MR. HYNDMAN'S FURTHER REMINISCENCES.* Is the reminiscences which he published

a year ago Mr. Hyndman proved that he had the genuine faculty of the anecdotist. He can take the barest incident—something perhaps by no means worth mentioning in itself—and by putting it in relation to human character or significant circumstances can furbish it up into something, if not always of value, at least (which is as good from the point of view of the anecdotist) into something of interest. The book is good reading from beginning to end, though the substance is thinner on the whole than in the first volume.

Whether Mr. Hyndman's friends will like all that he says about them with exceptional frankness we cannot undertake to say, but we may hope that those who are Socialists think it only natural that their characters and idiosyncrasies should be made common property. Perhaps the titles "comrade" and

"brother" are understood safely to cover some licence.

Mr. Hyndman confesses humorously to some imprudence, and we learn that Mrs. Hyndman on occasion put on the brake when he was running too free—thus imprudently to mix our metaphors—by kicking him under the table. If we knew whether Mrs. Hyndman had read the proofs of this book we should be nearer to an estimate of how much latitude she allows her husband. When Mr. Hyndman was seventy years old last March his friends gave him a dinner, and it was a proof of the English liking for this custom, and of the English respect for the "allotted span" as well as for single-mindedness and human courage in whatsoever form it may appear, that many people who had no political sympathy with Mr. Hyndman then hastened to convey to him their felicitations.

It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Hyndman is of the straitest sect of the Marxiane. He and his comrades of the Social Democratic Federation and the red flag no doubt dislike

a Tory, but their dislike for him is almost affection compared with their antipathy to a good old crusted bourgeois Liberal

and to a Socialist who is not of the right brand, like Mr.

Ramsay MacDonald. As for the Fabians, we fancy that only the intellectual reputation of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr.

Sidney Webb prevents Mr. Hyndman from making guys of them. And as for a Socialist redeemed, like Mr. John Burns—but here words fail us, as they have evidently failed Mr. Hyndman.

We have often asserted that Liberals do an immense injustice to the English agricultural labourer when they pretend that he has no will or conscience of his own, but

votes in a servile manner at the instruction of a tyrannical landlord. It is one of the virtues of Mr. Hyndman's book that it deals indifferent justice to the prejudices of both the great political parties. Thus Mr. Hyndman relates bow Mrs. Hyndman, canvassing in his interest, tackled an agricultural labourer :— "She held forth to him upon his miserable wages, his tumble- down and cramped cottage, his lack of opportunities of enjoyment,

• Further Itsminiseences. By Henry Mayers Hyndman. London : Macmillan and Co, [Ms. net.]

the manner in which the common land hard by had been filched from him, the shamef4.1 fact that he could not get a nice bit of garden ..round at anything at all within hail of the yearly rent paid by the farmers for their acres, the way in which all the old perquisites and easements had been taken away, the long winter in which, now that thrashing was performed by machinery and there was little arable land around, there was little to do and therefore little to get. The man listened attentively and seemed to agree with her, so my wife felt encouraged. . . . There he sat listening stolidly, with the land about him, which I myself remembered as well-tilled and prosperous, going steadily out of cultivation, and the active village of the last century becoming a deserted Sleepy Hollow of to-day. When my wife had quite finished—and it took a long time to put all this after a fashion to be understanded of the Sussex mind—he took his clay pipe slowly out of his mouth, and spat and spoke. Thank you, marm. You thinks so ! I thinks otherwise."

Possibly this agricultural labourer had heard that in many districts the once derelict land is coming steadily under cultivation again, and that a reasonably stable prosperity has reared itself on the cheap raw materials of the farming industry which Free Trade provides. As regards fiscal matters, Mr. Hyndman is equally scornful of the "complete failure" of Mr. Chamberlain and the " sophisms " of Cobden and Bright. Of course, he thinks the Reform Club even more reactionary than the Carlton, though he has, or had, a high opinion of the Reform Club cook. On one occasion he ordered a dinner for some friends at the Reform who could not trust their own taste, and the cook was obviously impressed by Mr. Hyndman's experience and discrimination in good feeding. Mr. Hyndman is not unconscious that his ability in this respect may seem unsocialistic, and so be explains that if he forswore good dinners his asceticism would make no difference at all to the miserable inequalities of life. Only Socialism could do that. We are reminded of another distinguished Socialist who, when reproached with extravagance because he generally takes a box at the theatre, says, " Ah, but we must level up !" It is a beautiful vision of the Socialistic state when every theatre-goer will sit in a box. We suppose, incidentally, that the practice of " charity " could be almost measured according to men's belief in the efficacy of State intervention. If the truth were known, it would probably be found that Socialists give less to, say, hospitals, in proportion to their wealth, than any body of politicians. They feel that they have discharged their personal debt to their countrymen in presenting them with a panacea. The old-fashioned indi- vidualist who does not believe in panaceas is quicker to adjust the debt by putting his hand in his pocket.

Of Mr. Lloyd George's Budget of 1909 Mr. Hyndman. says, "I regarded the Budget as about the biggest fraud, and its author as the most unscrupulous and treacherous political adventurer that had been seen in our time." Mr. Hyndman has also a profound contempt for the Insurance Act and the land-tax campaign. He says of the former :— " People are apt to forget that the German Insurance Act, from which the Act of Mr. Lloyd George and the Liberal Government is to all intents and purposes literally translated, was brought in and carried by Prince Bismarck with the avowed object of defeat- ing the projects of the German Social-Democrats, and of keeping the German workers carefully regimented under Government and police control. I do not deny that the Act embraces certain advantageous arrangements for the people. But for this it could not have been forced even through the subservient Reichstag of Bismarck's day. Its main object was, however, that which I state. I discussed the whole of its provisions, both before and after it1 enactment in Germany, here in London with my old friend, Dr. Rudolph Meyer, Bismarck's ablest private secretary. We both agreed that, although Social-Democracy had advanced too far in the Fatherland to be headed back by all the compulsion and deduction from wages and police control involved in the admini- stration of the measure, it might for a time, by the additional power it placed in the hands of an unscrupulous Government and unscrupulous employers, lessen the rate of Social-Democratic pro- gress. The whole measure, I repeat, was avowedly introduced and passed by Prince Bismarck, not simply to benefit the people, as has been alleged, but by its contributory clauses, compelling the workers to pay their quota out of wages, and by the additional power it gave to the bureaucracy, in order to keep the entire German working class permanently under Government and capitalist control. It was State Socialism' of the very worst and most tyrannical type, applied in part to social advantage. There is not, and there never has been, any dispute about this, and Liberals themselves were among the most bitter critics of the entire Bismarckian measure at the time. No wonder."

Of the latest land-tax agitation he says :— " I crew of wealthy Radical resurrectionists have disinterred Henry George's Single Tax nostrum, which I confess I thought had been buried for good and all thirty years ago. But no, the 'capi- talists' last ditch,' as Marx called it, has not been filled up Nally with the remains of this bootless burden-shifting panacea for all economic ills. Baron de Forest, Joseph Fels, Josiah Wedgwood, Hemmerde, Outhwaite and Co. are hard at the galvanization of their exhumed mummy, and George the Second is waiting close by to see whether their charlatanry can imitate vitality to a sufficient extent to capture the votes of the people and justify his appearance on the stage as the true mantle-bearer of the well- meaning but ignorant prophet of the San Francisco Sand Lots."

Mr. Hyndman, who writes indignantly of the deference paid by Labour members of Parliament to Liberal plutocrats, becomes himself almost deferential when he describes the personality and capabilities of Lady Warwick, who has turned Socialist. The memory of a visit to Lady Warwick at Easton Lodge prompts him to write as follows :—

"There is no doubt about the lineage and descent of the Maynards, I believe, and their quarterings are all right. Race goes for something, and, personally, I much prefer the long-drawn inheritance of landowning expropriation and its representatives to the architects of their own fortunes and self-made men at large, whose genealogy is as short as their purses are long. I should like to inhabit a planet free from both capitalists and landlords. Expropriated landowners, however, should always be sure, if I had my way, of a supper and shakedown in Venus or Mars. We speak as we find."

It is agreeable, at all events, to get this word for the landowner from an unexpected quarter.