Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/678

652 The influence of these ideas on the trade-union movement in Great Britain and Ireland has been very pronounced, though they have taken a different direction, modified by the traditional, conservative instinct of the British working-class. In Great Britain the real cause of the permeation of certain unions by syndicalist ideas was the absorption of trade-union leaders in administration or in politics, which caused them to lose touch with the rank and file. Especially is this the case with regard to the miners, the railwaymen's unions and the engineers.

Daniel de Leon was leader of the Socialist Labour party in the United States from 1880 onwards, and his writings influenced British socialist thought, particularly in the Clyde and in the mining valleys of S. Wales. Though not a syndicalist in the strict sense, he advocated organization by industry and the general strike. It is significant that 1903 saw in England the secession of the Socialist Labour party from the Social Demo- cratic Federation. After that date, in addition to the growing educational influence of the Independent Labour party (though this was never syndicalist), was seen the promotion of the Work- ers' Socialist Federation, the British Socialist party (in the post- war period) and the Communist League, all of which advocated practically the same structure of organization and policy. They all agreed in a lack of faith in political action, though not always refusing to utilize it, but their real politik was industrial action. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, they secured greater promi- nence; they became the stormy petrels of the labour world in Great Britain, and their effect on the political action of the Labour party was seen in the Council of Action in Aug. 1920.

In England, between 1900 and 1910, there was a growing dissatisfaction among the rank and file with political action, despite the fact that the influence of the Labour party in the House of Commons secured the trade-union movement freedom of industrial and political action by the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 and the Trade Union Act of 1913 to a greater degree than ever before, it was felt by the far-sighted among the rank and file that a speeding up was necessary, and State collectivism as a way out towards industrial democracy was discredited. James Connolly, the Irish Labour leader who was executed after the Easter rising in Ireland in 1916, started a similar organization to that of Daniel de Leon on the Clyde in 1905. In his pamphlet Socialism made Easy he enunciated the syndicalist principles " that they who rule industrially will rule politically," and that " the functions of Industrial Unionism is to build up an industrial republic inside the shell of the political slate, in order that when the industrial republic is fully organized it may crack the shell of the political slate and step into its place in the scheme of the uni- verse." Tom Mann, while in France and Australia, which had im- ported the ideas of the I.W.W. from America, was also powerfully influenced by the same theories, while on the Rand, in S. Africa, a small but very influential group of leaders was working out the structure, forms and policy of a movement similarin character. In 1910 Tom Mann preached the new faith in all the big industrial centres and rapidly won many followers. Workmen had refused to follow their orthodox leaders from about 1008, as they felt that the trade union of the old Liberal-Labour school was behind the times. The Plebs League was founded by a group of labour students in Ruskin College, Oxford, about the same time, and in 1909 these seceded from Ruskin College and founded first a labour college in Oxford and then moved to London as the Central Labour College, financed by the S. Wales miners and the railwaymen. This educational movement organized classes in every .mining area in S. Wales, led by tutors from these two colleges, and influenced largely by the new ideas. A similar movement took place on the Clyde, in the great ship- building centres like Barrow, Birkenhead, and Pembroke Dock, and also in inland engineering centres like Coventry and Shef- field. Then followed the railway strike of 1911 and the great coal strike of 1912. It is quite clear that the National Union of Railwaymen and the Miners' Federation of Great Britain became organized as two of the most powerful unions in consequence of the new thought, not because their leaders had adopted syndicalism in the form taught by de Leon and the French group of thinkers, but because they adapted it in the peculiar British way; they made it practical and definite; they shaped it in alliance with the political and trade-union structure of Britain. They disagreed with the syndicalist view of the State, but they recog- nized the driving power of the theories that stated " that political power is a reflex of industrial power." The transport workers soon had a similar federation, and after the strikes of 1911 and 1912, and the Irish transport workers' strike of 1913, the Triple Alliance (of railwaymen, transport workers, and miners) was formed in 1915. The failure of this last to function during the miners' strike in the spring of 1921 discredited " direct action," and the British labour movement swung back towards constitu- tional and parliamentary methods.

See J. A. Estey, Revolutionary Syndicalism (1913); L. Levine, Syndicalism in France (and ed. 1914) ; G. D. H. Cole, Self-Govern- ment in Industry (3rd ed. 1918), The World of Labour (1919), Labour in the Commonwealth (1919), Introduction to Trade Unionism (1918); S. and B. Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1920) ; H. Lagardelle, Le socialisme ouvrier (1911); J. R. Macdonald, Syndicalism (1912); John Sparfjo, Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism (1920) ; Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction (6th ed. 1920); Arthur Gleason, What the Workers Want (1920); The Industrial Council for the Building, Industry 1919 (Garton Foundation) ; G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Re-stated (1920) ; J. Graham Brooke, American Syndicalism (1913); P. F. Brissenden, The I. W. W. (1919); James Connolly, Socialism made Easy (1905); N. Ablett, The Miners' next Step (1912); A Plan for the Democratic Control of the Mining Indus- try (South Wales Socialist Society, 1919); J. T. Murphy, The Workers' Committee (1918). (S. H.; J. M. R.)

SYNGE, JOHN MILLINGTON (1871-1909), Irish dramatic author, came of an Anglo-Irish family, which had contributed several bishops to the Irish church. He was born near Dublin April 16 1871. A delicate child, he was left much to himself, and as a youthful member of the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club took long rambles over the Dublin and Wicklow hills. At Trinity College, where he graduated in 1892, he obtained prizes in Irish and Hebrew, and he knew something of several modern languages. At this period his chief interest was in music and he gained a scholarship in counterpoint and harmony in the Royal Irish Academy of Music. A sonnet, moreover, contributed to Kottabos, shows not a little of the accomplishment of verse, as well as his innate passion for primitive things. During the next few years (1893-8), Synge travelled in Germany, Austria, Italy, finally making Paris his headquarters. He managed to spend a third of the year in Paris, a third in the W. of Ireland, and a third in London or Dublin. W. B. Yeats found him in Paris (1898) preoccupied with theories of language and literature, and advised him to return to Ireland. He went to the Aran Is., where he shared the life of the islanders, and he gave an account of it in a series of sketches afterwards collected in the volume, The Aran Islands (1907). In these and other sketches of the same period he had not quite shaken off the obsession of "stylism," and still had a wish " to do for the W. of Ireland what Pierre Loti had done for the Bretons." Gradually, however, Ireland got hold of him, and, turning to the dramatization of incidents in the life he now knew intimately, he began to elaborate, partly from his note-books and partly from the writings of Lady Gregory and Dr. Douglas Hyde, that richly imaginative though largely artificial dialect of Anglo-Irish which he carried to its furthest capacities. The Abbey theatre was opened towards the close of 1904, with Synge as one of the directors. He had already produced two one-act plays, In the Shadow of the Glen and Riders to the Sea (1903), of which the first had acquired some notoriety for the author as an affront to Irish morals; he had also written a farcical play, The Tinker's Wedding, which proved a failure when acted (1909) after his death. The beautiful three-act play, The Well of the Saints, produced before a few dozen people in the early months of the Abbey (1905), was regarded as a new affront; and in Jan. 1907, rumour having got about of its subject matter, the performance of The Playboy of the Western World was interrupted by an organized disturbance which continued night after night for a week. This affair, when the merits of the play came to be known, made the fame of the Abbey theatre. Synge's health was now shattered, and with