204 ENGLISH SAGA

Square: here they were repeatedly charged by massed constables
with drawn batons until hundreds of skulls were cracked and
bleeding. It was the first glimmer of the red light that threatened
social explosion. "No one who saw it will ever forget the strange
and indeed terrible sight of that grey winter day, the vast, sombre-
coloured-crowd, the brief but fierce struggle at the corner of the
Strand, and the river of steel and scarlet that moved slowly
through the dusky swaying masses, when two squadrons of the
Life Guards were summoned up from Whitehall."1 Afterwards
two of the leaders, John Burns and the chivalrous Cunninghame
Graham, were taken into custody.

The red light was not unheeded. The conscience of England
is sometimes hard to awake but it never fails in the end to respond
to a great wrong. Two years later the selfless pioneers of the
British Socialist movement won a great triumph. In August,
1889, several thousand labourers in the London Docks struck
work, Such men were the poorest of the poor—the flotsam and
jetsam of the water-side. They were unorganised, despised even
by their fellow workers, without hope or craft. They slept in the
fb'c'sles of empty ships and subsisted on scraps of mouldy biscuits
left over by their hard-bitten crews, were subjected by sub-
contractors—often more brutes than men—to work with rotten
plant and defective machinery and left to perish in crippled
destitution and misery when their limbs had been mangled in
some squalid accident on the dock-side.2 In the frantic competi-
tion for freights, they could scarcely ever look for more then two
days* continuous employment. But stirred by the new spirit
among their downtrodden kind, they now made the unheard of
demand that their labour should be hired at not less than four
hours at a time and at a uniform rate of 6d. an hour. It was.
rejected by dockowners who relied on the poverty and stupidity of
the poor derelicts they exploited to ensure their defeat. But the
sullen resolve of the men, fanned to anger by the fiery eloquence
of one of their number, Ben Tillett, and sustained by the growing

1 y. W. Mackatt, Lift of William Morris, II, JOT.

* Sir Tames Sexton, earning a precarious living as a dock-walloper, was hurled into
a barge by a sling of bags of grain which broke loose through a defective hook at the
end of the rope-fall and an untrained incompetent at the winch. His right cheekbone
was smashed, his eye forced out of the socket, and his skull fractured. For two hours he
lay unattended on the wintry dockside, for such accidents were too common to be
allowed to interfere with work. Owing to a defect in the Employers' Liability Act,
then recently passed, no compensation was paid him.

—Sir James Sexton, Agitator, 7^-5.