The Proud Tower (66 page)

Peace, Retrenchment and Reform which had satisfied as the Liberal creed for so long were no longer adequate. The optimistic Liberalism of the Nineteenth Century was past. An “indignant pessimism” inspired Charles Masterman’s
From the Abyss
in 1902 and
In Peril of Change
in 1905. A young Liberal journalist, literary editor of the
Daily News
, devoutly High Church in religion, married to a Lyttelton whose uncle was a member of Balfour’s cabinet, he was one of the new kind of Liberal, puzzled and disturbed by trends which betrayed the promise of the Nineteenth Century. Another was the lonely economist J. A. Hobson, author of
The Social Problem
, 1901. He saw the brilliant hopes of early Liberalism overcast by the doctrine of survival of the fittest and the energy for progress absorbed in material growth. Political Economy having failed to solve the Social Problem, he believed a new social science was needed to “furnish a satisfactory basis for the art of social progress.” Hobson fixed on unemployment as the crux of the matter. He saw it as a waste of human resources and included in that waste the idle rich, of whom 250,000 males between the ages of twenty and sixty-five, according to a census of 1891, were without trade or profession. Under-consumption, the corollary of unemployment, was the chief source of trouble and he saw imperialism, not as the white man’s burden nobly shouldered, but as the economy’s drive to compensate for markets missing at home. Hobson’s views, expressed in
The Psychology of Jingoism
in 1901 and
Imperialism
in 1902, were influential but offensive both to the imperialists and to the Fabians, who believed in imperialism. He was never offered a chair either by the major universities or by the London School of Economics, founded by the Fabians in 1894, to establish that new social science which was his goal.

What the Fabian Society wanted was Socialism without Marx or revolution, something like Macbeth without murder—an intellectual, respectable, gradual, factual, practical, “gas and water” English Socialism powered by the brains, hard work and infinite attention to detail of the Webbs and the brilliant common sense of Shaw. Founded in the eighties, expounding plans and arguments through the Fabian Tracts, it was an intellectual lobby bent on guiding existing political institutions toward the ultimate goals of Socialism. Fabians were the B’s in Beatrice Webb’s division of people into A’s (aristocrats, artists and anarchists) and B’s (benevolents, bourgeois and bureaucrats). They sought no working-class base but preferred to operate, as William Morris said, by “gradually permeating cultivated people with our own aspirations” and gradually influencing government toward their goals. They made splendid progress among those of their own kind but remained a scholastic regiment of seven or eight hundred, aloof from the people for whom they toiled. In England persons of the educated classes did not and could not penetrate the unions. Discrediting the Marxian dogma of mandatory class war, the Fabians believed that labourers and employees must gain their ends within the capitalist system because it was the employers’ surplus capital which gave them work. In his lectures “disproving” Marx, Shaw, a tall, reedy, red-haired figure, emphatic, provocative and bold, held listeners spellbound as he poured out ideas in crisp, sharp sentences, unfaltering for an hour and a half. In
Major Barbara
, which opened in December, 1905, with Mr. Balfour in the audience, Shaw spoke through the mouth of the munitions magnate, Undershaft, on “the crime of poverty.” “What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there. What do they matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed, ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

The Webbs attacked the crime with mountainous reports and the English lubricant of social intercourse and conversation. Coldly bent on improving society, they were essentially authoritarians, impatient with the democratic process. They favored Protection, Joseph Chamberlain (with whom Beatrice had once contemplated marriage) and anything which strengthened the State and brought in revenue for more sewers, soup kitchens and unemployment insurance. They had no use for the Liberals, who understood neither the imperial nor Socialist demands of the new age, and had little faith in a Labour party of the untutored which would be incapable of imposing its will. What was needed was a strong party with no nonsense and a business-like understanding of national needs which would take hold of the future like a governess, slap it into clean clothes, wash its face, blow its nose, make it sit up straight at table and eat a proper diet. This could only be the Conservative party, regenerated by Chamberlain, advised by Mr. and Mrs. Webb, bestowing upon England the iron blessings of Tory Socialism.

Orthodox Socialism was represented by the Socialist Democratic Federation led by H. M. Hyndman, a wealthy product of Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he had attended in the same year as the Prince of Wales. As devout in Marxism as it was detached from the working class, the SDF expressed all the fiercest revolutionary doctrines of continental Socialism, but, lacking followers, remained a voice without a body. “I could not carry on,” said Hyndman, “unless I expected the revolution at ten o’clock next Monday morning.” Presumably it was to drop from the sky, because in Hyndman’s scheme the workers did not figure as initiators. “A slave class cannot be freed by the slaves themselves,” he pronounced. “The leadership, the initiative, the teaching, the organization, must come from those who are born into a different position and are trained to use their faculties in early life.” He complained of the peculiarly British technique by which the ruling class absorbed rising labour leaders who proved only too willing to sell out to the dominant minority (that is, the Liberals) after they had “obtained their education from well-to-do Socialists who have been sacrificing themselves for their sake.” The tone suggests some justification for the friends who said that Hyndman, a cricketer, had adopted Socialism out of spite against the world because he was not included in the Cambridge eleven. Along with Robert Blatchford, editor of the
Clarion
, and other earnest spirits, Hyndman in meetings, articles, journalism and oratory, relentlessly pursued that Monday morning which he could not have survived and the British working class did not want.

In 1901 occurred a decisive moment in the shifting balance of political power. The Taff Vale judgment by the House of Lords, acting in its capacity as a court of appeal, held trade unions liable for the damage caused by strikes, thus putting in jeopardy their pension and benefit funds. It proved to be that act of the ruling class which convinced the English working class of the need for political representation. Until then English labour believed in fighting its battles against employers by direct action through trade unions rather than by political action through Parliament. Giving its political allegiance to the Liberals, English labour could not be drawn into support of a Socialist party and disapproved of class war. “The English working class,” said Clemenceau, “is a bourgeois class.” Continental comrades found the English Trade Union Congresses dull and uninspired because the members were not interested in debating ideas but only in immediate gains. To the French, said one visitor, such gains were the gathering of strength for the social revolution; to the British worker they were ends in themselves while “fundamental principles and eternal verities irritate him.” He was not interested in a new social system, as Morley said, “but of having a fairer treatment in this one.”

In 1892 the eternal verities found a voice in a Scottish miners’ organizer with the zeal of a prophet. Keir Hardie, then thirty-six, was a short handsome man with smoldering brown eyes and hair brushed back from a domed forehead. Born in a one-room cottage on a Lanarkshire coal field and brought up with two adults and nine children in that room, where somehow his mother taught him to read, he went to work as a baker’s errand boy at the age of seven. On one weekly payday, with his father out of work, his mother in bed with a newborn child and no food in the house, the family’s small and only breadwinner walked the two miles to his place of employment in the rain, to arrive for the second day in a row fifteen minutes late. “You are wanted upstairs by the Master,” said the girl behind the counter. Entering the room where the employer and his family sat around a mahogany breakfast table set with steaming coffee and hot rolls, he was told he was dismissed and, as a reminder against lateness, his week’s wages were forfeit. On his empty way out the maid in silent pity gave him a roll.

Hardie believed in class war to the end. Liberals to him were no different from Tories but just another face of the employing class. When he stood for the first time as an independent labour candidate from mid-Lanark in 1888, the Liberal candidate—Sir George Trevelyan—explained to him how unfortunate it was that they should fight each other to the benefit of the Tories and proposed that if Hardie withdrew, the Liberals would assure him a safe seat and election expenses at the next general election and pay him as M.P. a yearly salary of £300. Hardie, who had never earned anything approaching that sum, refused. Although he lost on this occasion, receiving only 617 votes out of a total of 7,000, four years later he was elected as an independent from South West Ham. When he took his seat in the House wearing tweeds and a cloth cap, unlike others of his class who put on respectable black broadcloth when they mixed in the world, it was as if the red flag had been raised at Westminster. He never succumbed to the capitalist embrace. During a debate on the unemployed he sat listening in growing rage while no word of sympathy for the starving was uttered and finally burst out, “You well-fed beasts!” On another occasion when a member was denouncing the unemployed as lazy vagabonds who did not want to work, Hardie suggested that an equal number of vagabonds could be seen “every day on Rotten Row in top hats and spats.” When he addressed meetings, standing like a statue in hewn granite of the emancipated worker, with head thrown back and body erect, he seemed to express the “equality, freedom and triumphant self-reliance” which he wanted to infuse in the working class. With no salary or political funds to draw on, he supported himself, his wife and three children on what he could earn from journalism, the maximum he ever made being £210 a year.

In 1889 the desperate dockers’ strike for 6
d
. an hour started the movement to organize the unskilled in industry-wide unions. It continued through the nineties with organizers moved by a sense of “religious necessity” and workers whom it was difficult to persuade that arbitration paid them better than “the fierce strikes in which their repressed emotions sought outlet.”

The dockers’ strike waged in the heart of London had thrust the realities of labour’s battles under the eyes of capital and swept young men like Herbert Samuel into politics. Appalled by conditions among the strikers and by the sweatshops and squalid homes he saw in Whitechapel when canvassing there for his brother’s candidacy for the LCC (London County Council), he decided “from that moment” that the House of Commons was “my objective and to take part in social legislation my aim.” The strike also brought to prominence a rampant trade unionist, John Burns of the Amalgamated Engineers, union of the locomotive drivers, who was known as the “Man with the Red Flag” from his habit of carrying that item with him whenever he addressed meetings. Although the dockers were not his union, he took over management of the strike to help its leaders, Tom Mann and Ben Tillett. He kept on excellent terms with the police, organized food lines and procured the settlement which won the “dockers’ tanner”—to the distress of Kropotkin, who thought a critical moment had been missed. “If Burns with 80,000 men behind him does not make a revolution,” he wrote, “it is because he is afraid of having his head cut off.” Burns, however, despite a period of vociferous Socialism, was too English to be revolutionary and never shared Hardie’s refusal to compromise with capitalism. He preferred to fight labour’s cause through whatever alliances suited the situation, and when elected to the LCC, collaborated with the Liberals. His hatred of Keir Hardie, according to Beatrice Webb, “reaches the dimensions of mania.”

At the Trades Union Congress of 1893 Hardie generated enough support, against the opposition of Burns, to form an Independent Labour Party of which he was named chairman. Its declared Marxian purpose was to secure public ownership of “all means of production, distribution and exchange” and, lest there be any mistake, “to take charge of the revolution to which economic conditions are leading us.” Not unnaturally financial support from the craft unions was shy. Two years later in the general election of 1895, which brought in Lord Salisbury’s Government, the ILP failed to elect a single one of its twenty-eight candidates. It was “the most costly funeral since Napoleon’s,” commented Burns, not without satisfaction in which he was joined by Mrs. Webb. For Labour to act independently and insist on three-cornered contests, she declared, was “suicide.” Yet the Conservative editor J. L. Garvin suspected that despite the fiasco the ILP might well prove to be “an increasingly powerful and disturbing factor in English politics.”

At the same time, employers’ associations—formed to resist the demands of labour—increased in number and joined in agreements to employ non-union labour. To create a “reserve” in case of strikes they organized Free Labour Registries, which were simply lists of strikebreakers under another name. In 1897 they were able to defeat the old and powerful Amalgamated Engineers in its strike for the eight-hour day which lasted thirty weeks. Taking the offensive by lockouts, they succeeded against other unions in re-establishing piecework and repudiating overtime pay. On occasion the Government lent troops in their support. Leaving nothing to chance, the associations in 1898 formed the Employers’ Parliamentary Council to smother any nascent legislation unfavorable to their interests.