CHAPTER XIII.

SOCIALISM.

The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his tenacity, and his self-control.  A successful International Congress at Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most successful gathering was held.  To me, personally, the year has a special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called, though only partially, to the Socialist movement.  I had heard Louise Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the National Reformer had interested me, but I had not yet concerned myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with ever-increasing force on heart and brain.  Of Socialist teaching I knew nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my younger days.  In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number of the Reformer for that year:  “What tests 1884 may have for our courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty, none can tell.  But this we know—­that every test of courage successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before.  And therefore, for our own and for the world’s sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you, each and all, the hero’s heart and the hero’s patience, in the struggle for the world’s raising that will endure through the coming year.”

On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called Justice, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation—­not yet the Social Democratic—­in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that “all means were justifiable to attain” working-class ends.  I protested strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social progress.  A few weeks later the Echo repeated a speech of Mr. Hyndman’s in which a “bloodier revolution” than that of France was prophesied, and the extinction of “book-learning” seemed coupled with the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on.  But I had the pleasure, a week later, of reprinting from Justice a sensible paragraph, condemning the advocacy of violence so long as free agitation was allowed.