"Proud Tower"

British politics, one generation later:

• What the Fabian Society wanted was Socialism without Marx or revolution, something like Macbeth without murder—an intellectual, respectable, gradual, factual, practical, “gas and water” English Socialism powered by the brains, hard work and infinite attention to detail of the Webbs and the brilliant common sense of Shaw.
• he announced boldly and went on to propose the state as a “reserve employer” of labour, the establishment of minimum standards and state ownership of railways. Beatrice Webb was very gratified: “Winston has mastered the Webb scheme,” she noted in her diary, and having done that he could be classified as “brilliantly able.”
• The speech was a series of sneers, sarcasm and personal allusion tossed into Liberal laps like firecrackers. A legend later went the rounds that when he was at Oxford he and Sir John Simon had tossed to decide which party each should join since no party could contain them both.
• Put off again and again by Asquith’s promises to carry through Enfranchisement, which he made to secure quiet and never kept, the feminists in the years after 1909 slashed pictures in the National Gallery and set fires in cricket pavilions, race-course grandstands, resort hotels and even churches. They interrupted services in St. Paul’s and Westminster, forced petitions on the King at court, engaged in “painful and distressing” struggles with police, forcing their own arrest and imprisonment.
• The strange physical fury generated by the women’s struggle for the vote was the most unsettling phenomenon of the Liberal era.
• In a series of lectures he delivered at Yale in 1909 on “Hindrances to Good Citizenship,” he admitted that the practice of democracy had not lived up to the theory.
• The philosophers of Liberalism, looking around them, were making the equally painful discovery that laissez-faire, essence of the Liberal creed, had not worked.
• Hobhouse and a number of other investigators were concerned with man’s curious refusal to behave rationally in what seemed his own best interest. ... The Columbus of this discovery was a surgeon, Wilfred Trotter, who named the phenomenon, gave it status as a subject for scientific study and quietly concluded his first voyage in sociology with a sentence as pessimistic as any ever written. “A quiet man,” as a friend described him, with a wide variety of interests in philosophy, literature and science, Trotter, who was thirty-six in 1908, was to be judged thirty years later “the greatest surgeon of the present century in this country.”
• “It needs but little imagination to see,” he concluded, “how great are the probabilities that after all man will prove but one more of nature’s failures.”
• Lloyd George... told a working-class audience of four thousand at Limehouse in London’s East End, “A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two Dreadnoughts … is just as great a terror and lasts longer.”
• It provided that on bills certified by the Speaker as Finance Bills the Veto should be abolished and that other bills, if passed by three successive sessions of the Commons, should become law with or without the consent of the Lords. Talk flew around London about creation of peers; everyone from poets to tea merchants, “even Hilaire Belloc,” as Wilfrid Blunt noted maliciously, saw visions of the coronet descending upon his own head.
• Both sides were caught in a trap. To put the Budget through now, the Liberals needed the Irish votes and the Irish disliked the Budget because of the tax on whiskey. The price of their support was Asquith’s promise to carry through abolition of the Lords’ Veto in order to clear the way for Home Rule.
• What impelled the Conservatives in their equal rage of resistance was a determination to preserve the last rampart of privilege. To lose the Veto or to lose the Conservative majority in the House of Lords meant to lose their last check upon the advance of the besieging classes.
• The Russian Ballet made its London debut at Covent Garden, Pavlova and Nijinsky danced at private parties, including one in a garden under a blue sky at Strawberry Hill, once the home and gothic extravaganza of Horace Walpole. Its new owner, Lady Michelham, owned nineteen yards of pearls and gave a dinner for sixty guests after the dance in the garden, at which the entrées were served in the form of lighthouses, lit up inside and surrounded by ortolans representing sea gulls with a surf of white sauce breaking over them.

What I never learned at school:

• Socialism was equally predicated on the concept of class war and on its eventual outcome, the destruction of capitalism.
• When the Pullman strike in the United States in 1894 stopped trains and the mail, Judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati, far from a ferocious man, wrote to his wife, “It will be necessary for the military to kill some of the mob before the trouble can be stayed. They have only killed six … as yet. This is hardly enough to make an impression.” Here was the class war in operation.
• This Marxian doctrine of Verelendung (pauperization, or increasing misery) and Zusammenbruch (collapse) was the religious formula of Socialism, equivalent to “God is One” of another religion. It afflicted Socialism and the labour movement with a chronic schism between the necessity of collapse and revolution on the one hand and the possibility of gradual reform of the existing order on the other.
• The Marxian premise built into Socialism a chronic dilemma as well as a schism. As a movement on behalf of the working class it needed working-class support, which could only be obtained by showing practical results. Yet every practical result slowed or arrested the process of impoverishment. When walking with a friend who reached in his pocket to give money to a beggar, Johannes Miquel, in his youth an ardent Socialist, stopped him, saying, “Don’t delay the Revolution!” This was the logical extreme of Marxism. Any reform inferred a common ground between the contesting classes; revolution assumed the absence of it.
• at the age of twenty-eight in 1904 wrote a small classic, Poverty. With the undulled emotion of his time
• But revolution appealed more to intellectuals who had no doubt of their capacity to manage society than it did to the working class.
• Organized Socialism bore the name Workingmen’s Association but in fact it was never any such thing. It was a movement not of, but on behalf of, the working class, and the distinction remained basic.
• Socialist doctrine, however, required it to be an entity with a working-class mind, working-class voice, working-class will, working-class purpose. In fact, these were not easily ascertainable. The Socialist idealized them and to be idealized is to be overestimated.
• The question carried the further implication: whether Socialist goals might not, in the long run, be attained by way of reform?... The name of the man who presumed to revise Marx was Eduard Bernstein, and his new doctrine, as if not quite daring to give itself a name, came to be called simply Revision.
• Revision meant in effect abandonment of the class struggle. It was a stake plunged into the heart of Socialism. All the deputies in the Reichstag were powerless, for the Reichstag was itself powerless in any case. It was the very helplessness of the German Socialists which enabled them to take an uncompromising stand on doctrine.
• In 1905 the great Marxist event, Revolution, suddenly took place—in the wrong way in the wrong country. Russia had not reached the highly industrialized stage which Marx had predicated as necessary for collapse. The rising was not the work of a self-conscious disciplined proletariat but simply of exasperated human beings.
• The Austrian regime, frightened by the demonstrations, yielded the promise of manhood suffrage, which went into effect in 1907, virtually the only positive result of the Russian rising.
• American Socialism, like Russian, since it had no representatives in Congress and no role in government even at the municipal level, was protected from the temptations of collaboration.
• Socialism with steadfast heart remained, nevertheless, predicated in the event of war on a “rising” of the workers of the world. In this it shared the tendency of the age to clothe reality in sentimental garments. The public of the time was not represented by those doctors, writers and social psychologists who were beginning to look at man without illusions. These were the advance guard, as were “seers of black” like Wedekind. The public preferred the rosy view: the perfect pearly nudes of Bouguereau, the impossibly handsome Gibson girls—creatures that never were on land or sea. So, in their own way, did the Socialists.
• “We relied on Jaurès,” wrote Stefan Zweig long afterward, to organize the Socialists to stop the war.
• When the call came, the worker, whom Marx declared to have no Fatherland identified himself with country, not class. He turned out to be a member of the national family like anyone else. The force of his antagonism which was supposed to topple capitalism found a better target in the foreigner. The working class went to war willingly, even eagerly, like the middle class, like the upper class, like the species.
• When the effort was over, illusions and enthusiasms possible up to 1914 slowly sank beneath a sea of massive disillusionment. For the price it had paid, humanity’s major gain was a painful view of its own limitations.