Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/35

12 Labour in a political sense, occurs. There were no Socialist meetings, no Socialist literature. The Guild of St. Matthew, founded in 1877 by the Rev. Stewart Headlam, the Rev. W.E. Moll, and a small group of earnest Church reformers, who avowed themselves Socialists and declared that Socialism and Christianity were one, may rightly claim to have sounded the note of the forthcoming Socialist movement, but it had a religious rather than a political basis.

Such was the state, or stage, of Socialist thought in this country when the Democratic Federation was formed in London in March 1881. The Federation was not itself an avowed Socialist body at the outset, though its chief promoters, H.M. Hyndman, Herbert Burrows, Miss Helen Taylor (stepdaughter of John Stuart Mill), and Dr. G.B. Clark, were Socialists. The most advanced item on its programme was the Nationalisation of the Land; and although Mr. Hyndman (who himself had just been converted to Socialism by reading Marx's 'Capital') at the opening meeting distributed a little booklet, 'England for All,' which was the first publication in this country that laid down the new 'scientific' doctrine of Socialism and called for political action for Socialism, it was not until nearly four years later, September 1884, that the Federation adopted a definitely Socialist basis and changed its name to that of the Social Democratic Federation.

By this time the Fabian Society had also come into being, emerging, early in 1884, from a group of social and ethical research enquirers, calling itself the Fellowship of the New Life. But the Fabian Society, though adopting political Socialist aims, was a middle-class group of controversialists, who sought to permeate existing political parties with Socialist ideas, rather than to create a new Socialist party.

Morris joined the Federation when as yet it was only 'becoming' a Socialist body, on January 17, 1883, exactly ten years, it may be noted, before the Socialist movement