SHOOTING    NIAGARA	203
to the theses of their continental comrades, seemed curiously
unaware of all this. It was precisely because they wished to help
the underdog that they were Socialists at all. Men like William
Morris and Arnold Toynbee devoted their lives to the working-
class movement because their English sense of justice and kindli-
ness was affronted by the sickening misery and cruelty of a great
reserve of unskilled labour like the East End of London. They did
not wish merely to use the underdog but to tend and cherish him,
just as they wished not to exterminate the bourgeois but to
convert him. The University Settlement, then first taking shape,
was a characteristic product of both these wishes. And in their
dreams for the future the early English Socialists sought nothing
_but a gentle Christian paradise after their own kindly middle-
class hearts. Morris's News from Nowhere published in 1890 is
as far removed from Marx's Capital as the Gospel of St. John
from the Book of Judges. tf I know," said its author of a working-
men's procession, awhat these men want: employment which
would foster their self-respect and win the praise and sympathy
of their fellows, and dwellings which they would come to with
pleasure, surroundings which would soothe and elevate them;
reasonable labour, reasonable rest. There is only one thing that
can give them this—Art."1
To modern middle-dass revolutionaries, with their armoury
of Marxian dialectic and their pessimist's despair of the living,
there must seem something incurably futile about this lovable
old man, haranguing in his gentle voice on Eelbrook Common
and looking in his blue serge reefer jacket like a cross between a
farmer and a sea captain. At that time he and his proletarian
prototype, John Burns, were the life and soul of militant English
Socialism. Their object was to save the underdog from the shame-
less sweating and exploitation which he suffered by organising
him like his comrades, the prosperous artisans of the skilled
Trade Unions. During the recurrent trade depressions of the
'eighties they organised vast processions of unemployed—of the
unwanted and starving army of laissez-faire capital. One of these,
on "Bloody Sunday," November, 1887, became part of English
history. Long drab companies of pallid ragged men, marching
behind red banners and bands of antiquated instruments, con-
verged in defiance of the police from the outer slums on Trafalgar
1 Speech delivered at Burslem, X3& Oct., 1881, ciL R. ff. Grtfton> A Modem History
of the English People, 64,