E

HENRY MAYERS HYNDMAN

(1911)

ANGLAND is at last talking about Henry

Mayers Hyndman, but England is neither

talking about Hyndman for what Hyndman is, nor for what he has done, but because he has written a book. It has been overlooked somehow that the book in question is the by-product of a very remarkable life; and it is highly probable that the bare fact of Hyndman's existence may come as a surprise to a great many otherwise well-informed people. Still more well-informed people, knowing of his existence only from the daily newspapers, will be surprised to find that this Socialist agitator of the reddest type is a highly respectable member of the English bourgeoisie, born of wealthy parents, educated at Cambridge, experienced as a journalist and a traveller, and claiming among his friends many of the finest, as well as the best-known, men of his day. Four years ago Hyndman told a friend of mine, who had been offering him birthday congratulations, that he was sixty-five years young, and in his book, "The Record of an Adventurous Life," he describes himself to-day as an active man of sixty-nine. There

we have the real Hyndman; the restless energy that has ruffled the surface of English politics and upheld the banner of uncompromising Socialism in England for well over a quarter of a century.

Hyndman is, in many ways, an activity, a force, rather than an achievement. Doubtless he would tell you he was a great success, but that would only be a part of his undying enthusiasm, his perpetual youth; for no matter how sweetly reasonable he may be on such topics, to the outside world, as well as to the larger part of the world of Socialism, Hyndman is that moving, tragic force, the Eternal Impossibilist. On the other hand, his impossibilism is an unconscious rather than a conscious thing. I think he would like to be successful, and I think the mantle of success would sit well on his shoulders; but he is far too reasonable ever to be anything more than a failure. Years ago The Pall Mall Gazette asked ironically: "Why does Mr Hyndman go about calling himself the Social Democratic Federation?" But The Pall Mall Gazette did not realise half of the truth it spoke. This tiresome Utopian is not only the father of the Social Democratic Party in England, he is its guide, philosopher and friend, its inspirer-in-chief, its prophet and its genial autocrat. So important is he to the organisation that if you took him away it would either collapse or grow into something new and strange. Under his long reign the Social Democratic Federation, now the Social Democratic Party, has never for a moment deviated from its prescribed

path. In the midst of political and economic battles it has remained inviolate in principle and impregnable in idea; and although it has achieved apparently little more than a status quo, it has, in reality, acted as an effectual economic dam against temporary floods of reaction from less uncompromising sources of social revolt.

Since the S. D. P. was formed many Socialist societies have come into existence, to flutter briefly before the public gaze and fall to earth with broken wings; others, more yielding to popular prejudices and conventional expediencies, like the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society, have come and worked, and had their brief moment of brilliance, only to settle into a premature and effete old age; but the S. D. P., with H. M. Hyndman bearing aloft the Red Flag proudly, seems to be eternal. In its early days he drew under its banner all the bright spirits then beginning to accept the Socialist idea; but he was not strong enough to hold them together. Bernard Shaw left him for the Fabian Society, and William Morris left him for the ill-fated Socialist League, but, undaunted, Hyndman refused to capitulate and continued to run his paper, Justice, and his Federation, as it was then called, in company with his faithful comrades Harry Quelch and Belfort Bax. Innumerable pamphlets and leaflets were issued and scattered over England, and many elections were fought with heroically disastrous results. England showed not the slightest inclination to join

the Social Democratic Party, and even the majority of those who called themselves Socialists refused to be converted. But the S. D. P. did not die; it is alive to-day, its disciples go forth into the highways and byways preaching, with the unbending enthusiasm of religious conviction, the only true Socialistic faith. Great halls throughout the land still rock with the eloquence of Hyndman. But nothing else seems to happen. The revolution is as far off as ever, and the people of England understand something less of the Marxian theory of value than they did before. All this, however, has not destroyed the fire or the enthusiasm of his deathless faith and hope. Henry Mayers Hyndman is sixty-nine years young, and as he stands on the platform, four square to his audience, pouring torrents of irony, invective, sarcasm, dialectic and humour over the uplifted faces, you feel with Whitman that, though victory may be great, defeat also is great.

There is something incongruous about this respectable, frock-coated, silk-hatted, grey-bearded, highbrowed patriarchal figure even in the conventionalised Socialist movement of to-day. But what must he have looked in the Socialist movement of the eighteen eighties? For, save the fact that his frosting beard gives his years away, he looked the same then as he does now-something between a successful merchant and a Nonconformist preacher; but his comrades in those days considered homespun and corduroy, clay pipes, red ties and sombreros the outward and

visible signs of an inward and revolutionary grace. Such conventions, however, did not affect the father of the S. D. P., for, believing, as he does, that men are equal before God, no matter what clothes they wear, he abandoned all claims to distinction of birth and possessions except the sartorial badges of his social heritage. I fancy Hyndman would have pleased Walt Whitman. He is a superb person, the sublumation of the democratic's poet's idea of the divine average. He is unique only in the greatness of his endeavour; ready and willing to make sacrifices, to do the dirty work, as any humble member of the rank and file; arrogant only in his persistency; original only in his enthusiasm for the phase of a cause that has neither lost nor found itself; persuasive, eloquent, laborious; yet, in spite of all these things, in spite of the spite and jealousy, the meanness and suspicion, of political propaganda, Hyndman has remained clean and lovable and honest, adored by his followers, honoured by Socialist, conformist and nonconformist alike, and misrepresented by his foes.

I have said that his life did not represent an achievement, but surely to have achieved so much is to have achieved much. That such a man should have been, until now, comparatively unknown to the mass of his fellow-countrymen is a grievous fault, and his fellowcountrymen are the losers. But, inspired by his own account of himself, the press has made some amends by at length discovering that he is at least a forceful