Like most joint productions of clever men, it is by no means an inspiring document.  The less said, the less to dispute about, and so it only runs to eight pages of large print, four devoted to the evils of capitalism, unemployment, the decline of agriculture, and the ill-nurture of children, and the rest to remedies, a queer list, consisting of:—­

   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
   Municipal 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 constituted 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.