Part 14 (1/2)
An eight hours law.
Prohibition of child labour for wages.
Free Maintenance for all necessitous children (a compromise in which Fabian influence may be traced by the insertion of the word ”necessitous”).
Equal payment of men and women for equal work.
(A principle which, whether good or bad, belongs rather to individualism than to Socialism: Socialism according to Bernard Shaw--and most of us agree with him--demands as an ideal equal maintenance irrespective of work; and in the meantime payment according to need, each to receive that share of the national product which he requires in order to do his work and maintain his dependents, if any, appropriately.)
To resume the programme:--
An adequate minimum wage for all adults employed in Government and Munic.i.p.al services or in any monopolies such as railways enjoying State privileges.
Suppression of all sub-contracting and sweating (an ignorant confusion between a harmless industrial method and its occasional abuse).
Universal suffrage for all adults, men and women alike.
Public payment for all public service.
These of course were only means tending towards the ideal, ”to wit, the supplanting of the present state by a society of equality of condition,”
and then follows a sentence paraphrased from the Fabian Basis embodying a last trace of that Utopian idealism which imagines that society can be const.i.tuted so as to enable men to live in freedom without eternal vigilance, namely, ”When this great change is completely carried out, the genuine liberty of all will be secured by the free play of social forces with much less coercive interference than the present system entails.”
From these extracts it will be seen that the Manifesto, drafted by William Morris, but mutilated and patched up by the other two, bears the imprint neither of his style, nor that of Shaw, but reminds one rather of mid-Victorian dining-room furniture, solid, respectable, heavily ornate, and quite uninteresting. Happily there is not much of it!
Unity was attained by the total avoidance of the contentious question of political policy. But fifteen active Socialists sitting together at a period when parties were so evenly divided that a General Election was always imminent could not refrain from immediate politics, and the S.D.F., like many other bodies, always cherished the illusion that the defeat of a minority at a joint conference on a question of principle would put that minority out of action.
Accordingly, as soon as the Manifesto had been published resolutions were tabled pledging the const.i.tuent societies to concentrate their efforts on Socialist candidates accepted as suitable by the Joint Committee. On this point the Fabian Society was in a hopeless minority, and an endless vista of futile and acrimonious discussions was opened out which would lead to unrest in our own society--for there has always been a minority opposed to its dominant policy--and a waste of time and temper to the delegates from our Executive. It was therefore resolved at the end of July that our delegates be withdrawn, and that put an end to the Joint Committee.
The decision was challenged at a members' meeting by E.E. Williams, one of the signatories of the Joint Manifesto, subsequently well known as the author of ”Made in Germany,” and in some sense the real founder of the Tariff Reform movement; but the members by a decisive vote upheld the action of their Executive.
Four years later, early in 1897, another effort after Unity was made. By this time Morris, whose outstanding personality had given him a commanding and in some respects a moderating influence in the movement, was dead; and the Hammersmith Socialist Society had disappeared. Instead there was the new and vigorous Independent Labour Party, already the premier Socialist body in point of public influence. This body took the first step, and a meeting was held in April at the Fabian office, attended by Hubert Bland, Bernard Shaw, and myself as delegates from our Society. The proposal before the Conference was ”the formation of a court of appeal to adjudicate between rival Socialist candidates standing for the same seat at any contested election,” an occurrence which has in fact been rare in local and virtually unknown in Parliamentary elections.
As the Fabian Society did not at that time officially run candidates, and has always allowed to its members liberty of action in party politics, it was impossible for us to undertake that our members would obey any such tribunal. The difficulty was however solved by the S.D.F., whose delegates to the second meeting, held in July, announced that they were instructed to withdraw from the Committee if the Fabian delegates remained. The I.L.P. naturally preferred the S.D.F. to ourselves, because their actual rivalry was always with that body, and we were only too glad to accept from others the dismissal which we desired. So our delegates walked out, leaving the other two parties in temporary possession of our office, and Socialist Unity so far as we were concerned again vanished. I do not think that the court of appeal was ever const.i.tuted, and certainly the relations between the other two Societies continued to be difficult.
The next move was one of a practical character. The Fabian Society had always taken special interest in Local Government, as a method of obtaining piecemeal Socialism, and had long acted as an informal Information Bureau on the law and practice of local government administration. The success of the I.L.P. in getting its members elected to local authorities suggested a conference of such persons, which was held at Easter, 1899, on the days preceding the I.L.P. Annual Conference at Leeds. Sidney Webb was invited to be President, and gave an address on ”The Sphere of Munic.i.p.al Statesmans.h.i.+p”; Will Crooks was Chairman of the Poor Law Section. At this Conference it was resolved to form a Local Government Information Bureau, to be jointly managed by the I.L.P. and the Fabian Society; it was intended for Labour members of local authorities, but anybody could join on payment of the annual subscription of 2s. 6d. For this sum the subscriber obtained the right to have questions answered free of charge, and to receive both ”Fabian News” and the official publications of the I.L.P., other than their weekly newspaper. The Bureau also published annual Reports, at first on Bills before Parliament, and latterly abstracts of such Acts pa.s.sed by Parliament as were of interest to its members. It pursued an uneventful but useful career, managed virtually by the secretaries of the two societies, which divided the funds annually in proportion to the literature supplied. Several Easter Conferences of Elected Persons were held with varying success. Later on the nominal control was handed over to the Joint Committee, next to be described.
The problem of Socialist Unity seemed to be approaching a settlement when the three organisations, in 1900, joined hands with the Trade Unions in the formation of the Labour Representation Committee, later renamed the Labour Party. But in 1901, eighteen months after the Committee was const.i.tuted, the S.D.F. withdrew, and thereafter unity became more difficult than ever, since two societies were united for collective political action with the numerically and financially powerful trade unions, whilst the third took up the position of hostile isolation. But between the Fabian Society and the I.L.P. friendly relations became closer than ever. The divergent political policies of the two, the only matter over which they had differed, had been largely settled by change of circ.u.mstances. The Fabian Society had rightly held that the plan of building up an effective political party out of individual adherents to any one society was impracticable, and the I.L.P. had in fact adopted another method, the permeation of existing organisations, the Trade Unions. On the other hand the Fabian Society, which at first confined its permeation almost entirely to the Liberal Party, because this was the only existing organisation accessible--we could not work through the Trade Unions, because we were not eligible to join them--was perfectly willing to place its views before the Labour Party, from which it was a.s.sured of sympathetic attention. Neither the Fabian Society nor the I.L.P. desired to lose its ident.i.ty, or to abandon its special methods. But half or two-thirds of the Fabians belonged also to the I.L.P., and nearly all the I.L.P. leaders were or had been members of the Fabian Society.
The suggestion was made in March, 1911, by Henry H. Slesser, then one of the younger members of the Executive, that the friendly relations of the two bodies should be further cemented by the formation of a Joint Standing Committee. Four members of each Executive together with the secretaries were appointed, and W.C. Anderson, later M.P. for the Attercliffe Division of Sheffield, and at that time Chairman of the I.L.P., was elected Chairman, a post which he has ever since retained.
The Joint Committee has wisely confined its activities to matters about which there was no disagreement, and its proceedings have always been harmonious to the verge of dullness. The Committee began by arranging a short series of lectures, replacing for the time the ordinary Fabian meetings, and it proposed to the Labour Party a demonstration in favour of Adult Suffrage, which was successfully held at the Royal Albert Hall.
In the winter of 1912-13 the Joint Committee co-operated with the National Committee for the Prevention of Dest.i.tution (of which later) in a big War against Poverty Campaign, to demand a minimum standard of civilised life for all. A demonstration at the Albert Hall, a Conference at the Memorial Hall, twenty-nine other Conferences throughout Great Britain, all attended by numerous delegates from Trade Unions and other organisations, and innumerable separate meetings were among the activities of the Committee. In 1913 a large number of educational cla.s.ses were arranged. In the winter of 1913-14 the I.L.P. desired to concentrate its attention on its own ”Coming of Age Campaign,” an internal affair, in which co-operation with another body was inappropriate. A few months later the War began and, for reasons explained later, joint action remains for the time in abeyance.
It will be convenient to complete the history of the movements for Socialist Unity, though it extends beyond the period a.s.signed to this chapter, and we must now turn back to the beginning of another line of action.
The International Socialist and Trade Union Congresses held at intervals of three or four years since 1889 were at first no more than isolated Congresses, arranged by local organisations const.i.tuted for the purpose in the preceding year. Each nation voted as one, or at most, as two units, and therefore no limit was placed on the number of its delegates: the one delegate from Argentina or j.a.pan consequently held equal voting power to the scores or even hundreds from France or Germany. But gradually the organisation was tightened up, and in 1907 a scheme was adopted which gave twenty votes each to the leading nations, and proportionately fewer to the others. Moreover a permanent Bureau was established at Brussels, with Emile Vandervelde, the distinguished leader of the Belgian Socialists, later well known in England as the Ministerial representative of the Belgian Government during the war, as Chairman. In England, where the Socialist and Trade Union forces were divided, it was necessary to const.i.tute a special joint committee in order to raise the British quota of the cost of the Bureau, and to elect and instruct the British delegates. It was decided by the Brussels Bureau that the 20 British votes should be allotted, 10 to the Labour Party, 4 to the I.L.P., 4 to the British Socialist Party (into which the old S.D.F. had merged), and 2 to the Fabian Society, and the British Section of the International Socialist Bureau was, and still remains, const.i.tuted financially and electorally on that basis.
In France and in several other countries the internal differences between sections of the Socialist Party have been carried to far greater lengths than have ever been known in England. In France there have been hostile groups of Socialist representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and constant internecine opposition in electoral campaigns. In Great Britain the rivalry of different societies has consisted for the most part in separate schemes of propaganda, in occasional bickerings in their publications, in squabbles over local elections, and sometimes over the selection but not the election of parliamentary candidates. On the other hand co-operation on particular problems and exchange of courtesies have been common.
The International Socialist Bureau, under instructions from the Copenhagen Conference had made a successful attempt to unite the warring elements of French Socialism, and in the autumn of 1912 the three British Socialist Societies were approached with a view to a conference with the Bureau on the subject of Socialist unity in Great Britain.