MR. HYNDMAN'S RECOLLECTIONS.*

Wu expected to find so little to agree with in Mr. Hyndman's autobiography that it was with real pleasure that we came upon a passage in the Preface which expresses with the utmost exactness our own feeling towards anti-militarism. "Born," says Mr. Hyndman, " into the stirring period when the armed uprising of oppressed nationalities was the most hopeful feature of European development, I have lived to see the day when pacificism has reached such a pitch among its more • The Record of an Adventurous .Life. By Henry Mayers Hyndman. London Macmillan and Co. [15a. net.]

ardent votaries that manful resistance to militarist aggression is regarded as a betrayal of democracy. This view is to my mind utterly pusillanimous and contemptible. . . . Any nation which refuses to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain its influence and uphold its treaties abroad is un- worthy, as it must remain incapable, of conquering for itself economic and social freedom at home. And this is specially true of my own countrymen." Whether this last sentence is true we are not sure, for anti-militarism is making way in France as well as in England. But in both countries, we suspect, it would disappear at the first sounds of war. It would be well, no doubt, if Socialists at home had their love of peace as well ill hand as their German brethren, but we question whether the doctrine that a poor man is just as well off when his country has been conquered as while it retains its independence will long govern the action of any large number of citizens either here or elsewhere. Still, as it may hold the field long enough to delay military preparations until invaluable time has been lost, we welcome this expression of sound and natural feeling from one who can call himself without fear of contradiction "a Social Democrat of more than thirty years' standing." Quite early in the volume there is another passage which Mr. Hyndman's friends would be well advised to lay to heart :-

" I was walking down the bank with one of my own friends, John Chambers, who had been Captain of the Boats at Eton and was afterwards President of the University Boat Club. The University Boat rowed by. It looked very pretty indeed and to an untutored eye seemed a very good boat. ' Is that a good boat?' I asked. Yes,' said Chambers, 'it is not a bad boat." Has it any chance against Oxford ?' I went on. 'Not a ghost of a chance,' replied Chambers. Why not ? " Because they have no stroke.' But can't they make a stroke ?' inquired I in my innocence. No,' was the answer, have often heard of a stroke making a boat, but I'm d—d if I ever heard of a boat making a stroke.' How many times I have quoted that simple saying against the empty-headed fools of democracy who imagine or pretend that because men should be socially equal therefore leadership and initiative and in a sense authority becoine unnecessary."

Mr. Hyndman is thoroughly convinced that a writer of reminiscences must make his wares attractive. We are

tempted to say that Socialism plays too small a part in the present volume. Perhaps, however, as we are told of a second to follow, he has been prudent to conciliate in the first instance that large public which are too much afraid of Socialism to wish to hear much about it. Certainly they have no cause to complain of what is provided for them. Mr. Hyndman has had the general reader in his mind, and he has taken care that he shall not go away empty. Travel in Europe, in the United States, and in Australia supplies abundance of amusing and often enlightening adventure. Separate chapters are devoted to Mazzini, Meredith, Disraeli, Clemenceau, William Morris, and Randolph Churchill, and equally careful sketches are given of persons less famous but not always less interest- ing. Mr. Hyndman was in Italy when the news came that wax was certain between Prussia and Austria, and he went up with Garibaldi's force into Tyrol as correspondent for the Pall Mall Gazette, then a newly started paper. This move on the part of Garibaldi was only a trifling though picturesque incident in the great campaign of 1866, but the force engaged had its full share of loss and suffering, and

the correspondent had full experience of the miseries of an improvised hospital. "Ever since," he says, "when I have

heard or read of splendid feats of heroism in warfare I have thought of that church full of shattered human creatures at Storo, with typhoid fever standing grimly by to reap its harvest of death from those who were recovering from their injuries." A chance conversation with an Austrian colonel returning from Venice to Vienna shows a little known aspect of the Austrian occupation. " I don't like ' going home,"' the colonel said in answer to Mr. Hyndman's congratulations.

" I have been quartered here in Italy for twenty years. I have grown to love the country and the people. I have many dear friends here, and my leave-taking from them now has been the saddest event in my life." This fact is possibly mentioned with the more satisfaction that Mr. Hyndman ends the chapter with the confession that, enthusiastic as he was for emancipation, "modern bourgeois Italy" has come upon him with something of a shock.

In the four chapters which record the two years spent in Australia, Polynesia, and the United States, perhaps the most characteristic incident is the conversion of an Australian

squatter to land nationalization. Mr. Hyndman was even then

convinced that "interlopers called squatters were as a class nefarious land-grabbers who ought to be expropriated without further ado." Of this sentiment he delivered himself one night in a company of fifteen squatters smoking happily round a table. Luckily for him there was a landowner in the neighbourhood who was greatly disliked by his own class, and when the discussion ended and the question of the immediate resumption of all the squatters' land, with fair compensation for improvement, went to a division, it was defeated only by one vote. Mr. Hyndman's most formidable opponent was one " Tommy " Shaw, who at breakfast next morn- ing " came straight to where I was sitting, and without

even saying good morning delivered himself thus : I have been thinking carefully over what you were say- ing last night about the private ownership of vast tracts of land by squatters, and I have come to the conclusion that you were quite right:" It was a lasting victory, but not quite a complete one, for many years afterwards Mr. Shaw had got no further than Henry George's scheme,

which Marx described as " the capitalist's last ditch."

Among the personal chapters perhaps the most tantalizing is that which deals with M. Clemenceau. Mr. Hyndman evidently likes him better than on his own principles he can quite justify. He cannot, he admits, feel the special bitter- ness towards him which affects his French friends. M. Clemenceau has too much brilliance and too much charm to allow of his being judged by isolated measures taken against Socialism. He " is above all the man of the moment, ever equal to either fortune." Mr. Hyndman gives an account of one really important conversation which took place as long ago as 1889, but has still its value in reference to French politics. The French Socialists were then of opinion that a man who had thrown ever eighteen administrations ought to take office and to hold out his hand to the growing Socialist power. Mr. Hyndman accordingly undertook to lay this view before him. M. Clemenceau's answer was, in effect, that he could not work miracles, and that nothing but a miracle could make the French peasants Socialists :— "I have seen them very close, in birth and in death, in sickness and in health, in betrothal and in marriage, in poverty and in well-being, and all the time their one idea is property... . Always property, ownership, possession, work, thrift, acquisition, individual gain. socialism can never take root in such a soil as this. . . . Your Socialists are men of the town; they do not understand the men and women of the country."

By 1906, it is true, M. Clemenceau held this opinion with, at all events, less strength of conviction, for when Mr. Hyndman gave, as reasons for his own belief that a Socialist conquest of rural

France is not impossible, the changes in industrial conditions, the discontent in the wine district, and the difficulty felt by the small owner in obtaining the machinery and the manures which play so large a part in modern farming, M.

Clemenceau, recalling what he had said seventeen years earlier, added, " I do not know that I should say the same now. But we believe that the instinct of property is strong enough to hold its own against these new influences, and that it is by giving this instinct scope that the battle against Socialism must be carried on. It is in the feeble hold that property has on the English labourer that our own danger mainly lies." M. Clemenceau, we learn, has a poor opinion of the English proletariat. "La classe ouvriere en Angleterre est une classe bourgeoise." "I am compelled to admit," adds Mr. Hyndman, " with the deepest regret, this caustic appreciation of my own

toiling countrymen is in the main correct." But what is this but the instinct of property in another form I' One more story we must give because it is a fragment rescued from that mass of interesting recollections which died with Frederick Greenwood. " Mr. Chamberlain, Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Morley, and Mr. Greenwood were dining in the Strangers' Room at the Reform Club in May, 1899,

when matters in South Africa were approaching a crisis. ' If,'

said Mr. Chamberlain, 'I could be sure of public opinion behind me I would have war in a fortnight.' " The other three thought a war against the Boers " a very dangerous and doubtful enterprise indeed. 'Not at all,' was the answer of the Secretary of State for the Colonies; 'the whole thing would be a matter of three months, and would cost about £12,000,000." Mr. Chamberlain showed, it may be, similar

accuracy of calculation when he entered upon his war with Free Trade.

We have not left much space for the Socialist element in

Mr. Hyndman's book. He took the plunge himself, he tells us, on June 10th, 1881, when he took the chair at the first Socialist conference held in England, and presented his book England for AU to each of the delegates. The immediate result of its appearance was a quarrel with Karl Marx. His English disciples managed to survive this opening discourage- ment, and the Social Democratic Federation was founded. It started with a programme which is still a programme, since its author has sadly to admit that " after twenty-nine years of assiduous agitation" not one of the six proposals included in it "has yet been passed into law." But the members did their best to popularize their principles—notably, Mrs. Hynd- man as regards the feeding of destitute children. Others, like Champion, " set to work to make twelve o'clock at eleven " by trying to get particular measures imported into party pro- grammes. Others, again, founded the Church Socialist League, which, we believe, has maintained an unobtrusive existence to this day. A weekly paper, Justice, was also started which has lived for twenty-seven years "entirely without advertisements." Its introduction to the London public was as extraordinary " as its vitality." " Et 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, I myself wearing the frock-coat in which, according to Mr. Shaw, I was born, with a tall hat and good gloves, all earnestly engaged in selling a Socialist paper during the busiest time of the day in London's busiest thoroughfare."

We must leave the reader to learn from Mr. Hyndman's pages how great William Morris was and to learn it with the more conviction, as it is the testimony of a man who holds that his action in leaving the Social Democratic Federation and founding the Socialist League " set the movement back fully twenty years "; and how grievously—to his thinking— Mr. Burns has fallen away from the position he held in the West-end riots of 1886. But in these chapters, as in every other, Mr. Hyndman has much to tell us, and tells it in a very agreeable way.