to another is so rapid as almost to defy calculation. Can it be said then that we are safe for any length of time from the shock of one of those convulsions which may change the whole social prospect? Those who condemn democracy, who look askance at the determination to give political power to every class in order that all may be able to insist upon their share in the general advancement, are but rendering more probable the overturn they dread. The old days of aristocracy and class privileges are passing away fast; we have to consider now how to deal with the growing democratic influence, so that we may benefit by the experience of others. This can only be done by a steady determination at the outset to satisfy the needs and gratify the reasonable ambition of all.”
This, as is now only too obvious, was much too sanguine a view of the situation. Talking it all over with the editor, Sir James Knowles, he reproached me a little for my optimism as to the future. “Ah,” he said, “you cherish these sanguine anticipations and you may be right to do so; but, mark my words, there will be a tremendous rushing back of the pebbles on the ebb of this temporary inflow before the next flood-tide of democracy and progress sweeps in.” So it has proved.
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