Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/543

134 Morris generously acquitted his old colleague of all blame for the rupture. But the reconciliation could not reunite a broken party, and the history of English Socialism in the nineteenth century was then already a closed record.

The affair dragged on for several months more. The mere idea of breaking up the party did not distress Morris deeply: "half-a-dozen people," he says, "who agree and are friends, that is, can trust each other, are worth a hundred jealous squabblers." But he was heartily annoyed and, to say the truth, frightened at the prominence into which he found himself being pushed by his faction. He had placed himself at their orders, in the indistinct hope that he might elude responsibility by simply doing loyally what he was told: now to his dismay he found himself called upon to become a leader, and responsible not only for his own action, but for the continued existence of his party.

What brought the quarrel to a point was a jealousy so trivial that it can hardly now move anything beyond a faint smile. A small knot of Socialists in Edinburgh (the same to which two further recruits were added by Morris's visit and address that autumn) had been organized into a society by Mr. Scheu, whose business had taken him there during the summer. To give it a more imposing air, and also to conciliate the national susceptibility, it was not made a branch of the English Democratic Federation, but was started as a separate organization under the name of the Scottish Land and Labour League. The fat was in the fire at once. Mr. Hyndman called for the instant dissolution of the newly-founded league in the name of the Federation One and Indivisible. "Discord has arisen in this Council," ran the reply of his opponents, "owing to