THE COMMON ENEMY 89 88 THE CLASS STRUGGLE order in it, where man rules over commodities instead of commodities over man. But here was Disraeli Beaconsfield the great leader of the Conservative Party, who was not satisfied with merely plodding along trying to conserve the present, but who had great visions of resuscitating the past glories of the English nobility. man of insight and imagination; a man who could see the two nations struggling within every capitalist nation, and who had visions of a future in which there would he no such strife. What mattered it that he was a representative of the Past, both in his practical politics as well as in his outlook upon the future? Could not the Past and the Future join hands in a fight against the Present?
Had not the English nobility shown themselves willing to come to the assistance of the factory workers and to ameliorate their condition against the strenuous opposition of the votaries of the buy cheap and sell dear philosophy? Wasn Lord Ashleywhom, by the way, both Carlyle and Kingsley venerated. the great progenitor of Factory Legislation in England, even as the Duke of Kent was an adherent of Robert Owen communistic teachings?
Hyndman quixotic mission to Lord Beaconsfield in 1881 or rather the frame of mind which brought it about bore practical fruit a few years later in what has become known in the history of Socialism in England as the Tory Gold incident.
In 1885 the Social Democratic Federation entered the electoral campaign under Hyndman leadership, running two candidates in London, the campaign expenses being paid largely, if not principally, by the Conservative Party. The action of the in accepting Tory Gold was strongly condemned at the time by other Socialist organizations, the Fabian Society adopting a resolution declaring. That the conduct of the Council of the Social Democratic Federation in accepting money from the Tory Party in payment of election expenses of Socialist candidates is calculated to disgrace the Socialist movement in England.
This incident throws a flood of light on the question here under consideration. The Fabian Society was shocked at the acceptance of Tory money, but would probably have had no objection whatever to Liberal money, because it considered the Tory Party, the remnants of Feudalism in England, as the enemy, against whom it was quite proper to make common cause with bourgeois Liberalism. Hyndman affected indifference between Conservatives and Liberals, but in practice he would no more have thought of allying himself with the Liberals than he would have thought of applying to Mr. Gladstone with his schemes for the social reconstruction of the world. Because to him capitalist Liberalism was the enemy to be fought, and to be fought by all means possible and in whatsoever company. Neither the Fabian Society nor Hyndman had as yet risen to an understanding of real independent political action by the working class.
II.
The great World War has again brought to the surface the contending forces, struggling for solution of the great problem of the common enemy and the proper working class tactics dictated by it, which were lying dormant for a while within the bosom of the Labor Movement.
When the war broke out the Movement divided on the explanation of the war as a social phenomenon and the causes which have brought it about. One section of the Movement held to the view that the present war was nothing but a family quarrel between two contending groups of the same class the capitalist class while another section was of the opinion that it was at bottom a struggle between two classes Feudalism and Capitalism for the mastery of the world. The last view was strongly upheld in this country by Joshua Wanhope in a remarkable article published shortly after the beginning of the war in the New York Call. To the upholders of this view the question of the common enemy at once became acute. If this war was a classwar the two contending groups of Powers representing different classes and, therefore, different systems of social orderwhat was the working class to do? Should it be indifferent?
Could it be indifferent? Should it take sides. If so, which was the proper side for it to take?
Compassless and rudderless in the navigation of the turbulent