Henry Mayers Hyndman

The Record of an Adventurous Life


Chapter XX
Economics and Journalism

In the earlier period we entered upon an investigation, exclusively conducted by the Democratic Federation, as to the condition of the people in the working-class districts of London, in order to determine how large a proportion of the wage-earners were receiving as their weekly remuneration an amount of payment insufficient, under the conditions in which they lived, to keep themselves in proper physical health for the work they had to do. This inquiry was conducted very systematically and very carefully in different quarters of London, typical working-class streets and buildings being taken as the tests in each case. We were most careful to avoid exaggeration in every possible way, and went so far, in order to keep on the safe side, as to make deductions from the percentage of those we had finally settled as being insufficiently fed and clothed to prevent them from physically deteriorating on the standard of life they were able to command, even in those days of low prices, for actual necessaries. The figures thus obtained we marshalled as well as we could with the means at our command and we published them in various ways. We arrived at the conclusion that no fewer than 25 per cent of the workers of the metropolis were in receipt of weekly wages upon which it was quite impossible for them to live, not to say in any reasonable comfort, but in such wise as to keep themselves and their wives and children from slow but sure physical deterioration. These statistics and the statements and criticisms with which we accompanied them attracted a great deal of attention, and of course we Socialists were, as usual, denounced as deliberate falsifiers of facts and exaggerators of the poverty of the mass of the people.

One day, however, Mr. Charles Booth, then quite unknown to me, came to our house with a letter of introduction from Greenwood, who was editing the St. James’s Gazette. Mr. Booth was very frank. He told me plainly that in his opinion we had grossly overstated the case. He admitted there was great poverty in the metropolis among the workers, but he maintained that to say that there were not fewer than 25 per cent who existed below the line of reasonable subsistence was to make a statement which could not possibly be substantiated over the whole area. I knew how thoroughly we had done our work – I think I may claim for myself that I have never yet been shown to be wrong in my statistics, even when handling them alone, while here I had the help of capable friends – and I at once said I was quite sure that the more thorough any examination might be the more completely would our figures and statements generally be verified. Mr. Booth, who, by the way, is a Conservative, again assured me that he felt quite certain we were wrong, and then told me that he himself intended to make, at his own expense, an elaborate inquiry into the condition of the workers of London: the wages they received and the amount of sustenance they could obtain for the money remuneration they were paid, he being quite certain he would prove us to be wrong. I welcomed this as a very useful thing to do, and congratulated Mr. Booth upon his public-spirited attempt to establish the truth beyond all question by putting the real facts and the deductions from them in such a manner and on such a scale as to carry conviction to all.

This inquiry was set on foot and carried out most minutely at Mr. Booth’s own cost. It was entered upon, as I say, with the idea on Mr. Booth’s part that we had very considerably exaggerated the proportion of the working people who lived below the line of decent subsistence; Mr. Booth even going as far as to denounce me in a quiet way for putting such erroneous, and as he then termed them “incendiary,” statements before the people. But what was the result of Mr. Booth’s historic investigation, which has rightly gained for him international recognition abroad and very high honours at home? It was established conclusively by this long and expensive search into the conditions of the wage-earners in every part of the metropolis that, so far from the Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation having overestimated the numbers of the hopelessly poverty-stricken, we had erred considerably in cutting down our original figures. It appeared that instead of 25 per cent of the working class receiving wages insufficient to keep themselves and their families in reasonable physical efficiency, 30 per cent and more were sunk in this slough of economic and social despond. That was the outcome of Mr. Booth’s Commission of Inquiry, as all the world knows, and the proportion of starving producers in the metropolis is still greater to-day.

Almost precisely the same proportion of underfed people was found by Mr. Rowntree in the Cathedral City of York as the result of a similar investigation there. But, of course, in this case as in all others, the Socialists got no credit for having called attention to the facts and forced on the inquiry by their original investigations. Far from it. They were abused still more, and even Mr. Booth himself had not the courtesy at the time to inform me of the result of his inquiry, or to withdraw the imputations he had personally made upon me and the body to which I belong. Nor has he ever done so to this day. But I am quite accustomed to that sort of treatment from men who build upon the foundations we lay.

We had now arrived at the point where we thought a Socialist weekly paper was a necessity. I was personally by no means so convinced of the advisability of taking upon us this serious responsibility as some of the others were, and Morris, I judge, doubted whether the movement was ripe for this venture even more than I did. At any rate, he was not disposed to risk any money at that time on the establishment of a Socialist journal. However, it was decided we should start one, and, our friend Edward Carpenter having provided a sum of money, the thing was done. I had not the very slightest intention when we began of becoming the editor. Both my wife and myself knew what the result must be to me in our then position, and it was agreed Charles Fitzgerald should undertake the work. Fitzgerald was a retired army officer who had acted as Special Correspondent for the Daily News; but from one cause or another the best writers we had would not work under his editorship, and I was practically forced to take the place at once or give up the venture.

Thus began the most unfortunate undertaking for myself personally that I ever entered upon, and when I think of all the ability and energy and sacrifice which others as well as myself have thrown into Justice during the past twenty-seven years I am bound to recognise that, invaluable service as the paper has rendered at times, we should have done far better to have expended our money and enthusiasm in other directions. It was one of those fatal mistakes that cannot be remedied and which engender a sort of mania of obstinacy: the more it cost us to keep it up the more determined we were to keep it on. The wonder is that a journal bitterly hostile to the dominant class and entirely without advertisements should have lasted so long as it has. Nothing but the determination of its present editor, and the persistence of the little band of writers who stuck to it could have kept it going all these years.

We started well. Morris, Shaw, Hubert Bland and Mrs. Bland, Joynes, Salt, Champion, Helen Taylor and others made up a good staff; the paper itself was well printed, and the whole effect of it was good. But the trouble was with the circulation. We did not meet a long-felt want, that’s certain. In fact, well as it might be written, it was a purely propaganda sheet, dealing with questions that the mass of mankind did not wish to have thrust upon them. Those were the days when none of us were above doing anything. We distributed bills, took collections, bawled ourselves hoarse at street-corners, and sold Justice down Fleet Street and the Strand. This last was really a most extraordinary venture.

It was a curious scene. Morris in his soft hat and blue suit, Champion, Frost and Joynes in the morning garments of the well-to-do, several working men comrades, and I myself wearing the new frock-coat in which Shaw said I was born, with a tall hat and good gloves, all earnestly engaged in selling a penny Socialist paper during the busiest time of the day in London’s busiest thoroughfare. Outside of the Salvation Army nothing of that sort had been done up to that time. There could be no doubt as to the earnestness of the men who thus made themselves ridiculous to all those who had never felt disposed to run any risk of that kind for any reason whatever.

And of course there were some amusing episodes in those early beginnings. For example, there were appearing in Justice in the first numbers some more or less funny jokes written by the editor entitled Needles in hay. There were those who actually laughed at these well-meant efforts at being amusing. Even the writer himself thought they were not so bad. But suddenly there came a letter from one of the oldest members of the body, whose faculty for criticising other people has always been greatly in excess of his own power of performance, in which he was good enough to speak very highly of Justice and its literary merit generally. “But,” he wound up, “who is that damned fool who writes Needles in hay?” As the writer of that sentence had many of the attributes of a foolometer the “needles” ceased to encumber the provender and appeared no more. But the circulation of our paper did not leap up in consequence. Yet as I look back at those early files of Justice I see far less to regret than might have been expected. Some of the articles, indeed, would well bear reprinting to-day, and I have always thought the following fable of The Monkeys and the Nuts one of the most telling and brilliant things of its kind ever done in Socialist literature. I have forgotten the name of the writer.

FABLES FOR THE TIMES
THE MONKEYS AND THE NUTS

A Colony of monkeys, having gathered a store of nuts for the winter, begged their Wise Ones to distribute them. The Wise Ones reserved a good half for themselves, and distributed the remainder amongst the rest of the community, giving to some twenty nuts, to others ten, to others five, and to a considerable number none. Now, When those to whom twenty had been given complained that the Wise Ones had kept so many for themselves the Wise Ones answered, “Peace, foolish ones, are ye not much better off than those who have ten?” And they were pacified. And to those who objected, having only ten, they said, “Be satisfied, are there not many who have but five?” and they kept silence. And they answered those who had five, saying, “Nay, but see ye not the number who have none?” Now when these last made complaint of the unjust division and demanded a share, the Wise Ones stepped forward and exclaimed to those who had twenty, and ten, and five, “Behold the wickedness of these monkeys. Because they have no nuts they are dissatisfied, and would fain rob you of those which are yours!”

And they all fell on the portionless monkeys and beat them sorely. Moral. The selfishness of the moderately well-to-do blinds them to the rapacity of the rich.

UTILE DULCI.

The general policy of the paper, then, was precisely the same that it is now, and some day, as the realisation of Socialism draws closer, the value of the work we then did will probably be appreciated much more highly than it is now.

Justice had not been started more than three months when the first of the great debates took place which from time to time have enlivened the Socialist movement. Charles Bradlaugh at this date was at the height of his vigour and fame. He was undoubtedly the most formidable and imposing platform figure in the country. Tall, powerful, and well-shaped in body, his face was that of a huge bull-dog with the upper lip drawn down instead of being turned up. And he had all the qualities of the animal he resembled when fully roused. No man of our time fought a harder uphill fight than Bradlaugh. Not content with being an ardent Radical he was at the same time, as all the world knows, a most pugnacious and persistent Secularist. It is not too much to say that, though not possessed of the literary capacity of Watts or Foote, the scientific knowledge of Aveling or M’Cabe or the charm of oratory which distinguished Annie Besant, he was at that time the real inspirer and organiser of the Secularist party in Great Britain, which, since his death, has had good reason to recognise the extraordinary force of the man.

That he was more than a little of a bully and a despot, as well as a capable and courageous leader, cannot be disputed. But this was almost inevitable, not only from his natural character but from the circumstances in which that character developed. He was an individualist of individualists. Every man must make his own way with his own right arm. That the weakest should go to the wall was a beneficial fact for the race: that he, Bradlaugh, would survive in this competition as one of the fittest he had no doubt whatever. And he took good care to impress this view of himself upon all with whom he came in contact. Secularism in Bradlaugh’s day was the fanaticism of negation, and Bradlaugh was at one and the same time the prophet, high priest and King of this nullifying creed.

Of course he was deadly opposed to Socialism. Though accepting the material basis of life and society, on which Bradlaugh himself took his stand, Socialism represented the constructive side of his destructive propaganda. It set itself the task of teaching mankind the truth about the relentless but unconscious or unappreciated development towards Collectivism and Socialism, and the higher individualism which would arise out of this inevitable progression. The ultimate object being to secure for all that true liberty which is the knowledge of necessity and which gives man in society ever-increasing and self-understanding control over the forces of nature, as well as over the growth of society itself.

Bradlaugh did not understand all this a bit. He laughed at it as chimerical utopianism, and never lost a chance of speaking against Socialism. It became necessary, therefore, to controvert him publicly and in a striking way. The best thing we could think of was that there should be a public debate in the St. James’s Hall. The discussion was on Will Socialism benefit the English People? Professor Beesly, admired and even revered by advanced men of all shades of opinion, for his splendid and courageous work on behalf of the people and of the oppressed of every country, was the Chairman, and I was chosen to confront and debate with Bradlaugh. Many thought I had undertaken too heavy a task, and, of course, to meet Bradlaugh at his best, with so little experience of platform work as I had then, was a serious matter. But I had one idea in my head and that was, whatever might come of the debate thereafter, to get in, during my first half-hour, a statement of the meaning and objects of Socialism which people would easily read. It was worth even being beaten in immediate argument, if I was to be beaten, to ensure that. But I don’t deny that I looked forward to the conflict with some trepidation, as the fear of doing harm to the cause itself, even for a short time, weighed upon my mind.

The weather was not at all favourable to a man who suffers from a sluggish liver. The evening of the debate there was a dry, cold, biting east wind which shrivelled me up. I don’t know why I had the impression, but the idea was in my mind that Bradlaugh thought I should fail to appear, my courage failing me at the last moment. But I came in just at five minutes to eight o’clock and we began punctually enough. I succeeded to the full extent of what I had hoped for in getting in every point I wished to make in my first half-hour’s speech, and then Bradlaugh had his innings, and a very good innings it was too. Nowadays, when Socialism is well understood, even by many who pretend it is ridiculous, Bradlaugh’s attacks would sound quite out of date and perhaps not a little absurd. But at that time, well supported as he was by his own party in St. James’s Hall, they were telling enough. When, therefore, with a dexterity I could not but admire, he wound up his first speech on the very tick of his time, after having quoted some impressive figures of the Savings Banks, and other accumulations as he contended of working-class thrift, with the words “Fight those,” I knew very well that my victory, if gained at all, would not be won that night, in the opinion of the audience at any rate. But I do not think I showed any depression and when I glanced through the verbatim Report of the Debate again the other day, I declare there was not a great deal I should care even now to change in my later speeches. It was for this Debate William Morris wrote his All For The Cause which filled one full page of Justice.

Of course the Bradlaugh folk thought their champion had triumphed, and many of them were not behindhand in saying so as they filed out of the Hall. But the answer to one of them, attributed to Bernard Shaw, “Our man has been playing at longer bowls than you know,” really did sum up the situation. It is the fact that within six months of that debate, Annie Besant, Dr. Aveling, Heaford and several more of Bradlaugh’s ablest supporters joined the Social-Democratic Federation.

One thing struck me very much after the debate: the exaggerated deference paid to Bradlaugh personally by those immediately around him. It gave me a shock. I noted too that the great Secularist drank a deep draught of cold claret after his exertions, and I told my wife then that, heated as he was, this was a deadly indulgence. I know it would have settled me very quickly. Six years later, when, owing to John Burns’ running away from his own challenge to Bradlaugh, I was forced to oppose my old opponent again in St. James’s Hall on the Eight Hour Law, I recognised at once he was not at all the same man I had encountered in 1884. There is and there can be no principle in a limitation of work to a fixed maximum of eight hours per day and I told all my old comrades and friends of the Social-Democratic Federation, Quelch and Lee and Hunter Watts and others that I was going forward to defeat, or at the very best a drawn battle.

But Bradlaugh really beat himself. I had nothing to do but to state and restate my case, and to offer him the Bill to criticise which he had forced me to draw and would not discuss. In fact, Bradlaugh was ill, the heat was terrific, the tide had turned against individualism; so, what between downright physical ailment and mental irritation arising from that cause, he did himself no sort of justice in the face of a none too friendly audience. I have always said that Bradlaugh, with all his great strength and wonderful constitution, was even then a dying man, and I felt sorry to see such a splendid fighter, deeply as I differed from him, passing away from the field of conflict.

From this time onwards my work in the Socialist movement was very active, very exhausting, and, at times, very depressing. Apart from editing Justice, contributing articles and doing other writing I was constantly engaged in speaking at public meetings in halls and in the open air. The open-air work was to me the most trying of all. I began it too late in life thoroughly to understand how to take it easy. At first I had also a strong prejudice against addressing the hopeless sort of audiences we had to deal with at the beginning of our propaganda. I always consider I first stripped myself of my class prejudices when I addressed a gathering largely made up of rather debauched-looking persons round the old pump at Clerkenwell Green. I laughed a little at myself standing there in the full rig-out of the well-to-do fashionable, holding forth to these manifest degenerates on the curse of capitalism and the glories of the coming time.

Our old friend Jonathan Taylor of Sheffield, who was then working with us in London, walked back with me one day from this meeting place and took me to task all the way home on my optimism. I heard him for once patiently and without interruption, as he descanted upon the drawbacks to my exaggerated enthusiasm. When we neared our door, however, I turned on him and asked, “How do you know I am optimist in this business?” “By the way you talk,” he answered; “you speak as if the revolution would be here in a few years.” “And would you tell them it won’t?” said I; “if you did you would throw back the movement at once,” which was quite true. No leader of a popular movement, in however small a way, must ever look or speak as if he were in the least discouraged. Should he do so, and there is no one at hand to correct the effect of this, there is a marked set back observable immediately. Of such is the making of democracy.

I said above that open-air speaking to those not trained to it is an arduous job physically: it also calls for a good deal of alacrity mentally, especially if the speaker is advocating an unpopular cause. I know no better training, indeed, for dealing with interruptions and attacks and questions than a course of street-corner oratory. It is often only the unexpected that happens in such circumstances, and a speaker must have his wits about him, in London particularly, where, as in most capital cities, the fringe of a crowd is abnormally sharp. It is absolutely necessary at times to turn the laugh against the witster who challenges you, no matter at what loss of dignity, and questions must be answered right off, clearly and without hesitation. You can afford to be wrong but you cannot possibly afford to seem doubtful.

I could fill a good many pages with more or less amusing stories of platform readiness or the reverse, but the two following anecdotes have their own moral. Our veteran speaker and writer Quelch, who, with few advantages, has become the best informed and most capable of the able men who are carefully kept out of the Labour ranks in the House of Commons, was speaking at a street corner in Walworth when he was a candidate for the School Board. It was a raw, cold night, the air foggy and choking, but Quelch had a fair audience of the very poor gathered around him in one of the most poverty-stricken districts of this most poverty-stricken locality. The houses around showing up the gloomy and dirty depression without spoke eloquently of the misery and too often filth within. “See,” said Quelch, “the sort of dog-hutches that are good enough for toilers of your class and mine. Look at these wretched kennels into which you slink after having spent weeks and months and years of your lives ill-taught, ill-fed, ill-clothed, piling up riches for the classes who rob you of your labour and ever keep you down. Such slums as these are a disgrace to this city and this nation. That slum over there is an outrage on humanity.” Scarcely were the words out of his mouth when a tall, uncouth-looking man standing in the little crowd next to me, clad in ragged clothes with a rough scarf round his neck and an ill-shaped cap on his head and his boots broken out at the toes called out, “’Ere, I say, mister, you be a bit careful in what you’re talking about calling this a slum. I lives ’ere!” Born, brought up and living all their lives in grime and squalor the men and women of the slums won’t have it they exist in – slums.

The following incident occurred to myself. I had been taunting a working-class audience with their apathy, indifference and ignorance, and holding forth at length upon their contemptible lack of capacity to understand their own power, if only they would rouse themselves to action against the class which oppressed and robbed them. I said that people who put up with such conditions of life were destitute of any sense. At the end of my address one of those present, who, quite properly, objected to this attack upon himself and his fellows by a well-to-do man like myself, got up to ask a question, which we have always allowed at our meetings. “I should like to ask the lecturer” – we were all “lecturers” at the start – “Mr. Chairman, through you, whether he seriously meant to tell us that the workers of this country are lunatics, whether he did not really say that they are lunatics.” I rose most gravely. “No, sir,” I replied, “I did not say or suggest that the workers of Great Britain are lunatics.” (Oh! Oh!) “Well, Mr. Chairman, it is, of course, within the memory of the meeting, but I again ask Mr. Hyndman plainly whether he did not tell this audience that the working classes are lunatics.” “No, sir, I positively declare that I did not say the working classes are lunatics.” (Oh! oh shame!) “I ask Mr. Hyndman once more did not he say the English workers were lunatics?” By this time things had got a little hot, so I gave my explanation at once:– “No, sir, I never said the working people of this island are lunatics” – (uproar) – “because” (very loud, so as to be heard over the din) “in order that people may become lunatics they must have minds to go out of to start with.” (A burst of laughter.) “What I did say was that the working classes of London and of England are idiots, and I say it again.” I sat down amid a round of cheering.

That is their way: the people will stand any amount of denunciation of their own shortcomings if only you stick to your guns and have a little sense of humour. Unfortunately, it goes no farther: act in their own class interest, as an organised political force, they will not. The addresses we were then giving in the Radical Clubs were almost as depressing for the speaker as the street corner orations at Clerkenwell Green, Mile End Waste, or Bermondsey. Morris was a stopgap, Bernard Shaw a “turn at these beer-swilling, gin-absorbing political centres.” Eloquence, satire, adjuration were all merely accompaniments to endless potations, and potmen strolled around taking orders in the middle of the most moving passages of the speaker’s address. But we did, nevertheless, get able recruits out of these unpromising surroundings, and by degrees we weakened the influence of these subsidised Radical Clubs, though not so completely as we thought and hoped at the time.

When I remember, however, that in 1881 there was to all intents and purposes no Socialism at all in Great Britain, and then look round to-day I cannot consider our efforts, in spite of all treachery and loss of enthusiasm, have been in vain. But what a lot of work has been done. I look back myself with some satisfaction to the open-air meetings in the Parks. Some of the speaking, apart from the working-class agitators themselves, was really excellent. Champion was very good, and Frank Harris, when a member of our body, was one of the most effective of our out-door orators, and he did good service in helping on the intellectual and oratorical development of James M’Donald and others. I myself used to have at one time quite a regular audience in Hyde Park, of which W.E.H. Lecky, Fitzjames Stephen, and Randolph Churchill, all of whom lived close by, were frequent members. It is all very well to laugh at the tub-thumper and stump-orator, but I should very much like to try some of our self-satisfied members of Parliament and “tone-of-the-House” men against such gatherings as we used to have round the Hyde Park Reservoir; when at any moment an expert in history or economics or sociology might throw in an interjection or put a serious question at the end. On one occasion Lecky entered the field against one of our open-air speakers, and afterwards handsomely admitted that though he did not agree with what had been said, there was ground for argument on our side. Thousands of such meetings of various degrees of size and merit were held throughout the country, and even yet we do not feel the full effect of all what was then done.

Everything in fact at this time prognosticated for us a long period of useful, however difficult and uphill, agitation. The withdrawal of the Fabians had been more than made up for by the accession of strength from other quarters and never at any period, having regard to the comparatively recent establishment of a Socialist organisation in England, did things look so bright for our propaganda as they did in the summer and early autumn of 1884. A list of our speakers and writers alone is even now sufficient to show where we were in those days. Morris, Bax, Champion, Quelch, Thorne; Burns, Williams, Herbert Burrows, Joynes, Salt, Frost, Eleanor Marx, Keddell, Andreas Scheu, Annie Besant, Edward Aveling, Hobart, Hunter Watts, Helen Taylor, the Murrays – this made up, with others not named, a very strong combination indeed. Lee, our Secretary, also joined us at this time. It was reasonable, with such a group of men and women gathered round, an effective weekly journal, and with a well-organised centre as a rallying point, to believe that in a few years we might rival the strength and discipline of the German party, while possessing some of the life and unexpectedness of the French. In the brief sketch of William Morris and his connection with the movement I tell of the deplorable split, which, arising chiefly out of a personal misunderstanding with myself, did the greatest possible harm to the entire Socialist movement, and led on to those unfortunate sectional combinations which have been and still are so prejudicial to the whole Socialist development in Great Britain.

It was a great shock that separation; but those of us who remained when Morris and his companions left were quite resolved we would not be beaten, and we weren’t. But what a waste of energy it was to have the Social-Democratic Federation and the Socialist League struggling against one another, instead of striving together for one another, all those years. Now and then we combined, as at the Commemoration of the Commune of Paris, when Eleanor Marx made one of the finest speeches I ever heard. The woman seemed inspired with some of the eloquence of the old prophets of her race, as she spoke of the eternal life gained by those who fought and fell in the great cause of the uplifting of humanity: an eternal life in the material and intellectual improvement of countless generations of mankind. It was a bitter cold, snow-swept night in the street outside, but in the Hall the warmth of comradeship exceeded that of any Commune celebration I have ever attended. We were one that night. The day after the antagonism recommenced.


Last updated on 30.7.2006