Chapter 5

The Peel Institute was a hotbed of political Liberalism of the Daily News variety. Membership of it converted me from Toryism to advanced Radicalism. This was early in 1904, when I was finding Huxley's lectures and essays of absorbing interest. His Romane’s address of 1893 on “Evolution and Ethics" were responsible for my development into a Socialist.

In this lecture, Huxley insisted that “the influence of the cosmic process on society is the greater, the more rudimentary its civilization." He spoke of social progress checking the cosmic process at every step, and substituting for it the ethical process. The influence of the latter was directed, not so much to the survival of the fittest, as the fitting of as many as possible to survive. It thus repudiated the gladiatorial theory of existence, and permitted Huxley to rebuke “the fanatical individualism of our time" for attempting “to apply the analogy of cosmic nature to society." “Social life, and the ethical process in virtue of which it advance" towards perfection, Huxley defines as being, strictly speaking, “part and parcel of the general process of evolution." Readers of Kropotkin will see in this a support of the latters view of “mutual aid” as “a factor in evolution." It must be remembered, however, that Huxley's “ethical process" is developed, by its author, into a plea for sentimentalism and loyalty to interests of an abstraction termed “the community." I believe in the community—in a different social order, but can see only two classes to-day. Huxley sees no classes, only a “community." And Kropotkin's “mutual aid" tends to create faith m the same paralyzing and fatal abstraction.

All this was not clear to me at the time. I never considered that Huxley, who has pleaded powerfully the grandeur of the Anarchist ideal, was here preaching up a morality, a law, and an order which tended to negate all rebel effort. But I became emancipated from neo-Darwinian fears. Capitalism and the struggle for existence were not the last words in social-evolution. Equity, mutual aid, freedom, justice, etc., did represent realizable ideals. Socialism was the inevitable goal of all social development. This vision of the coming social harmony, this conviction that the new era would dawn, filled me with new energy. I must leave the capitalist parties and enter the real movement, that of Socialism and working-class emancipation. So I turned my back on compromise and radicalism, on liberal-laborism and pure-and-simple secularism, and joined the Social Democratic Federation.

That was in March, 1905. My membership of this organization was a very stormy one, and only lasted down to October, 1906. By this date I was convinced that social democracy was a very poor affair.

In May, 1906, I fell foul of the Labor Party for its inaction in Parliament. The shallowness of its independence was disgusting in the extreme, and it was every bit as much the tail of the Liberal Party as the old—time Liberal-Labor Group had been. The Labor Party's deliberations in Parliament was marked by the same waste of time as that which characterized the Liberal and Conservative Parties’ confabs. Utility was constantly subordinated to the ostentatious ornamentalism which is considered proper in Parliamentary circles. And a most rigid nominal outward conformity to traditions Labor M.P.’s should have been inwardly opposed to, was preserved. All in the name of opportunism—and not, I fear, without some view to office. Under these circumstances I plumped for Socialist propaganda only as the workers’ hope. It was necessary to spread the education that made for class-consciousness. Parliament had ceased to interest me. But I was “non," not “anti." Some would have defined me as not being “a ballot-box maniac," meaning- thereby that I had not entirely discarded belief in the ballot-box. But I had ceased to believe in palliatives and clung firmly to impossiblism.

This brought me into conflict with the party on the religious question. Socialism involved Atheism since it was a philosophy of life. It was founded on a materialism which explained all abstract ideas and all institutions in the terms of Mother Earth. To embrace its teachings was to war against every myth from God to the “captain of industry.” Certainly it told of a universe of natural law, conditioned by the principles of its own existence, and ruled by no capricious deity whose will was altered by the whim of man. Belfort Bax publicly and privately applauded this stand. But the party officially declared against my “atheistic bigotry," and practically avowed its conviction that Socialism was but a reformist legislation. Political opportunism suggested that it was secular and mundane, not atheistic and anti-religious. Such revisionism—both political and philosophical—as this and other official statements of policy pointed to, dissatisfied me. So I left the party, having derived much useful instruction from the publications of the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. I had no wish to capture the Socialist platform for Atheist propaganda, but I did not intend to be crippled in my exposition of Socialism. How could one offer it as a substitute for present-day society, without opposing its every principle to all the institutions of capitalism? Besides, if Socialism had no room for God, it had as little space for the Freethinkers' abstract “reason." Here was Socialism clear-cut philosophy of materialism—representing the revolt of mother earth against the sky—the social and economic maturity of man as a social animal-being negated for votes by persons who mouthed working-class watchwords today only to eulogize the deeds of capitalist cabinets tomorrow. Here were the essentials of revolutionary propaganda being denied and twisted in order to secure middle-class smiles and smirks for men claiming to be Socialists! But not really revolutionary, not too extreme, not so strictly logical as to be above bribery, you know! Pour God! He is the believed of every public and private corruptionist.