Henry Mayers Hyndman

“ Social Democrats of all countries will gladly welcome the establishment in the United States of an International Socialist Review specially designed to keep up an intellectual intercourse between the revolutionary Socialists of the new world and the old. I say "revolutionary Socialists" deliberately, because, although I understand the new periodical is to open its pages to all schools of Socialist thought, it is quite certain that they, in America as elsewhere, must eventually control the whole. The hatred and fear of the word revolution is always to me the evidence of a weak mind. ”

“ In the same way, therefore, that it is of the greatest importance to English Social-Democrats to know so far as it can be known, the truth about the industrial and social development of the United States, it is of no less significance to Americans to have correct information in regard to what is occurring here. Attempts to make out that either society is more advanced towards the next great stage in human evolution than it really is can only do harm and tend to arrest intelligent progress. ”

“ When to all this we add the testimony of the certifying surgeons in our manufacturing centres that the children exhibit less and less vigor and we know from middle-class statistics that a very large proportion of those who attend the Board Schools are insufficiently fed, it is scarcely necessary to cite further evidence in order to prove that mere municipalism and localism, however useful in some directions, has wholly failed to solve the pressing social problems of our modern capitalist. ”

“ Tramways and model lodging-houses move their very souls. The trade union and the co-operative store awaken their intelligence to a sempiternal contemplation of economic harmonies. The etherealization of the town council and the apotheosis of the municipality constitute their highest conception of the Socialist state. ”

“ The wage-system is doomed as chattel slavery and serfdom were doomed. The capitalist class which, with its hangers-on, deems itself to be everything today, will be absorbed in the collective organization of fully-developed and highly educated democracy tomorrow. ”

“ Evolution in all departments of nature inevitably leads to revolution—often in a cataclysmal shape— and revolution does but confirm and realize the results of evolution. Whether this fresh period of growth, and of renewed evolution in its turn, is attained peaceably or forcibly at the last matters no doubt a good deal to the men of the time when the revolution occurs ”

“ Now there has been a tendency of late for Americans who have come to England in order to study our social and economic conditions to exaggerate absurdly the work which has been done and to advance the point at which we have arrived. ”

“ Sooner or later we must all act together if we are to take full advantage of the developments going on around us in order to avoid the dangers that might follow upon a general attempt at reconstruction without sufficient knowledge and full international agreement. So closely bound together are modern industrial communities that what seriously affects one cannot fail to influence the others—as international crises have shown us time after time. ”

“ That collection of middle-class gentlemen and ladies has learnt that self-advertisement is far more useful than first-rate ability under existing conditions and they lose no opportunity of endeavoring to prove to visitors to our shores that they are controlling the issues in this England of ours with great capacity to nice bourgeois-Socialist ends. ”

“ There is in England to a larger extent than in any other country in the world a great buffer class, if so I may call it, whose members and their forbears have never from generation to generation taken part in direct capitalist exploitation at home. ”

“ What is more, no great improvement can be made until the whole problem is dealt with from the national point of view by the agency of a really democratic State or rather Commonwealth. And of any attempt being seriously made in this way, there is at present no sign whatever. In like manner the question of the unemployed is persistently pushed aside to a more convenient season, so that when a period of depression comes there is no effective machinery whatever for dealing with the mass of workers who are thrown into hopeless poverty by no fault whatever of their own. ”

“ Liberty. Everybody is personally free. The police are very fairly impartial to protect all sorts and conditions of men and women indifferently. What more do you want than freedom to struggle and starve? ”

“ In fact, it is doubtful whether in the great cities of any other civilized country the bulk of the population is so wretchedly housed and the children of the poor so shamefully neglected as they are in the great cities of Great Britain. ”

“ Let it rather be frankly admitted that, notwithstanding the assiduous propaganda of the Social-Democratic Federation for the past twenty years and of other Socialist organizations more recently, England lags behind the rest of Europe in acceptance of Socialist doctrines as well as in some respects even in the practical application of Socialistic palliatives. ”

“ Our political forms are at least a hundred years behind our economic development. We have neither universal suffrage, one man one vote, second ballot, payment of election expenses and of members, nor any other complete democratic method of election. ”

“ The Trade Unions tend in the same direction, being in England almost exclusively an aristocracy of labor. The Amalgamated Society of Engineers does not allow engineers' laborers who attend upon the skilled men to join the Society on any consideration I believe. ”

“ The heavy emigration and colonization of the past half-century have taken off, as they did in the case of Spain, the most adventurous and determined of the workers, leaving only the less energetic behind to propagate the race. ”

“ The growth of the huge parasitic class of children of the people, domestic servants, purveyors of luxuries, semi-artists and the like who, being dependent on their rich employers, adopt their opinions. ”

“ In Roubaix, Lille, and other French towns where the citizens have much greater power and use it with far greater effect than in any of our English cities, our French comrades of the Parti Ouvrier are under no delusions whatever as to the capacity and the limitations of mere municipalism. ”

“ In some of the districts of the North, where volunteering and recruiting have been going on during this shameful war in South Africa, as many as seventy-five per cent of those coming forward have been rejected as physically incapable. ”

“ The low standard of life of a large proportion of the working classes. Bad air, bad food, bad clothes, bad surroundings enfeeble intelligence and destroy initiative.
3. Fairly good wages and better conditions of life for the higher grade of artisans, thus separating them from their fellows living on a lower plane and rendering class combination difficult. ”

“ Now so long as these worthies kept their half-baked rubbish for home consumption no great harm was done, but when it is exported to America as genuine then some mischief follows. If a few eccentrics choose to make twelve o'clock at eleven the only result is they get their midday meal half cooked ”

“ Owing to these and other causes vast sections of our city inhabitants are undergoing steady physical deterioration; to such an extent, indeed, is this the case that it is not too much to say that the majority of the adult males are unfit for military service. ”

“ Our wealthy political men deliberately debauch the poorer voters in the constituencies by indirect but continuous bribery, especially in hard times.
18. The English aristocracy are extremely dexterous and painstaking. They work together in the interests of their order. The poor English "love a lord." ”