Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/580

ÆT. 53] The attempt at peacemaking proved quite futile. Morris found the leader of the other faction "stiff and stately, playing the big man, and complaining of being ill-treated by us, which was a Wolf and Lamb business." Indeed most of the grievances, on whichever side the cause of offence first arose, seem now as they seemed to Morris then, "preposterously petty." At Dod Street—so the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation insisted, and made this the front of the offence—there had been a distinct breach of faith as regards the order of speeches on the 27th of September the year before. Angry words had passed at the time about this, and the Council of the Socialist League had passed a resolution expressing its "pity for Mr. Hyndman's tools." The insult was never forgotten. Since then each party had roundly accused the other of trying to break up its local branches by open abuse and underground insinuations. "How can we make common cause," they asked, "with people who are perpetually calling us all liars, rogues, intriguers?" For Morris personally indeed his opponents expressed unaltered regard. To accuse him of intrigue would have been plainly preposterous in the most heated adversary: and little as they took a lesson by it, the simple goodness of his nature impressed itself on even the most jealous, the vainest, the most vindictive of the men whom he longed to call his comrades, and for whose faults and vices, so long as he believed they had the root of the matter somewhere in them, he had a patience that was all but inexhaustible.

"Well, I think I have done with that lot," he writes when this last negotiation had broken down. "Why will people quarrel when they have a serious end in view? I went to Merton yesterday and worked