Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/382

ÆT. 44] (M.P. for Morpeth and who is, or was, a working man) was chairman, and spoke excellently though shortly, with a strong Northumbrian tongue: he seemed a capital fellow. Meantime the Liberal party is blown to pieces, and everything is in confusion."

As summer passed over, the shadow of imminent war lifted: but in autumn Morris was once more eagerly at work on the Committee which, under the presidency of Lord Lawrence, strove unavailingly to prevent the Afghan campaign, which was accepted by the war-party in England as an equivalent for open hostilities with Russia. At the beginning of 1878, when the Russian troops had forced the Balkans, the crisis became acute again. "This is terrible news," he writes on the 5th of January, when war seemed all but certain. "I confess I am really astounded at the folly that can play with such tremendous tools in this way; and more and more I feel how entirely right the flattest democracy is." At a meeting held in Exeter Hall on the 16th to protest against the threatening attitude of the Government, Morris appeared for the first time as a writer of political verse. "Wake, London. Lads!" a stirring ballad written by him for the occasion, was distributed in the hall and sung with much enthusiasm. Here, as in the manifesto of the previous year, the appeal is to the "political working man," as Morris calls him in a letter describing this meeting, and is made in the name of the future and its hope. When the crisis in the East was finally past, it left Morris thoroughly in touch with the Radical leaders of the working class in London, and well acquainted with the social and economic ideas which, under the influence of widening education and of the international movement among the working classes, were beginning to transform their political creed from