In 1886 the socialist movement in England was in full swing. Large
bodies of workers had openly joined it in all the principal towns, as
well as a number of middle-class people, chiefly young, who helped it
in different ways. An acute industrial crisis prevailed that year in
most trades, and every morning, and often all the day long, I heard
groups of workers going about in the streets singing ‘We’ve got no work
to do,’ or some hymn, and begging for bread. People flocked at night
into Trafalgar Square to sleep there in the open air, under the wind
and rain, between two newspapers; and one day in February a crowd,
after having listened to the speeches of Burns, Hyndman, and Champion,
rushed into Piccadilly and broke a few windows in the great shops.
Far more important, however, than this outbreak of discontent, was
the spirit which prevailed amongst the poorer portion of the working
population in the outskirts of London. It was such that if the leaders
of the movement, who were prosecuted for the riots, had received severe
sentences, a spirit of hatred and revenge, hitherto unknown in the
recent history of the labour movement in England, but the symptoms of
which were very well marked in 1886, would have been developed, and
would have impressed its stamp upon the subsequent movement for a long
time to come. However, the middle classes seemed to have realized the
danger. Considerable sums of money were immediately subscribed in the
West End for the relief of misery in the East End--certainly quite
inadequate to relieve a widely spread destitution, but sufficient to
show, at least, good intentions. As to the sentences which were passed
upon the prosecuted leaders, they were limited to two and three months’
imprisonment.
The amount of interest in socialism and all sorts of schemes of reform
and reconstruction of society was very great in all layers of society.
Beginning with the autumn and throughout the winter, I was asked to
lecture over the country, partly on prisons, but mainly on anarchist
socialism, and I visited in this way nearly every large town of England
and Scotland. As I had, as a rule, accepted the first invitation I
received to stay the night after the lecture, it consequently happened
that I stayed one night in a rich man’s mansion, and the next night in
the narrow abode of a working family. Every night I saw considerable
numbers of people of all classes; and whether it was in the worker’s
small parlour, or in the reception-rooms of the wealthy, the most
animated discussions went on about socialism and anarchism till a late
hour of the night--with hope in the workman’s home, with apprehension
in the mansion, but everywhere with the same earnestness.
In the mansions, the main question was to know, ‘What do the socialists
want? What do they intend to do?’ and next, ‘What are the concessions
which it is absolutely necessary to make at some given moment in order
to avoid serious conflicts?’ In these conversations I seldom heard the
justice of the socialist contention merely denied, or described as
sheer nonsense. But I found also a firm conviction that a revolution
was impossible in England; that the claims of the mass of the workers
had not yet reached the precision nor the extent of the claims of the
socialists, and that the workers would be satisfied with much less;
so that secondary concessions, amounting to a prospect of a slight
increase of well-being or of leisure, would be accepted by the working
classes of England as a pledge in the meantime of still more in the
future. ‘We are a left-centre country, we live by compromises,’ I was
once told by an old member of Parliament, who had had a wide experience
of the life of his mother country.
In workmen’s dwellings too, I noticed a difference in the questions
which were addressed to me in England to those which I was asked on
the Continent. General principles, of which the partial applications
will be determined by the principles themselves, deeply interest
the Latin workers. If this or that municipal council votes funds in
support of a strike, or organizes the feeding of the children at the
schools, no importance is attached to such steps. They are taken as
a matter of fact. ‘Of course, a hungry child cannot learn,’ a French
worker says. ‘It must be fed.’ ‘Of course, the employer was wrong
in forcing the workers to strike.’ This is all that is said, and no
praise is given on account of such minor concessions by the present
individualist society to communist principles. The thought of the
worker goes beyond the period of such concessions, and he asks whether
it is the Commune, or the unions of workers, or the State which ought
to undertake the organization of production; whether free agreement
alone will be sufficient to maintain Society in working order, and
what would be the moral restraint if Society parted with its present
repressive agencies; whether an elected democratic government would be
capable of accomplishing serious changes in the socialist direction,
and whether accomplished facts ought not to precede legislation? and
so on. In England, it was upon a series of palliative concessions,
gradually growing in importance, that the chief weight was laid.
But, on the other hand, the impossibility of state administration of
industries seemed to have been settled long ago in the workers’ minds,
and what chiefly interested most of them were matters of constructive
realization, as well as how to attain the conditions which would make
such a realization possible. ‘Well, Kropótkin, suppose that to-morrow
we were to take possession of the docks of our town. What’s your idea
about how to manage them?’ I would, for instance, be asked as soon as
we had sat down in a small workman’s parlour. Or, ‘We don’t like the
idea of state management of railways, and the present management by
private companies is organized robbery. But suppose the workers owned
all the railways. How could the working of them be organized?’ The lack
of general ideas was thus supplemented by a desire of going deeper into
the details of the realities.
Another feature of the movement in England was the considerable number
of middle-class people who gave it their support in different ways,
some of them frankly joining it, while others helped it from the
outside. In France or in Switzerland, the two parties--the workers and
the middle classes--not only stood arrayed against each other, but were
sharply separated. So it was, at least, in the years 1876-85. When I
was in Switzerland I could say that during my three or four years’ stay
in the country I was acquainted with none but workers--I hardly knew
more than a couple of middle-class men. In England this would have been
impossible. We found quite a number of middle-class men and women who
did not hesitate to appear openly, both in London and in the provinces,
as helpers in organizing socialist meetings, or in going about during
a strike with boxes to collect coppers in the parks. Besides, we saw a
movement, similar to what we had had in Russia in the early seventies,
when our youth rushed ‘to the people,’ though by no means so intense,
so full of self-sacrifice, and so utterly devoid of the idea of
‘charity.’ Here also, in England, a number of people went in all sorts
of capacities to live near to the workers: in the slums, in people’s
palaces, in Toynbee Hall, and the like. It must be said that there was
a great deal of enthusiasm at that time. Many probably thought that
a social revolution had commenced, like the hero of Morris’s comical
play, ‘Tables Turned,’ who says that the revolution is not simply
coming, but has already begun. As always happens however with such
enthusiasts, when they saw that in England, as everywhere, there was a
long, tedious, preparatory, uphill work that had to be done, very many
of them retired from active propaganda, and now stand outside of it as
mere sympathetic onlookers.