Christian Socialist
rr HE death of R. H. Tawney brings to mind what Shaw said of an earlier figure cast in the same mould, William Morris: 'You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.' Tawney's work, as economic historian, egalitarian Christian Socialist, and above all as a force for sanity, clarity, tolerance and reform, has made its influence felt, however indirectly, throughout our society. The Labour Party owes him a debt it can never repay, and shows pre- cious little sign of wanting to: almost the last of the great Fabians, his essentially pragmatic approach was always firmly based on his deep, passionate Socialist principles. The result was a man whose thought, and whose life, avoided the arid disputes which have helped bring the Labour Party to its present plight, and at the same time could never be reproached for shal- lowness or inconsistency. He worked to the end, without flagging and without losing heart, in the cause of scholarship and of social reform; and bath these causes in Britain today derive more from him than most of their practitioners (let alone beneficiaries) realise.
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