Note 647 — Chapter IX · (continued 2)

The fervent energy of the typical official of the Labour Union of that day was well described in 1894 in the following sketch by Mrs. Bruce Glasier (Katherine Conway), a member of the “Independent Labour Party.” “He has his offices, but is generally conspicuous there from his absence. Walter Crane’s ‘Triumph of Labour’ hangs on the wall, and copies of The Fabian Essays, and the greater proportion of the tracts issued by the Manchester or Glasgow Labour Presses, lie scattered over the room. In England, Byron and Shelley, in Scotland, Byron and Burns, are the approved poets. Carlyle and a borrowed Ruskin or two are also in evidence, and a library edition of Thorold Rogers’ Work and Wages. John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy, side by side with a Student’s Marx, give proof of a laudable determination to go to the roots of the matter, and to base all arguments on close and careful study. But the call to action is never-ceasing, and train-travelling, if conducive to the enormous success of new journalism, affords but little opportunity for serious reading. ‘The daily newspapers are continually filled with lies, which one ought to know how to refute,’ and the situation all over the globe ‘may develop at any moment.’

“Yet, unlike the old Unionist leader, he is ever ready for the interviewer or the sympathetic inquirer, of whatever class or sex. Right racily he will describe the rapid growth of the movement since the great dock strike of 1889, and show the necessity in dealing with such mixed masses of men as fill the ranks of unskilled labour to-day, of continually striking while the iron is hot, and of substituting a policy of coup d’état for the deliberate preparation of the older Unions. ‘Lose here, win there,’ is our only motto, he says, resolutely determined to look at defeat from the point of view of a general-in-chief, and not from the narrower range of an officer in charge of a special division. At the moment of surrender he may have been white to the lips, but the next day will find him cheery and undaunted in another part of the country, carrying on his campaign and enrolling hundreds of recruits by the sheer energy of his confident eloquence.” (Weekly Sun, January 28, 1894.)