The Fabian Election Manifesto.

1892.

In a few weeks-perhaps in a few days-from the publication of this Manifesto, there will be a General Election, the result of which will depend on the votes of the Working Classes; and yet the Working Classes will have no political party of their own to vote for. They will be invited to choose between the Conservatives, led by Lord Salisbury, and the Liberals, led by Mr. Gladstone.

What the Conservatives have done.

The Conservative party is avowedly the party of privilege and monopoly. It has been in power for the last six years; and during that period it has suppressed popular rights in Ireland, and attacked them in England, using the armed forces at its disposal against the rights of Free Speech and Public Meeting as willingly in Trafalgar Square as at Mitchelstown, whenever the interests of the landlords were at stake. In the numerous disputes between Capital and Labor during its period of office, it has sanctioned State interference only when the blackleg needed protection against the Trade Unionist. Although the administration of the criminal law has been biassed against the poor to a scandalous degree, the Government has only interfered to show extra favor to the rich. The infamous Game Laws have been mercilessly enforced; Labor leaders of unimpeachable personal character have been charged with intimidation and imprisoned; several working men and two working women have been arrested for exercising the right of Free Speech in London; no redress has been given in cases where the Government, in spite of the most vindictive efforts to blacken the characters of its victims, has been compelled by public indignation to beat a retreat; and ferocious sentences of penal servitude have been dealt out to poor offenders for trifling thefts, whilst rich criminals, convicted of robbery and manslaughter committed under circumstances which placed them beyond all excuse, have been treated with conspicuous humanity. All attempts to deal with the Land Question have had for their object the strengthening of the land monopoly by the creation of a host of petty landlords; there has been no extension of the Franchise or alteration of those Registration clauses which deprive one-third of our workers of the votes to which they are entitled under the Reform Act of 1884; the Local Government Act was drawn so as to prevent the agricultural laborers from exercising any real control over the County Councils; the County Franchise was withheld from the lodgers, who have voted in parliamentary elections since 1867 ;

the County Council of London, the capital city of England and the world, was denied an ordinary municipal borough's powers of local self-government, lest the monopoly of the ground landlords, which costs the Working Classes £16,000,000 a year, should be interfered with; and the privileges of the Church and the House of Lords, the Septennial Act, the denial of payment to Members of Parliament, which, with the system of throwing all election expenses on the private means of candidates, excludes poor men from the House of Commons, have all been maintained by the Government. Clearly a party of which this can be said, is no friend to the Working Classes.

What the Liberals have done.

But when we turn to the Liberals, we find that though they have had the great advantage of being in opposition, and therefore of being able to proclaim much more advanced Radical views than they would have ventured upon when in office and liable to be called upon to make good their words by legislation, they have repeatedly shewn themselves to be at bottom no more on the side of the Working Classes than their opponents. They have made the most desperate efforts to stifle English questions by an agitation about Irish grievances, the insincerity of which was sufficiently proved by the fact that when the Government tried its Mitchelstown tactics at Trafalgar Square in 1887, the Liberal party practically abandoned the London working men to their fate, and Mr. Gladstone actually complimented "our excellent police." In the slums of English towns in 1886, distress was as acute, and evictions for non-payment of rent as frequent and as cruel as in Ireland; but the official Liberals persistently ignored the condition of the English workers, from whose labor their own rents and dividends were drawn, and clamored solely about the exactions of Lord Clanricarde, who was doing no more in Ireland than landlords do in England with the full support of the Liberal party. The opposition of the Liberals to the Irish Land Purchase scheme was purely factious, since, far from wishing to prevent the land from slipping away from the Irish nation into the hands of the farmers, they had actually tried to pass a similar Land Purchase Bill themselves during their last term of office. When at last the vigorous agitation of the Socialists and Radicals forced them to add some Working Class measures to their program (which was, in 1887, actually less advanced than the Conservative program),* they refused to adopt the vitally important measure of Payment of Members, and then, when they were again forced forward, prevaricated grossly on the subject by declaring that they "recognized the principle" of such payment. Under the pretext of remedying the grievances of London leaseholders, they supported the Leaseholds Enfranchisement Bill, a fraudulent measure which would not have benefited any leaseholder with a shorter tenure than twenty years, and the result of which would be to turn the richer leaseholders into • See Fabian Tract, No. 11, "The Workers' Political Programme."

ground landlords, and so strengthen the voting power which supports the odious monopoly of land in London. Of late, in spite of the approach of the General Election, the Liberals have fallen so far out of touch with the Working Class that they have gone from bad to worse in the House of Commons. Their servility to Mr. Gladstone, whose opinions on every other question than that of Home Rule are those of an exceptionally prejudiced Tory, is probably more affected than real, and is only due to the fact that his personal popularity is the sole asset in their political bankruptcy. But their recent failure to rally as a party against the Septennial Act, when Sir W. Foster's Resolution offered them the opportunity, or in favor of Payment of Members on Mr. Fenwick's motion; above all, their treacherous desertion, at Mr. Gladstone's bidding, of the station master who was dismissed by the directors of the North Cambrian Railway for giving evidence before the Labor Commission : these public acts must have convinced every politically active working man who is not a mere fanatical Gladstonian, that the Liberals who are now begging for his vote are no more representatives of the Labor interest than the Conservatives who are bidding against them.

The Conspiracy of Hypocrisy.

In both parties alike, the conspiracy of silence on the fundamental question of how to alter our outrageously unjust system of distributing the wealth of the country, has remained unbroken. During the present Government's term of office, there have been constant complaints as to the extravagance of public expenditure. We have had clamour in the name of the ratepayers against spending the paltriest sums on pianofortes for Board Schools, and in the name of the taxpayers against every new ironclad. Meanwhile, nearly three thousand million pounds sterling have been wasted on the propertied classes in rent and in that particular form of interest which costs its recipient no more labor than the cashing of a dividend warrant or the cutting off of a coupon. Out of this legalized plunder probably a thousand millions has been capitalized by the "abstinence" of the plunderers so as to increase the tax on future labor: the rest has been squandered in the endowment of idleness. Yet both Liberals and Conservatives agree that whatever other expenditure we can retrench in or dispense with, this endowment must be left untouched. They are willing to economise in the army, the navy, the schools, the housing of the poor, sanitation, smoke prevention, river embankments, harbors, in anything and everything that is of national importance, sooner than touch one penny of the unearned incomes of the idle rich, or even take the simplest step to forestall their increase. Every budget is drawn up on the principle that all devices for screwing the revenue out of the poor must be exhausted before the idle rich are touched. The country postman has to walk excessive distances for miserable wages in order that the profit on the Post Office may be filched from the employees and from the public by the Chancellor of the Exchequer

in order to keep down the Income Tax; and with the same object taxes on the food of the people are maintained in defiance of every sound canon of political economy and common sense. Ministers are ready to moralize on every subject but this authorised spoliation of the industrious by the idle; to point out every social evil except this root of all the social evils; to insist on every reform except its reform. Whenever they allude to it, they imply that it does not exist; that the class which lives on rent and dividends, and spends them in the manner revealed by the Tranby Croft gambling case, is an industrious and deserving class; that the poor are poor because of their improvidence and vice; and that all assertions to the contrary are direct incitements to Anarchy. During the recent trial of Ravachol in Paris, the Press advertised the exploits and spread the arguments of the assassin and dynamiter throughout Europe without an attempt to controvert them, because it would have been impossible to do so without calling attention to the social injustices which he made the excuse for his crimes.

The Policy of the Working Class.

Yet throughout this huge conspiracy of Silence, or rather of Hypocrisy, it is perfectly well known on both sides that the Working Classes have only one possible program, which may be summed up as the Disestablishment and Disendowment of Idleness. They have left Utopian Socialism and Sentimental Republicanism far behind them; and though the belated literary-man-turned-politician of the middle class imagines that the Labor agitator is still a dreamer of dreams, the agitators and their audiences have never been more out of patience with both dreams and party shibboleths than at present. Their objects and methods are plain to all except those who have not the wit, or perhaps the will, to see them. They intend to bring the representative governing bodies, local as well as parliamentary, under genuine popular control by Payment of all Members and Election Expenses, Second Ballot, and more frequent elections. The powers thus obtained will be used to relieve the land and industry of the country from the control of idlers by gradually transferring it to local governing bodies under all the usual forms of sale-andpurchase or compensation, the final act of expropriation at each step being the raising of the purchase money or compensation by deliberate taxation of those unearned incomes which at present amount, as the Income Tax returns shew, to the monstrous sum of Five Hundred Million pounds sterling a year. This program of Municipal Socialism and Radical Finance is the only one upon which a Labor Party can be organized; and the common pretence that the friends of Labor are not Socialists, and that their financial schemes go no further than the old Whig cry for the conversion of indirect into direct taxation, is only part of the Conspiracy of Hypocrisy. If the Working Classes spend much less time than they used to in attacking the open venality of the Established Church, or the detested hereditary privileges of the House of Lords and the Crown,

it is because they have learned from the experience of the United States, where these abuses do not exist, that the true masters of a nation are not the Kings, Peers, and Bishops, but those who own its land and capital and control its industrial organization. The battle is now pitched between the present owners and the workers, who are bent on wresting their privileges from them. How, then, can the Working Classes be represented by a House of Commons consisting of men who could not afford to sit there if they were not landlords, capitalists, or, at best, professional men depending for their means and position on the patronage of landlords and capitalists? Naturally, the moment a Bill or Resolution in Parliament raises the vital issue of Property versus Labor, the members rally overwhelmingly in defence of Property, whether they are Conservatives, Tory Democrats, Whigs, "New Liberals," or Philosophic Radicals. When the workers asked, a few months ago, that a little more of the wealth of London should be spent on the Board Schools and a little less on the ground landlords, Mr. Labouchere the Republican rushed at once to the side of the Duke of Westminster; and Mr. Balfour has no stauncher ally than Mr. John Morley in his opposition to the enforcement by the State of an eight hours limit to the working day.

The Tyranny of our Party System.

Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that we hear from all quarters a demand for a new party devoted singly to the interests of Labor. Unfortunately, the difficulties which hamper the beginnings of a third political party in England can only be appreciated by those who have learnt them from practical electioneering experience. By our method of deciding parliamentary elections, the seat is given to the candidate who obtains the highest number of votes at the first ballot, although double as many may be divided among his competitors; so that the majority in the House of Commons may easily represent a minority of the nation. It therefore becomes of the utmost consequence to the majority in any constituency that its vote should not be "split": that is, divided between two or more rival candidates on the same side. Consequently, if a third candidate comes forward in a one-member constituency he is at once accused of a treacherous design to split the vote in the interests of the party which he professes to oppose; and he is boycotted at the polls by all who are sufficiently experienced and disciplined in politics to understand that nothing but a solid party vote can win a closely contested election. This state of things, whilst it is fatal to Independent candidates, suits the two established political parties so well that they both, when in office, ignore the demand of the advanced sections for the introduction of the Continental system of Second Ballot, which secures the final victory at the polls to the majority, whether the vote has been split at the first ballot or not. Pending the introduction of this reform, the tyranny of our party system is complete. This was strikingly shewn at the recent elections for the London County Council, where the