How I Became a Socialist by William Morris

Author:William Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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* Read at the Conference convened by the Fabian Society at South Place Institute, June 11, 1886. [Ed.: These notes were added by Morris for publication of Signs of Change (1888)].

† They have been ‘rather rough’, you may say, and have done more than merely hold their sentimental position. Well, I still say (February 1888) that the present open tyranny which sends political opponents to prison, both in England and Ireland, and breaks Radical heads in the street for attempting to attend political meetings, is not Tory, but Whig; not the old Tory ‘divine right of kings’, but the new Tory, i.e., Tory-tinted Whig, ‘divine right of property’, made Bloody Sunday possible. I admit that I did not expect in 1886 that we should in 1887 and 1888 be having such a brilliant example of the tyranny of a parliamentary majority; in fact, I did not reckon on the force of the impenetrable stupidity of the Prigs in alliance with the Whigs marching under the rather ragged banner of sham Toryism. [On 13 November 1887, a day that came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’, the Metropolitan Police commissioner Charles Warren ordered his officers violently to disperse a large number of free-speech demonstrators, including a contingent from Morris’s Socialist League. Morris had participated in and helped to organ-ise the demonstration, and he wrote ‘A Death Song’ (1887) in commemoration of Alfred Linnell, one of the demonstrators who had been heavily injured as a result of the police violence, and who later died of his injuries. Morris’s report of the events is titled ‘London in a State of Siege’, Commonweal 3: 97 (19 November 1887), pp. 369–70.]

* As true now (February 1888) as then: the murder of the Chicago Anarchists, to wit. [On 4 May 1886, a demonstration in support of an eight-hour working day and against police brutality took place in Haymarket Square, Chicago. On 3 May, police had killed a striking worker at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, and had injured several others. As police dispersed the demonstration on 4 May, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police, killing seven police officers and four civilians. Eight anarchists were arrested and charged with conspiracy, though no firm evidence was produced to suggest that any of those arrested had, in fact, thrown the bomb, and some were not even present on the day. Nonetheless, seven of the anarchists were sentenced to death, and one to fifteen years in prison. Two of the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, and one of the anarchists committed suicide in prison. The remaining four anarchists were hanged on 11 November 1887. Morris condemned the ‘cold-blooded judicial murder’ of the Chicago prisoners in ‘Free Speech in America’, Commonweal 3: 91 (8 October 1887), p. 324.]

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