Life -Stories of Famous Men.
<3RGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
JOSEPH McCABE
OF FAMOUS MEN
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
ISSUED FOR THE
RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION,
LIMITED
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE (1903)
Frontispiece
LIFE-STORIES OF FAMOUS MEN
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
BY
JOSEPH McCABE,
AUTHOR OF
' LIFE OF ROBERT OWEN," ETC.
LONDON :
WATTS & CO.,
JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.0,4
641275
First Impression (1922) 5,000
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE MAKING OF A MAN - 1
II. AN APOSTLE OF EGBERT OWEN - 11
III. IN THE ROAEING FORTIES - 23
IV. PATRIARCH OF THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVE-
MENT - - 35
V. A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS - 46
VI. HOME POLITICS - 57
VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION 68
VIII. IN THE MATURE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 80
IX. THE CROWNING PHASE - . 92
X. A SUNLIT AGE - - 105
ILLUSTKATIONS
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE (1903) - Frontispiece
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE 1847) - - Facing p. 25
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE (1888) - ,,56
THE MEMORIAL ON G. J. HOLYOAKE 'S GRAVE
IN HIGHGATE CEMETERY ,, 89
v
PKEFACE
To compress the life of George Jacob Holyoake into a
little more than a hundred pages is no light task. He was
born in 1817, when the Holy Alliance completed its deadly
grip on the throat of European progress, and he died in
1906, when social idealism stood again erect and radiant
beside the dark old powers. Between those two dates
stretches the noblest struggle on which the sun has ever
shone, and Holyoake bore a lance in almost every single
field. He fought war, ignorance, superstition, tyranny,
injustice, folly, and cruelty all his life. We look back
over that historic battle-ground, and we coldly study the
" movements," as we call them, which brave men and
women formed, and fed with their blood, while the
millions enjoyed themselves. Holyoake is prominent in
most of these liberating movements, is in the van of very
many of them, and is the standard-bearer of not a few.
In the early annals of nearly every triumphant reform
of our time we find the name of the slender, refined
working man who set out from a Birmingham foundry
eighty years ago to slay dragons.
Fourteen years ago, after his death, I was invited to
write a biography of him. Six large trunks of letters
and other documents were placed before me. They would
have made an intimate and vivid biography of the nine-
teenth century. Letters from Gladstone and Chamberlain
vii
viii PREFACE
lay peacefully beside letters from half the firebrands of
Europe. Letters from divines and professors mixed with
glowing letters from Robert Ingersoll and Eichard Carlile.
The whole tragedy and comedy of the great play were
unfolded. From them I extracted the story of "an
agitator's life," to use his own phrase, and from that
biography (Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake ;
1908) I distil this little work. The dissatisfied reader
must go to the original for a full treatment of the romantic
scenes and picturesque struggles which are here coldly
pressed into so many paragraphs.
J. M.
March, 1922.
THE MAKING OF A MAN
HOLYOAKE was born in Birmingham on April 13, 1817.
He was the son of a foreman in the Eagle Foundry, who
wore drab breeches and shining top-boots of a Sunday.
His mother, a pious woman, ran a button-making business
in a shed at the rear of the house. It was, therefore, for
the time, a comfortable home. Probably it enjoyed a
revenue of thirty shillings a week.
There was more of Jacob than of St. George about the
child in those days. He grew in piety and good nature
so promisingly that they called him "the angel-child."
At the age of seven he learned the art of reading in the
school of an old dame who probably could not write.
At the age of eight he began, after school hours, to solder
the handles on tin lanterns and help to make buttons.
At the age of nine he commenced to work in the Eagle
Foundry, from six in the morning until six in the evening,
including Saturdays ; and he spent the Sunday in church
or over religious books. He attended the Wesleyan
Sunday School until he was fifteen, and continued to
learn to read, but not to write.
There you have the story of the first fifteen years of
his life. They were placid, healthy, and happy. But
as the eyes and ears of the " angel-child " grew sharper,
momentary shadows fell upon the sunny little world of
his young mind. It was not that he had to work
sixty-three hours a week and get a scanty education in
his tired hours. Lucky in those days was the son of a
1
2 THE MAKING OF A MAN
worker who had less hours of toil, or had any education
at all. Not one in ten was taught to read. They
learned their lessons from the book of life ; and a dark,
cruel, vicious life it was for the workers in those days.
The orchestra that had accompanied Holyoake's birth
had been a mingling of groans and curses wrung from
the distress of the country. It was the year of the
March of the Blanketeers. The wage of the adult was
generally less than ten shillings a week, and bread was
Is. 5jd. the quartern loaf. Foreman Holyoake could
afford a good joint, even a sucking pig on a festive
occasion. But the distress deepened and spread, and
at last it settled like a gloom on Birmingham.
George was eleven years old when he discovered that
there was something wrong with creation. The rector
of their parish church, St. Martin's, sent in his demand
for tithe. It amounted only to fourpence, but pence
were now so scarce that the bill was shelved. A younger
sister was very ill, and there was little enough for her.
The next week brought a fresh copy of the bill, with
the addition of half-a-crown for costs. Mrs. Holyoake,
recollecting that the bed had been taken from under an
invalid neighbour shortly before to meet the rector's
demands, hurried to the office. They kept her waiting
five hours, and she returned to look on the dead face of
her child. George himself got rheumatic fever at the
funeral, and nearly followed his sister.
But that was all a part of life in the good old times,
and George's piety was not dimmed. A few years later
more stimulating things happened. The boy would hear
strange talk from his father and in the foundry. Five
million workers were in a state of chronic revolt. The
bulk of them, the agricultural workers, got only 2jd. a
day ; the majority of the artisans only a shilling a day.
One could hardly buy coarse bread, potatoes, and grease
THE MAKING OF A MAN 3
A
enough to feed a family. Trade unionism had been tried
for five years, and had failed ; that is to say, Parliament,
sodden with corruption, had let the workers form unions,
and had fallen upon them with a mailed fist whenever
they did anything. From the London paper, which
came down on the coach, some literate worker would
read out to the others how the country was full of
burning ricks and wrecked factories and sabred rebels.
They must capture Parliament. Two hundred thousand
of them met one day on Newhall Hill, with bands and
banners and brave orators, and swore to furnish the new
King with an army of workers and enable him to pass
the reform which, of course, he was eager to pass. Then
the day came when the coach brought news that the
King had refused ; and George saw medals bearing the
King's head trampled under foot, and inn signs bearing
the ruddy royal face framed in crape, and workers secretly
making pikes, and the cavalry openly sharpening their
swords. He found himself consecrated. On May 6, 1832,
a crowd of 150,000 Birmingham and district workers
closed a great meeting with the solemn oath : " With
unbroken faith, through every peril and privation, we
here devote ourselves and our children to our country's
cause." Nothing less serious than a Cup-tie will attract
a crowd like that to-day.
Decidedly the world was not so well ordered as the
gentlemen in the pulpit represented. These vast meetings
and pike-makings, however, taught the peers and prelates
at London the beginning of wisdom, which is the fear of
Demos, and the " great " Beform Bill passed. The golden
age opened ; and, as it lasted nearly two years, we may
trace George's further development.
There was a Mechanics' Institution in Birmingham,
and in 1833 he began to attend it. Disciples of Robert
Owen and liberal Unitarians taught devotedly in it, and
4 THE MAKING OF A MAN
the boy learned not merely to write a beautiful hand,
but logic, grammar, drawing, and mathematics. He
could not afford to buy instruments, so he made com-
passes out of scraps of iron in the shop : a very bold act
for an angel, as a shopmate had been transported for
ten years for appropriating a file. He read the Penny
Magazine and the Penny Cyclopcedia. In 1836, when
Isaac Pitman distributed the prizes, George and his iron
compasses were introduced to the great man. " Pity
that a master-mind should be so crippled," he said ; and
he gave George a set of instruments. George had been
reading nearly every night, by candle light, in the attic,
from seven to twelve, after ten or eleven hours in the
shop. The recognition fired him, and he began to give
one whole night a week to study.
For some years his growing secular knowledge asso-
ciated kindly with his piety. He broadened without
suspecting it. The Unitarian teachers were so generous
that he taught a Sunday-school class in their chapel ;
stipulating that it should be near the door, in case God
should let the roof down upon them some day. Then he
taught in a Baptist Sunday school, but he was still so
virtuous that he thought himself not holy enough to be
baptized. Next he tried a Congregationalist chapel. He
drew up a boyish list of the essentials of faith, which he
would never surrender, and, armed with this, he went
everywhere.
At least, he studied every religion except one the
"Rational Religion " which Robert Owen was then
propagating. A lively shopmate, Hollick, joined the
Owenites, and expounded the new religion to him.
George found the proportion of reason to religion in
it too strong for his constitution, and he refused to
attend its meetings. Robert Hall was the type of
preacher he loved ; and he went one night, as he
THE MAKING OF A MAN 5
thought, to hear Kobert Hall, and found himself listening
to a thin, refined, unemotional man who talked a very
great deal about humanity and merely mentioned God,
courteously, from time to time, as if in deference to the
cosmic police. It was the other Robert. Holyoake did
not shudder. To shudder at Robert Owen's doctrine you
had to be quite ignorant of it. It was, in sum, that
man's character was made by his circumstances ; and so
all the slums and sweating-shops and gin-shops and
exploiters ought to be swept into the Styx, and a more
beautiful world must be created.
Still, it was not Christian ; and Holyoake remained
a Christian until he was twenty- four years old. His
education proceeded. His able Unitarian teachers,
delighted with his originality and fine character, gave
him special assistance, and he often pored over books
in his attic until two or three in the morning to rise at
five for the hard work of the foundry. His social and
more vital education went more slowly. None but the
Owenites would then teach social science. You were not
in England clapped into jail, as you would be in Italy
and Spain, if you dared to look for any disease in the
social and political organism, but you certainly became
interesting to the authorities. As a natural result,
secret societies multiplied. The reformed Parliament
had proved a hollow sham. Within two years the
workers turned from it in disgust, and Robert Owen
was leading them along a new path. They must help
themselves, co-operatively, as he had always told them.
He formed a " grand Consolidated Trades Union," which
in a few weeks had half-a-million members. He induced
the Birmingham builders to erect a fine hall for them-
selves. The millennium was opening once more ; and
would, as usual, run a few months.
Holyoake was cut off from Owenism by his religious
6 THE MAKING OF A MAN
ideas, and he joined a secret society. Unions were
swearing-in brothers with ceremonies that would have
delighted Dumas. The candidate was introduced blind-
fold, and at the removal of the bandage he generally
found himself confronting a skeleton, or a crude painting
of one, while elder brethren in shirts, armed with cutlasses
or tinfoil battle-axes, dictated fearsome oaths to him. It
gave one the impression of doing something very drastic ;
though no one knew precisely what they were engaging
to do. The Government's spies reported the situation,
and a few savage sentences put an end to the melodrama.
The serious trouble began when Holyoake reflected
that the Churches had nothing whatever to. say on these
matters which engrossed the attention of the nation. In
those dark days not a clergyman in England gave any
other message than resignation. The bishops opposed
every reform. The Nonconformist bodies produced not
a single minister who dared to denounce the prevailing
brutality and injustice. Holyoake was now a very
thoughtful and critical youth of twenty. Fine-natured
from his boyhood, thin-blooded from his endless poring
over books, he easily passed by the pitfalls of youth.
His life was intellectual. His emotions were social.
Fires again lit the country at night. Vast armies of
hundreds of thousands of workers marched to meeting-
grounds. The world, all awry for lack of wisdom,
threatened to become one bloody arena of pike- bearers
and troopers. And the preachers said that it was
11 politics " or " Eadicalism " to talk about these things !
Strange.
A new key to the millennium, Chartism, was brought
out with the customary blaze of banners and blare of
bands. The Eeform Bill of 1832 had been a mistake
because it merely, as Daniel O'Connell said, gave the
Whig manufacturers a twenty years' lease of Downing
THE MAKING OF A MAN 7
Street. Manhood suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the
ballot were the real panacea. So George tried the new
panacea. He became a Chartist. Birmingham had
another meeting of 200,000 workers. Faint echoes of
even larger meetings came from the north. This time
they were going to " flesh the sword to the hilt," in the
words of one of their chief orators. They marched under
the sign of the skull and cross-bones. Westminster was
trembling this time, they said. And in a few months
their leaders were flung into the fetid jails of the time,
and from his little cottage off the Bull Ring Holyoake
watched the maddened troopers chase his bolder comrades
by the light of their burning homes.
But the end of this, the first phase of Chartism, was
in 1839, and we must return a little. In the summer of
1838 Holyoake had found a new remedy for humanity's
ills. There came to Birmingham the apostle of the new
gospel, phrenology. George Combe had expounded his
mixture of good humanitarianism and bad anatomy in a
work called The Constitution of Man, which Holyoake
had read. He was not aware that Combe was no more
Christian than Owen or any of the other reformers.
His gospel sounded both scientific and spiritual. A man's
character or ability was determined by its material organ,
the brain. The supreme wisdom was to read every-
body's " bumps " and direct people to their proper places.
Holyoake had the distinction of being appointed assistant
to the lecturer for fourteen nights.
The sequel brings the young man before us as no other
event of his youth does. Combe's gospel was very
profitable in those days. In fourteen nights he had a
good harvest, and friends urged Holyoake to ask for
payment for his services. Combe had merely given him
a cheap copy of his Elements of Phrenology, and the
moralist's bump of indignation swelled when Holyoake
8 THE MAKING OF A MAN
VT
asked for money. It was humiliating enough for
Holyoake to learn that he was the first young man in
all the lecturer's experience to advance so greedy a claim,
but. a worse outrage was that Combe said that he had
done the work badly. He wrote a letter to Combe, and
he kept it until he was able to deliver it personally eight
years afterwards. I have read the letter. It might have
been written by Marcus Aurelius.
Combe left behind him in Birmingham a Swiss named
Bally, who used to make the plaster casts for him.
Bally in turn employed Holyoake. He was to find
customers, and as a reward he was to have a free cast
of his own head. On the auspicious day he prepared
his long black hair and pale features with especial care,
and went to Bally's house. The man had just left
for Manchester ! This double trial was too much for
Holyoake's overworked constitution. His nerves broke,
and he set out on a long walking tour. Bally was
among the Owenites of Manchester, he heard, and he
walked to Manchester and found him. What he did
again gives us the measure of his character. He stood
at Bally's door, delivered to him a very polite and
dignified lecture on honesty, and bade him " Good
morning."
The walking tour restored his health and quickened
his development. Inquiring for Bally among the Man-
chester Socialists, he met Owen himself and had talk
with him. From Manchester he walked to Liverpool,
and he met the Socialists there. He sailed for the Isle
of Man ; and at Douglas he wrote his first remunerated
piece of journalism, for Mona's Herald. The fee was a
bottle of port and a roast chicken. He walked home
through eastern Wales, eating frugally and lodging at
cottages. The whole tour, which lasted five weeks, cost
only five pounds.
THE MAKING OF A Lf AN 9
When he resumed work at the foundry in the autumn
of 1839 Holyoake was an older, wiser, and less religious
man. He had endured many disillusions, and even
Chartism was now plainly going the way of all " move-
ments." He looked dimly overseas, to the fairyland of
America, and to the strange new land, of which men
spoke, under the Southern Cross. The dingy, noisy
foundry, with its iron discipline, seemed a symbol of
England : soul-destroying, hopeless, unalterable. But
Cupid saved him for England. In Belcher's Unitarian
book-shop, where he dealt a little and lingered much, as
impecunious youths will, was a cheerful, sensible maiden
of the name of Eleanor. George was a bashful lover
he had already allowed one pretty offer of the gods to
float by but they came at length to an understanding.
It is a sufficient indication of his mental development
and her liberality that they were, on March 10, 1839,
married in the Eegistry Office. Some measure of civic
freedom had been wrung from the reformed Parliament,
and Eegistrars of civil marriages had recently been
appointed. William Pare, local leader of the Owenites,
had obtained the office, and he gave the pair his civic
blessing and hearty personal wishes ; for Holyoake was
now virtually an Owenite. The foundry still irritated
him, and he left it and had adventurous and hungry days.
Michael Wright, the oldest of his Unitarian counsellors,
found him work as assistant at an exhibition of machinery.
Then Wright died, and Holyoake took his place at the
Mechanics' Institution. He now, however, openly asso-
ciated with the Owenites, and religious folk entered upon
the usual personal campaign against the " apostate."
None questioned his competence in teaching or the
exceptionally high standard of his character. But he
had, though he hardly realized it as yet, ceased to be a
Christian, and he must pay the price.
B
10 THE MAKING OF A MAN
In the first month of 1840 he surrendered his place at
the Institution, and nervously faced the world. A child
was expected soon, and there was not enough to fill two
mouths. They lived in a little cottage on the fringe of
the town, and were very frugal. Eleanor grew mustard
and cress, to give some taste to the monotonous bread
and butter. Kindly neighbours insisted on sharing a pot
of stout at times with the pale expectant mother. George
ran hither and thither after elusive employment. For a
few months he taught in a private school. He kept the
books of a Venetian blind maker for eight shillings a week.
He wrote advertisements at seven shillings and sixpence
each. He gave private lessons in mathematics ; and
sometimes got the fee. But the lean grey wolf drew
steadily nearer. This was the ironic end of ten years
of intense self-education ! Had he remained a " working
man," his skill and sobriety would by this time have
won for him a comfortable position. Certainly there
was something wrong, fundamentally wrong, with the
world, in spite of the well-fed optimism of the rector of
St. Martin's. He turned to the Owenites.
II
AN APOSTLE OF KOBEBT OWEN
To this series of little biographies of great men I have
already contributed a life of Robert Owen, the noblest
and most consistent and not least effective of early social
reformers. I cannot repeat here how the great Welsh-
man far greater than a score of men of the time who
are now called great, while his name is forgotten
sprang, like Holyoake, from the upper working class,
and educated himself; how by fine, honest work he
became a prosperous manufacturer, and devoted his
fortune and his life to the uplifting of the workers and
the annihilation of injustice and misery ; how he was
the first to insist that ugly surroundings make ugly souls,
and proved his gospel by a marvellous industrial com-
munity at New Lanark which was the wonder of
Europe ; how, when the Government refused to create
such communities on a large scale, he appealed to the
people to do it themselves.
Owen was at the highest point of his influence during
the few years we have just surveyed. His " Rational
Religion," as he now called his social creed, had a
hundred thousand direct adherents, and he had a very
large moral authority over a million workers. When
we remember the small population of the time, especially
the small town population, and the very poor means of
transit and communication, this was a triumph. Let us
add at once that Owen's direct aim the formation of
thousands of model communities of the New Lanark
11
12 AN APOSTLE OF EGBERT OWEN
type was impracticable. His real value was in the
ideas on which his model community would be based.
He anticipated, or was one of the first to propagate,
almost every great social reform of the nineteenth
century.
Holyoake was the spiritual son and successor of the
great Welsh reformer. He soon realized that the
creation of model communities was not practicable or
advisable. He saw the various ideas which entered
Owen's comprehensive standard of communal life taken
up by separate movements. That was the only way to
get them realized. But he kept all the breadth of the
Owenite ideal in his own mind, as, unfortunately, few
reformers do ; and that is why he became a prominent
worker in so many movements. Above all, he continued
throughout life to lay the chief stress on character, on
positive culture ; and in this again he was to the end of
his life a disciple of Owen. Let us now trace how the
fine character which parents and churches had implanted
in him rapidly matured in the sunlight of Owenite
idealism.
It was in 1836 that he mistook the name of Eobert
Hall for Robert Owen, and first heard the reformer. In
the first month of the next year he began to attend the
Owenite meetings and join in their discussions. Presently
he took a class in their Sunday school, and at times he
gave readings before the lectures on Sundays. We saw
that he was well known to the Owenites of Manchester
and Liverpool in the autumn of 1838.
In that year Owen, who was nothing if not an
optimist, divided England into six regions or dioceses,
and appointed a " Social Missionary " to convert each
to the Rational Religion. The episcopal stipend was
from 80 to 100 a year. Hollick, Holyoake's friend
and shop-mate, was one of these missionaries, and he
AN APOSTLE OF EOBEET OWEN 13
urged Holyoake to enlist in the same service. Holyoake
still counted himself a Christian, as I said, but the
Eational Eeligion really did not concern itself about
religion. Its aim was positive human service, which it
called religion. Owen was an Agnostic, but he never
wished to discuss religion. When he was pressed he,
like Buddha and Confucius, frankly said that it was a
waste of time, as there were more important things to
do. The bishops clamoured in the House of Lords for
the suppression of these rival "bishops," and Punch
amiably caricatured their zeal. It was quite well known
that the Eational Eeligion hoped to put an end to all
Churches by displacing them.
By 1840, however, Holyoake seems to have ceased to
go to church. The Churches had no social message.
He therefore applied to the Owenite Congress for enrol-
ment as one of its new missionaries. His name was
well received, but there was as yet no vacancy, and in
the autumn of that year he accepted an invitation from
the Worcester Owenites to become their local " preacher."
He made his entry on the public stage.
It was a very humble beginning. The " Hall of
Science " at Worcester was a small workshop in a dingy
street, reached by the kind of rough wooden staircase
one finds outside such places when they are not on the
ground floor. The worshippers of science were so few
and poor that they dared not promise more than sixteen
shillings a week, and they had difficulty in raising that.
Little Madeline and her mother had to remain at
Birmingham, and Holyoake had to walk twenty-six
miles each way when he would see his family. He
eked out the income in various ways. There was a
private school in the town at which he was permitted to
teach mathematics ; but he had to pass under the name
of " Mr. Jacobs," lest any sensitive parent should learn
14 AN APOSTLE OF EOBEBT OWEN
that he was one of those awful people who wanted to
make the world better.
But Holyoake was touched by the sacred fire, the
grand passion of humanity, and neither scorn nor
sacrifice can turn from his path the man whose mind
has once been thoroughly lit by it. He lives in a world
that has a fascination of its own ; to say nothing of the
esteem and appreciation of some small or large circle of
his fellows. He struts the stage. He feels the lime-
light. A vast amount of nonsense has been talked and
written about the psychology of reformers. Being a
reformer, I am not likely to malign my class ; but the
work has its consolations. Your true reformer there
are many false reformers, and the talk about sacrifice
generally comes from them is a man before whom the
fates have laid two alternatives : speak out, or be
damned in your own conscience. He speaks out, and
he has his reward and his punishment.
George Jacob Holyoake was, like Robert Owen, a true
reformer. I have written many biographies, of many
types St. Augustine, the great Father of the Church ;
Peter Abelard, the brilliant scholar of the Middle Ages ;
Cardinal Richelieu, the French prelate- statesman ; Prince
Talleyrand, Goethe, Professor Haeckel, the Roman
Empresses, George Bernard Shaw, the Kaiser, and so
on. In only two cases have I found nothing to conceal,
to explain away, to dress in the veil of charity. Those
two are Robert Owen and George Jacob Holyoake.
Heaven forbid that I should make a stained-glass angel
of Holyoake ! I remember him as above all things
human, fond of cream in his coffee and a fur lining to
his coat, with a merry twinkle in his eyes which would
rebuke any man who made of him a medieval saint or
an Epictetus. Yet, honestly, I remember no episode of
any consequence in the life which six trunks of memorials
AN APOSTLE OF ROBEBT OWEN 15
laid before me that needed a gloss. He was a con-
sistently straight man in a crooked world. This was
the effect of the gospel of Owen on a naturally fine
character.
At Worcester he worked out his ideas on Owenite
lines. Eobert Owen had at that time written little, and
he wrote badly. His power was in the logic of his
plans. These gave Holyoake the key to the problem of
life, which the Churches had failed to give him. It was
quite useless to preach justice and brotherly love. Some-
how the masters and the politicians believed that they
were just ; and no pulpit under which they sat ever
disturbed their complacency. It was not enough.
Owenism, or " Socialism " as it was beginning to be
called, hit the unjust full in the face. To keep the
workers ignorant, to grind them and their children for
sixty hours a week or more, to have insanitary mills and
foul cottages, to be indifferent to their drunkenness and
dog-fights, to heap up fortunes while they lived with
hunger and fever these were concrete injustices, all
over Britain. Owenism was one sustained and detailed
condemnation of them.
The Owenite Congress of 1841 appointed Holyoake to
the diocese of Sheffield, and with his little family he
moved to the smoky hollow framed in glorious green
hills and picturesque crags. His diocese stretched from
Bradford to Derby and Nottingham. His stipend was
thirty shillings a week. His palace, for which he paid
rent, was a workman's cottage. But there was a hand-
some Hall of Science at Sheffield for his ministrations,
and he opened a Pestalozzian school with fifty pupils.
He made friends who helped him onward. George
Julian Harney, the Chartist, lived there, and he esteemed
Holyoake all his life. Ebenezer Elliott, the popular
poet, invited him to coffee. Samuel Smiles, who then
16 AN APOSTLE OF EGBERT OWEN
edited the Leeds Times, was very friendly, and took
contributions from him.
Before the end of 1841 he was so well known in
Sheffield that he was caricatured in the Christmas
pantomime. It was a caricature that would not displease
him. Jack the Giant-Killer was the play ; and the
principal boy "got up" as the young giant-killer of the
Hall of Science in Bockingham Street. We have Holy-
oake's portrait of the time, and can imagine it. He was
still lean, pale, and serious. His finely-cut, regular
features were surrounded by a cascade, neatly groomed,
of fairly long black hair. A man might be worse
caricatured than in the role of giant-killer.
Apostolic troubles were not long in moving upon the
anxious little home. The Owenite movement was
decaying, and the thin Sheffield congregation raised his
stipend with difficulty. Distant towns in his diocese
could not pay coach-fare. He had to walk to Hudders-
field and back to visit a remnant of his flock. At last
a heavy cloud appeared on the horizon.
I have said that the bishops thundered against
Owenism in the House of Lords. The Lords yawned,
but the followers of the bishops in the country got to
work. They found that the Owenites took money at
the doors on Sundays, and that there was an ancjent
and musty Act of Parliament which forbade any but
parsons to do so. It is still mustier and more ancient
to-day, but we patiently allow bigots to spoil our Sundays
by it. However, the old gun was deadly in the first half
of the nineteenth century, and the Owenites were called
to account. We saw that Owen did not wish to quarrel
with the Churches or discuss theology. The business
men who managed the movement were still less anxious
to have it stamped anti-theological. They needed capital.
So they advised Owenite societies to say that they were
AN APOSTLE OF BOBEET OWEN 17
"Protestants, called Eational Keligionists." Their
missionaries were then called upon to make profession,
on oath, of the Protestant religion, and some of them
did so.
Holyoake and others resented this. In the case of
most of them it was just rough, honest intolerance of
a piece of hypocrisy. They were not men of Holyoake's
moral fibre. To Holyoake himself it seemed an outrage
on the principles of Owenism, and in a few months he
found himself ousted by the intrigues of Lloyd Jones
and the Central Board of the movement.
It is well known that a few months later Holyoake
was in jail for blasphemy. Some of his modern admirers
may wonder if he had in those days all the refinement
of his later years, and we must trace the events which
culminated in his imprisonment. The Bristol missionary,
Southwell, goaded by the excessive caution of the Central
Board, began to criticize religion very fiercely. He had
been an actor and a soldier, and his lungs were as
vigorous as his vocabulary. He began also to publish
an anti-Christian weekly, The Oracle of Eeason. For an
article in the fourth issue of it he was sent to jail, and
he summoned Holyoake to Bristol. Holyoake was
stung by the intolerance, and he took Southwell's place.
The reader must remember that religious tyranny in
those days was revolting ; but that will be plain enough
presently.
After editing The Oracle of Eeason for some weeks
from Sheffield, Holyoake set his face southward. From
Birmingham, where he left his wife and child, he started
to walk to Bristol, ninety miles away. Naturally, he
gave Worcester a call on the way, and on May 24 he
gave the lecture at Cheltenham which brought upon him
all the terror of the fanaticism of the time.
The Vicar of Cheltenham, the Eev. F. Close (after-
18 AN APOSTLE OF ROBERT OWEN
wards Dean Close), owned the chief local paper, and he
sent men to report the horrible things which the
missionary was going to say in the heart of that highly
respectable town. But the lecture was quite innocent.
It was on " Home Colonization as a Means of Super-
seding Poor Laws and Emigration." The lecturer, true
to Owen's wish, did not mention religion. So the dis-
appointed spies drew him. He had told them a lot
about their duty to man, one said ; what about their
duty to God ? Holyoake's impromptu reply was to the
effect that, the country being so poor and in need of
attention as it was, they would do better to suspend
religious service and give all their devotion to man. He
has reproduced his little speech in his Last Trial for
Atheism, and I have given the relevant part of it in my
large biography. Here it is enough to quote the one
sentence which was selected as the base of prosecution :
I appeal to your heads and your pockets if we
are not too poor to have a God. If poor men cost
the State so much, they would be put, like officers, on
half-pay. I think that while our distress lasts it
would be wise to do the same thing with the Deity.
If any person calls this ribald or vulgar or scurrilous,
I would ask him to compare with it the language in
which Mr. H. G. Wells now describes the Christian God
in one of our leading magazines, The Fortnightly Review :
" A vigorous but uncertain old gentleman with a beard
and an inordinate lust for praise and propitiation."
But the Vicar of Cheltenham brought the passage to
the notice of the magistrates, and it was decided to arrest
Holyoake. He at once came back to Cheltenham and
surrendered. The details which preceded, accompanied,
and followed his trial must be read in my larger work.
He was treated with barbarity. They proposed that he
be made to walk to Gloucester, handcuffed, between two
AN APOSTLE OF EGBERT OWEN 19
policemen ; but his friends paid the fare of the trio. At
Gloucester they lodged him in a filthy and very
verminous cell, and made it impossible for him to get
bail within a fortnight. The Home Secretary admitted
in the House that " grave irregularities " had been com-
mitted, and Holyoake secured bail and went to London
to see his supporters and prepare his defence. He
returned to Birmingham to see his wife and child, and
surrendered to his bail at Gloucester on August 2. Such
disgust at the Cheltenham fanaticism had been aroused
in London that an Act was hastily passed transferring
cases of the kind to the Assizes.
Yet the trial was a mockery. The prosecuting
barrister, Mr. Alexander, made speeches that seemed to
be expressly modelled on those of Sergeant Buzfuz in
Pickwick. The indictment venomously described Holy-
oake as "a labourer." He spoke for nine hours for
which he richly deserved his sentence, the governor of
the jail jocularly told him and melted the hearts of
Christian ladies until they offered him tarts. He refused
the mild proposal of Mr. Justice Erskine, who did not
want to sentence him, that he should say that all he
meant was that the incomes of the clergy ought to be
reduced. That was the obvious meaning of his words,
but he loathed the appearance of compromise ; so Mr.
Justice Erskine gave him six months because he had
spoken with " improper levity."
He had had no food for thirteen hours, and, as the
sacred hour of meals was over when they took him to
the jail, the regulations forbade them to give him food.
A warder gave him, covertly, an apple and a cup of
water. Then his real martyrdom began. The cell was
filthy, damp, and cold. The food was gruel, coarse
bread, and potatoes, with a morsel of leathery salt beef
twice a week in the winter. He refused to don the
20 AN APOSTLE OF ROBERT OWEN
prison dress or attend chapel, and they spared them-
selves the trouble of making him. That he might make
some use of his time he got, through London friends, the
special permission of the Home Secretary to sit up until
nine. But the Home Office forgot that it was winter
and said nothing about a candle, and the pious folk of
Gloucester refused to let him have a light. He stuck
pins along the edges of a board, ran threads (to act as
lines) from pin to pin, and wrote in the dark. But the
dull day's round, the vile environment, the brutality of
it all to a young man who knew how high his ideals
were, soaked into him. For his obstinacy they withheld
his letters and refused visitors. He found himself a
quivering nervous system in a world of grey horror. At
last he got a letter. His lovely little child, weakened by
poor food, had died of fever. His wife was prostrate.
So they tempted him. If he would promise never again
to propagate nationalism or Owenism, he could walk out.
He refused ; and he examined the iron feet of his bed to
see if there was a spike which, in case of madness
threatening him, might be driven through his temple
And all over England there were men and women who
naively wondered why certain creatures attacked religion.
The most remarkable thing is that, apart from the
hour of greatest trial, Holyoake bore himself so cheer-
fully. All that we have said so far suggests a very
solemn young man, and it looks, at first sight, as if the
horrors of Gloucester jail unsealed the vein of humour
which brightens all his later work. This was not so, of
course, but we now begin to have contemporary proof
that, with all his earnestness, he was already extremely
witty and entertaining.
The chaplain invited him to the chapel one day for a
private harangue. " This place is too cold for reasoning,"
Holyoake said in the end ; and he got an hour in a warm
AN APOSTLE OF EOBEET OWEN 21
room. The chaplain offered him a cheap Bible. He
submitted that it was " not respectful to God to present
his word in that curmudgeon form," and obtained a
handsome copy. A visiting magistrate sagely quoted to
him : " The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God."
11 1 no more admire rudeness in the mouth of David than
I do in the mouth of a magistrate," he quietly replied.
They gave him up, and were content to describe him as
"the worst felon in the jail and the most atrocious."
He was the only felon, or other human being, in it who
tried to educate and seriously uplift the poor prisoners
who shared its horrors with him.
It may be suggested that it is his later fun which he
has read into the prison days. Not in the least. I have
read letters that he wrote from jail, and his articles in
the Oracle just after his release. They are full of humour
and sprightliness. He was critical of religion, naturally.
He had, in his quaint phrasing, " been called upon to pay
a certain price for free speech, and, as he had paid it, he
had purchased the right." He went back to Cheltenham
and repeated his offensive words. The vicar and the
clerical magistrates found it convenient to slumber.
They had been heavily punished in the press and the
House. He went up to London, and became secretary
to " Branch 53 " of the Owenite movement, at ten
shillings a week. Owenism was sinking lower than ever
under the burden of its religious feud. Holyoake clung
to the outspoken Eationalists, though his speeches and
articles were always temperate and dignified. He organ-
ized an " Anti-Persecution Union," for his colleagues
were on all sides passing into such jails as that from
which he had emerged. He gave classes in logic and
literature, and published his early works. Paley Refuted
in His Own Words (1844) was one of the books he had
written in the dark. It soon ran to a sixth edition.
22 AN APOSTLE OF EGBERT OWEN
With a friend named Ryall he started a new paper, The
Movement, which lived for fifteen months.
But " the movement " the Owenite movement was
doomed. With a last spasm of energy it had built a
splendid institution at Queenwood, in Hampshire, for
housing an ideal colony. It was extravagantly planned
and furnished, and rumours of failure soon spread.
Holyoake went to see it, and The Movement gave an
exhilarating account of his discoveries. It was declared
bankrupt in 1845, and the last hopes of Owenism were
buried in it. The Movement followed the " movement "
into limbo. Metropolitan Owenism was shattered, and
Holyoake again broke down. A new admirer, W. J.
Birch, a well-known writer on Shakespeare, discovered
him in a serious condition, and nursed him back to life.
But it was like harvesting in the fields when the first
frosts are on them. From Glasgow came a last invita-
tion to be local preacher to an Owenite society, and
the Holyoake family, now four in number, made the
fearful journey. We need say only that he remained
with his spirited but poor little flock six months. But
he came back to London in the spring of 1846 with a
new energy. He would carve a little kingdom of his
own out of the stricken provinces of the master. Owen
had sailed for America.
Ill
IN THE BOAEING FORTIES
IT was to a world of ruined hopes and weather-beaten
wrecks that Holyoake returned from Scotland in the
spring of 1846. Owenism, the greatest promise of the
first half of the nineteenth century, was dead. The little
company of " Atheists," which had budded out from it,
was withered. Chartism seemed to have sunk into the
languor of old age. The Unions were almost powerless.
Phrenology was in disrepute. Co-operation was repre-
sented only by one poor store at Rochdale and a hundred
wrecks of more ambitious enterprises. Reaction raised
its brazen front triumphantly in the metropolis and
smiled upon the ruins. The " old immoral world " had
conquered and extinguished the " new moral world," to
use the language of the Owenites.
For a giant-killer the age was rich in opportunities,
though desperately poor in resources. But just while
Holyoake looked anxiously round for some weapon, some
organ of utterance, a gentleman walked into his poor
tenement at Covent Garden and laid ten five-pound notes
on the table.
While he was at Glasgow, Holyoake had learned that
the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows had offered a prize
of ten pounds each for five lectures on Charity, Truth,
Knowledge, Science, and Progression. He was himself
an Oddfellow the oddest of Oddfellows. It seems to
have been a branch of that society to which he had been
secretly initiated in his youth at Birmingham ; and these
23
24 IN THE EOABING FORTIES
edifying lectures were precisely intended to replace the
foolish initiation ceremonies which he had experienced.
So with his finest penmanship and neatest style he wrote
five lectures and, with a very faint hope, sent them in.
The judges were dismayed to find that the anonymous
lectures they chose as the best were from the pen of the-
ex-prisoner for blasphemy, the best known Atheist in
England. But the authorities were honest and courageous
Lancashire men. Holyoake's essays were the best, and
Holyoake got the fifty pounds.
The little home was still lean and sober, but Holyoake
was an apostle. With the fifty pounds he started a
weekly magazine, The Beasoner. Surely now one might
make a pantomime hero ot him ? With a capital of fifty
pounds and a few small pages of print, turned out by his
brother Austin in some inky den off Fleet Street, he was
opening a campaign upon the press, pulpits, and Parlia-
ment of the metropolis ! Yet Holyoake was no Don
Quixote. His pages had a rare sparkle and fine senti-
ment. One by one they drew to him men and women
of distinction. It was the beginning of his influence.
Before long he found himself seriously regarded by
Harriet Martineau, the first woman- writer of England ;
W. J. Fox, one of the greatest orators of the time ;
Francis Place, the veteran reformer ; William Ellis, the
pioneer of education ; Thomas Allsop, " the beloved
disciple of Coleridge "; W. H. Ashurst, Solicitor to the
Post Office and great friend of reformers ; G. H. Lewes,
the philosopher ; Francis Newman, professor and brother
of the cardinal ; J. Stansfeld, later Privy Councillor and
Cabinet Minister, and others whose friendship was an
honour and an education.
At first the Beasoner (which ran for fifteen years)
was Owenite in tone. Theology was politely criticized.
Holyoake at this stage frankly described himself as
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE (1847)
Facing p. 25
IN THE ROARING FORTIES 25
Atheist ; the word " Agnostic " having not yet been
invented by Huxley, or he would have regarded it as
the correct description of his views. Beyond this, moral
and social issues were treated rather in the abstract.
Father Time soon gave a grim concreteness to his
message. Famine had spread over Ireland, and floods
of Irishmen (including the clan McCabe) had poured into
England to dispute employment with the Sassenach.
The grisly spectre stalked again through England. Free
Trade had not opened a new industrial era ; it had
proved a fresh disillusion. The workers fed scantily on
turnips, vile bread, and tea made with burnt crusts or
leaves of mint. Cholera followed in the steps of hunger.
Irish orators fanned the smouldering embers of earlier
movements ; as they did, doubtless, in prehistoric days,
and will be found doing at the crack of doom. Chartism,
with its " Blood or Bread " banners, returned to life.
This was in 1847. Holyoake had just settled down,
as he thought, to a course of academic study. He was
going to repair the defects of his education and win a
degree. University College in Gower Street had recently
been established as a purely secular university, and
Holyoake had borrowed from Mr. Ashurst fifty pounds
(which he repaid, though it was not expected) to pay
his fees. He was wrestling with the subtleties of Latin
grammar and Greek accents when the increasing roar of
the people's voice broke upon his ears.
Holyoake was, we remember, a Chartist and most
other things that were not respectable. He now set out
to play the part for which his character and good sense
fitted him. Most of the popular orators talked of pikes
and sabres. Holyoake pleaded for education, agitation,
and political action. He was so far heard that the fiery
folk of the north condescended to notice him. " The
mildest-mannered man in the ranks of public disputants,"
C
26 IN THE ROARING FORTIES
said the Northern Star. " Bought by the Government,"
said others. In the art of reckless vituperation no one
can beat the advanced person who complains most
bitterly of being himself misrepresented. Holyoake knew
that no good would come of bloodshed or mutual abuse.
Hot air fills the belly, but is not very nourishing. The
physical-force Chartists could, they said, boast three
million signatures to their petition ; and before the end
of the decade their movement would be dead and
dishonoured.
Holyoake's wiser message appealed to a very large
number, and he began to feel something of the stimu-
lation of leadership. But events now took a turn which
gave a fatal victory to the physical- force party, and in
time brought about the strange spectacle of the apostle
of moral force testing bombs for assassins and collecting
bayonets for rebels.
The Italians, who had been bloodily crushed by the
Papacy and Austria and Naples since Waterloo, began a
series of effective revolts early in 1848. While men
listened to this interesting news there came, almost
suddenly, from Paris the report of the third French
Revolution. Presently followed the news of successful
revolt in Hungary ; then of democratic revolutions in
Germany and Austria ; lastly of the flight of the Pope
and the establishment of a Republic at Roma. Surely
the golden age was opening this time !
The Chartists had meantime moved upon London, and
the old Owenite headquarters, the John Street Institution,
seethed with discussion. In March the Chartists met on
Kennington Common. They were going to march upon
Westminster, with a petition signed by five million adults,
and compel the Government to grant the six points
of " tHe People's Charter " : manhood suffrage, annual
parliaments, the ballot, the payment of members, equal
IN THE ROARING FORTIES 27
electoral districts, and the abolition of the property
qualifijation. The Government enrolled 150,000 special
police, and marshalled all its forces of troops and police
Guns protected the Bank and the Mansion House.
Citizens retreated behind domestic barriers, waiting for
the roar of civil war. And all that happened was that
20,000 very tame Chartists marched to the House of
Commons between the 180,000 soldiers and police ; and
the great petition was found to contain less than two
million signatures, many of which were fraudulent. For
the thousandth time in history physical force was
discredited.
Few knew better than Holyoake what an opportunity
had been sacrificed by the vanity of leaders and
the impatience of the masses. The points of the
Charter were so obviously just that in those days
even Carlyle, as Holyoake knew, subscribed to
them. There was, in fact, a large middle-class sen-
timent in favour of far more drastic proposals
than the Charter. Not only fiery young poets like
Swinburne and fiery old literary men like Savage Landor,
but even quiet scholars like Professor Francis Newman,
were Republicans. Holyoake, who had one leg in this
world and one among the Chartists, was aware of this.
His chief aim was to unite workers and intellectuals in a
great educational and political campaign. He opposed
what he regarded, on the experience of the last twenty
years, as Utopias, and was for practical measures. He
became a " Liberal " in politics.
Ashurst bought for him a small paper, The Spirit of
the Age, and for a few months he (maintaining the
Beasoner for his general philosophy) expounded his
political views in this, writing over the pseudonym of
" Ion." It was so practical that one friend proposed to
change the title to The Matter of the Age, and another
28 IN THE ROARING FORTIES
suggested that he ought to style himself "Iron." His
motto was : " The Radical [extremist] forgets that society
has a past the Conservative that it has a future We
want the wisdom which will dare, but dare securely."
His extremist friends snorted. But Holyoake was no
mere Whig. Noticing somewhere the cry of the friends
of "order," he says that it is a demand that "selfish
opulence shall disport itself with applause, and intelligent
mechanics learn to starve with politeness." He still
mixed daily with the " Radicals." He was elected to the
executive of the Chartist movement. He helped Lovett
to found a " Friends of All Nations " League. He joined
the National Reform League of Bronterre O'Brien and
Lloyd Jones, and Hetherington's League of Social
Progress.
It was all futile. The great effervescence of 1848
slowly died away. The new French Republic prepared
to become a respectable bourgeois Empire, and the
democrats began to fly to London. The Roman Republic
fell. The German and Austrian monarchs recovered
power, and bespattered their capitals with blood in the
good old style. Those who had taken the sword perished
by the sword. The Spirit of the Age sickened and died.
Holyoake went back to his Greek grammar and his
articles in the Eeasoner, and his lectures up and down
the country.
Among his papers I found one that shows the
indomitable spirit and hope of the man. The cholera
raged again in England. It was a sultry August (1849),
and Holyoake still lived in the atmosphere of Covent
Garden. He was ill, very ill ; and seven hundred people
were dying of cholera every day. Even on the slopes of
Hampstead and Richmond men were pale with anxiety.
Hetherington, one of the great-hearted reformers of those
days, had just died, and Holyoake had spoken the last
IN THE ROARING FORTIES 29
words over his grave. At home, with the rustle of the
wings of death all round him, he wrote his will. That
document was not only not written for publication, but
Holyoake never used it in his autobiographical works.
It just puts his personality on paper. And this is the
preamble of it :
If this epidemic takes me suddenly, I shall be
obliged to apologize to my readers and friends for
my abrupt and unceremonious departure. Yet, when
I think of it, I am so busy that I really have not
time to die. My duties and my studies so occupy
me that I shall be obliged to treat the cholera with
rudeness, as I shall be too much engaged to pay it
any attention. If, however, the cholera should be
wilful, and not disconcerted by my incivilities, it is
necessary that I make a will.
But those who wish to know his deeper thoughts in
those days, when death was very near and heaven farther
from his mind than ever, should read his little Logic of
Death, the most beautifully written of his works. It
ran to a hundredth edition.
The work went on. The Greek grammar was again
laid aside. Ashurst found funds for a new paper, The
People's Review, and lost 70 in three issues of it. This
was Holyoake' s eighth paper in eight years. " Like
flags carried in battle," he says cheerfully of these early
papers, " they were made out of such material as
happened to be available in the exigencies of forced
marches, and were often shot into tatters by the enemy."
He was now a skilful journalist. Few in the metro-
politan press had a livelier and more picturesque pen.
We shall presently find the editors of paltry provincial
journals writing, from religious prejudice, that he was
an Atheistic mountebank juggling with the Bible for
coppers which he could not earn otherwise. He did not
tell them, though I know the fact from his Diary, that
30 IN THE ROAEING FOETIES
Sir Joshua Walmsley, who met and admired him, had
offered him a good place on the Daily News. In the
spring of 1850, however, he took a not unimportant
place in metropolitan journalism. Thornton Hunt, son
of Leigh Hunt, started a paper called The Leader, and
Holyoake was appointed manager and member of the
staff. He continued in it the " Ion " letters which he
had begun in the Spirit of the Age. His colleagues now
included G. H. Lewes, Savage Landor, W. E. Forster,
George Eliot, T. Ballantyne, and other well-known
writers. His more advanced friends were ill-natured
about it, and he began to experience those venomous
and petty criticisms from colleagues with which some
reformers spread thorns in the path of other reformers.
As a rule he took no notice, and each attack provoked
fresh appreciation. Harriet Martineau answered one
attack, by W. J. Linton, which Lloyd Garrison was so
ill-advised as to insert in the Liberator. " I find myself
always morally the better for the noble spirit of the
man," she wrote of Holyoake.
The Leader was mainly political, in the broad sense,
and Holyoake continued his more philosophical gospel
in the Beasoner, to which Harriet Martineau referred.
At the same time he made frequent visits to the provinces
to lecture to the survivors of the old Owenite movement.
He began to hold debates with clergymen, and the pages
of his journal told many a racy story of his travels.
Provincial papers made ridiculous comments on his
debates. We have had, said the Newcastle Chronicle,
11 a succession of low, scurrilous vagabonds, too lazy to
work and too illiterate to earn an honourable livelihood."
It resented this outpour from " the inexhaustible channels
of vice and immorality in the metropolis." One may
doubt if any public man ever dealt with these scandalous
and ignorant attacks as Holyoake did. He generally
IN THE EOAEING FOBTIES 31
called on the editor, had a polite conversation with him,
and let him discover that " the cockney Atheist " was
a gentleman. As to the charge that his debates were
very profitable, it need be stated only that the seats cost
from a penny to threepence each, and that the man who
was " too illiterate to earn an honourable livelihood "
had, as I said, turned down an offer from Sir Joshua
Walmsley.
Holyoake felt that these scattered and nameless
societies ought to be united in some new organization
and labelled afresh. The word "Atheist" appealed to
him no longer. To say, as some of his later critics said,
that he dropped the name because it brought odium
upon one is simply untruthful. He abandoned it because
it was a negative word, and we saw that Holyoake's
primary concern all his life was positive culture. How
little there is in the taunt is seen from the fact that he
first proposed to style himself a " Netheist," but aban-
doned that when some one pointed out to him that it
was equally negative.
He wanted to describe what he was, not what he
declined to be : to induce in his followers a positive
educational spirit akin to the old Owenism. The ideal
in his mind was, as I said, always the broad Owenite
ideal which he had inherited. The whole man, the
whole race, must be cultivated in every respect. Theo-
logy, he thought, was a distraction ; but you have only
just begun your task when you have put an end to a
distraction. Thinking over the subject, he concluded
that, since his characteristic was that he wanted men
to give all their devotion to the problems of this world
(sceculum) since theologians had already drawn the
distinction between "secular" matters and religious
matters "Secularist" was the best name to adopt.
He began to use it towards the close of 1851. In 1852
32 IN THE ROARING FORTIES
it was generally adopted by the little societies to which
he lectured, and five years later there were no less than
thirty-five such societies. He had founded " Secularism."
From the start he meant precisely what he said. He
was not giving Atheism a more respectable name. He
invited Theists to join his society ; and I find that of
his nineteen new lectures in 1851 only six were con-
cerned with the criticism of theology.
The subject would not, however, be complete unless
we saw how his Secularist activity gave rise to calumnies
from less successful colleagues, just as his political
action did. On May 26, 1853, a distinguished company
met in the Freemasons' Tavern at London to make a
presentation to him. He received a cheque for 250.
Again he refused to apply a penny of it to his personal
comfort. With 50 he had started a paper. With 250
he would found an institution, a metropolitan home for
the new body. He offered to buy the small printing and
publishing business of James Watson. It was worth
about 100 ; but Watson claimed and obtained 350 ;
and he promptly became a critic of Holyoake. At the
end of 1853 Holyoake transferred the business to Fleet
Street (No. 147, now The Press Kestaurant), and the
luxury of his new position cost him 720 and loaded
him with debt.
He contracted debt the more easily as a wealthy
admirer had made a will bequeathing 30,000 to him on
behalf of his movement. And one day in 1855 this man
invited him to tea, together with a rival lecturer, Robert
Cooper, and put the will in the fire. The money was
transferred to Cooper. Holyoake learned in the course of
time that one of his shopmen, named Young, had supplied
Cooper with the untruths by means of which Cooper had
libelled him. Young was a Christian whom Holyoake
had befriended, and who had borrowed or appropriated
IN THE ROARING FORTIES 33
101 of Holyoake's money and decamped. It was theu
that he had approached Cooper. Holyoake, who would
never take an oath, could not prosecute. But the
strange behaviour of the " cockney Atheist " did not end
there. Two years later Robert Cooper was in difficulties,
and Holyoake appealed for subscriptions for him in his
paper. Young, in the same year, sought to enter the
Unitarian ministry, and he found the way barred by his
known appropriation of Holyoake's money. Holyoake
thereupon accepted 50 10s. to enable Young to become
a minister, and took the rest of the debt on his own
shoulders.
We do not wonder that his more comfortable friends
rallied to him. John Stuart Mill was generous to him.
Mr. Ross, the famous maker of microscopes, gave him
250. Mr. Birch gave him 200. But his troubles
were not yet over. Before the end of the same year
(1857) another employee, Thomas Wilks, departed with
the books of the business and claimed 154 out of debts
due to the firm. Of the man's claim it is enough to say
that, when the matter was taken to court, it was officially
described as " false and fraudulent." But Holyoake has
been blamed for allowing it to go to court. He was
unwilling to take an oath, it is said, but he was quite
willing to send his brother Austin to take an oath for
him. In 1857, however, Austin Holyoake was a partner
in the "Fleet Street House" and publishing business,
and he did not need his brother's pressure to secure his
interests. It is obvious that his attendance at court
would have been useless unless he were a partner.
Moreover, he was not then an Atheist, and had no
scruple about taking an oath. He easily vindicated the
claim of the business ; but for years afterwards Holyoake
had to sustain the rancour of his opponents.
Once more he became very ill, and friends insisted on
34 IN THE EOAEING FOETIES
taking care of him. Allsop sent him to Paris for a
change. Joseph Cowen, of Newcastle, entertained him
in the north for several weeks. His admirers presented
him with a cheque for 642 in August, 1858, and 500
in 1860; and with this he cleared the Fleet Street
House of debt. His critics had sourly reminded him
from time to time that he had promised to give the
House to the movement. Had he done so while it was
encumbered with heavy debts they would, of course,
have been more critical than ever. Now that it was
clear of debt he made it over to the Secularist body.
His brother Austin acquired the printing and publishing
business, and he found himself at last free.
IV
PATEIAKCH OF THE CO-OPEEATIVE
MOVEMENT
HOLYOAKE'S activity during these decades was gigantic.
He had inherited the Owenite ideal in all its breadth,
and the time had now come when a score of special
movements were dividing the work among them. It
was inevitable that he should work in each of these
movements. His paper was the chief chronicle of their
progress, and his voice and pen were always at their
command. They might fail he had seen twenty or
thirty progressive movements fail in his twenty years
of public life but it would not be because he refused
them a few of his crowded hours. Week by week the
Reasoner reflected their fortunes ; and his unpublished
Diary tells far more about his industry than is found
in the printed pages.
Take, for example, the woman movement. Owen, with
his broad and free outlook on all questions, had at once
pronounced against the existing injustices to woman.
Holyoake sustained the tradition. Bound him gathered
the little band of early pioneers of the struggle. Harriet
Martineau admired him enthusiastically. In a private
letter to him she writes :
I always read the Beasoner, every line of it. You
must allow me to thank you, in the name of every-
thing that is wise and good, for the glorious temper
you manifest towards foe and friend. Great as is
your ability, one almost loses sight of it in the
charm of your temper.
35
36 PATBIAEOH OF 00-OPEEATIVE MOVEMENT
Miss Collet, Mme. Venturi, Mme. Bodichon, and many
other ladies who were in one way or other fighting for
woman's right to personality were little less friendly
with him. Miss Bessie Eayner Parkes, who was a
descendant of Priestley and became afterwards Mme.
Belloc (mother of Mr. Hilaire Belloc), was a warm
friend of his and a contributor to the Reasoner, of which
she distributed copies generously. In 1847 Holyoake
suggested that women ought to have a paper of their
own, and call it Woman's Journal. It appeared, with
Miss Parkes as editor, in 1857. In the same year
Holyoake offered himself as parliamentary candidate at
the Tower Hamlets. He withdrew his candidature in
favour of another man, but he had published his pro-
gramme, and it included a defence of the Bill, which
was then before the House, to give married women the
secure ownership of their property.
Another item of his programme was the proposal to
open the museums on Sundays. Few people doubt
to-day that, since large numbers will not go to church,
it was decidedly better to give them on Sundays some
alternative to the public-house. In the fifties press and
pulpit thundered against this profane proposal to let
people study Velasquez or the Parthenon sculptures on
Sunday afternoons, and few besides the Secularists dared
advocate it. But Holyoake did not confine himself to
idealist uses of Sunday. People who rejected the creeds
had the right to use Sunday as they pleased ; indeed, all
would be better for a free and healthy use of the day of
leisure. The metropolitan Sunday was so hideous and
stupid that Dickens, in his memorable and bitter picture
of it in Little Dorrit (chap, iii), says that " the ugly
South Sea gods in the British Museum might have
supposed themselves at home again." Holyoake arranged
excursions for his friends, and when the Sunday League
PATEIAECH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 37
was founded in 1856 he at once became its chronicler
and chief supporter in the Eeasoner.
We shall see more important aspects of his activity in
the next chapter. Here we may confine ourselves to
one of especial interest because, while the enterprise he
fostered was one which seemed foredoomed to failure
and hardly any other writer in England would notice it,
Holyoake's loyalty to it was rewarded by seeing it grow,
before he died, into one of the greatest social enterprises
of modern times. I mean the Co-operative Movement.
The princely building which the Co-operators of
Manchester have dedicated to his memory is proof
enough that gratitude is a Co-operative virtue, yet one
may wonder if the new generation realizes the solid
grounds of the affection of the older members. Other
men, of name and distinction, came later to patronize
the Co-operative Movement, and to work very devotedly
and effectively for it. There were quarrels and schools,
and hard words were flung from camp to camp. In the
main, in fact, it was the work-a-day Co-operators them-
selves who made their movement great. It was the
dogged energy of thousands of men of the North and
the Midlands, the men who served on committees and
central boards. But Holyoake rendered mighty service,
and a little record of it must be placed here to his
honour.
The reader will remember that, when he lived as
Owenite missionary in Sheffield, Holyoake often drank
coffee with Ebenezer Elliott, a very popular poet of the
time. Elliott, who is now forgotten, regarded Owen as
a fool and Holyoake as a very worthy and clever youth
who was momentarily dazed by the glitter of Owen's
plans. It was therefore with a kind of amused annoyance
that he found Holyoake borrowing one of his poems,
mutilating it, and using it as a hymn in his Hall of
38 PATRIARCH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT
Science. Elliott was for land reform, and his poem
ran :
Behold ! behold ! the second ark
The Land ! The Land !
For the second line, which is poor enough, Holyoake
substituted " Coop-eration," which is (poetically) worse.
But it shows us that Co-operation was a dominant idea
in his mind from the first. It was, in fact, one of the
dominant ideas of Owenism. When Governments
refused to carry out his plan Owen turned to the people
and urged them to do the work by voluntary co-opera-
tion. His system came to be known as " Socialism,"
but it was voluntary Socialism ; and it was, no doubt,
the bias against State Socialism inherited from early
Owenite days which kept Holyoake estranged from it in
later years. However, Owen's model villages were to be
" Villages of Co-operation," and no word was more
familiar in the oratory and literature of the movement.
The grand plan was, as I said, impracticable, but one
feature or part of it was tried separately. The model
village would include a model shop or store, supported
by the capital of the consumers themselves. Owenites
took this idea of dispensing with the capitalist and his
profit as a practical possibility. As a rule, in their
experiments they dispensed with money altogether.
They created a centre in which a bootmaker could
exchange his boots for a table or a bag of flour. These
" Labour Exchanges " failed everywhere, but the idea
of having a store without the need to pay so much a
year to an "idle capitalist" long haunted the minds of
Owenite workers. It was in 1843 that the " Rochdale
Pioneers " opened the first store of the modern Co-opera-
tive Movement.
It needed very little research in Holyoake's papers to
prove that he had more to do with the opening of the
PATRIARCH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 39
Rochdale Store than he had ever professed. The general
connection of the movement with Owenism was plain
enough. Of the thirteen pioneers seven were Owenites ;
and it was these who had worked out the idea with
their allies, the Chartists and the Weavers of Rochdale.
They were, however, not merely Owenites. They were
friends of Holyoake ; and it was immediately after hear-
ing a lecture from him that they made their plans.
In 1843, we saw, he was released from Gloucester
Jail, and he went to the north to lecture. One lecture
was given in the little Owenite room, now taken over by
the Chartists, in Yorkshire Street, Rochdale. It was an
Owenite lecture to " Branch 24 of the Rational Society."
Holyoake has reproduced it in his History of Co-opera-
tion. One might suspect that the later success of the
Co-operative Movement had coloured his recollections of
the lecture, but, on looking up his paper at that time,
the Movement, I found that he expressly wrote that he
had gone north to expound " Socialism's benign and
practical philosophy," and, even more pointedly, to set
forth " Co-operative views." Half the Rochdale Pioneers
at least, probably more, were among his audience. It
is hardly fantastic to see in that humble picture an
immature youth, fresh from jail, expounding " Co-opera-
tive views" to a rugged group of weavers and other
artisans in a tiny room, while the Lancashire rain
soddened the grimy street without the beginning of the
vast popular corporation of our time.
Shortly afterwards, we saw, Holyoake was in grave
difficulties with the heads of the Owenite movement.
In the midst of his struggle came a letter from James
Daly, a Rochdale Pioneer, expressing the approval of
"Branch 24 of the Rational Society"; and five other
Pioneers put their names underneath that of Daly. It
was a fresh link between them. Holyoake followed the
40 PATEIAECH OF CO-OPEBATIVE MOVEMENT
fortunes of their store with keen interest, and visited it
whenever he was in the district. He had seen forty of
the Owenite stores rise and fall, and, although the
Eochdale store had a different basis and constitution,
any social student would have expected it to go the way
of all progressive enterprises in those days. Certainly
no social student gave it a word of encouragement for
years, while Chartist and Kadical leaders frowned on it.
They were going to "flesh the sword to the hilt."
Holyoake alone watched it from a distance and saw
it expand. In 1847 Leeds opened a store. In 1850
Derby, Bingley, and Oldham opened stores. In 1851
Manchester began. In each case there was an Owenite
nucleus for the growth. In Manchester the enterprise
followed closely upon a lecture by Holyoake. He now
had his new and more respected paper, the Reasoner.
From the start, in 1846, he had said that its aim was
"the substitution of Co-operation for Competition."
From 1847 to 1850 the Eeasoner was the only journal
to bring the growing movement to the notice of thoughtful
men and women. In 1850 Holyoake began to write in
the Leader, a much more importa/nt paper. He persuaded
the editor to let him have from two to four columns
a week in which, under the general heading of " Associa-
tive Progress," he kept a weekly chronicle of the advance
of the movement. Through him economists like Mill
were induced to take an interest in it.
At this point the Christian Socialists entered the
arena. No Co-operator and I am one will question
the very valuable services which they rendered to the
movement, but the friction which they inevitably had
with what one may call the " Secularist Socialists " has
led to some depreciation of the merits of Holyoake, and
I propose only to disentangle the facts from the
unpleasant feelings of the time.
PATEIAECH OF CO-OPEEATIVE MOVEMENT 41
Maurice and Kingsley meant, and expressly said, that
their movement was " to Christianize Socialism." Now,
it was the essential aim of both Owen and Holyoake to
keep the movement neutral, and the new departure was
bound to lead to trouble. Holyoake, in his paper,
welcomed them into the field of progressive work, but
he politely regretted that they mingled so much theology
with their human task, and they called this a " declara-
tion of war." Holyoake had so little idea of war that
in 1851 he was in correspondence with Lloyd Jones
about his undertaking an agency on behalf of one of
their enterprises. Holyoake was quite willing. Lloyd
Jones found that his associates were not willing, and
the idea was abandoned. There was, quite naturally,
a good deal of mutual coldness and some open friction.
One has therefore to read with reserve some of the
things they said about Holyoake. It is pleasant to add
that Kingsley, Maurice, and Hughes were more friendly
with him in their later years. All their enterprises
failed, and the Christian Socialist Society collapsed in
1854. After that date there was less ground for
hostility.
In 1857 Holyoake published his History of the Roch-
dale Pioneers, and it proved to be not the least of his
services to the movement. It not only had a wide
circulation in England, but it was translated into
French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Hungarian.
Economists and reformers in other lands began to apply
to him for information. Co-operative Societies arose on
the continent, often in lands, such as Spain, where
almost every other type of popular society lived under
the shadow of the police. The Eochdale germ grew into
a far-spreading European organization.
There was, as yet, no real organization in England,
and Holyoake contributed materially to the formation of
D
42 PATRIARCH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT
one. In 1863 there were more than twenty societies in
London and about 460 in the entire country. Holyoake
and a few others called a meeting of the secretaries of
the London societies at a coffee-house in Theobald's
Road, and the outcome of it was the founding of the
London Association for the Promotion of Co-operation.
E. V. Neale was an honorary member of it. But a
more important partnership was entered in the same
year, which greatly helped to link the south with the
more progressive north.
Until the early sixties the Co-operative Societies had
no periodical of their own. There was a privately owned
paper in the north, the Co-operator, which served as
organ for the Lancashire and Yorkshire societies, and in
the south Holyoake's successive journals served the
same purpose for the entire movement. At this stage
Mr. E. O. Greening started the Industrial Partnerships
Record in Manchester. There is no need to recall
to-day the spirited fight over profit-sharing which at
that time threatened to split the movement. Holyoake
and Greening and others, the " idealists " of the organiza-
tion, wanted to preserve the original principle of the
division of profits, which was gradually being discarded
in the north. The new Co-operative factories were very
profitable, and it was felt that the expansion of the
movement was impeded unless profit was divided among
the shareholders in the usual way. Greening and Holy-
oake joined forces, and in 1868 they brought out the
first national organ of the movement, the Social Econo-
mist. Greening merged his own paper with it, and
invited Holyoake to be manager and editor.
Whatever one may think of the merits of the dispute,
it is satisfactory to a biographer to notice that, if Holy-
oake erred at all, he erred solely from devotion to
principle. A separate Co-Partnership movement was
PATRIARCH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 43
inaugurated, and with this in turn Holyoake was closely
associated until his death. He remained, however, one
of the most prominent figures in, and lived to be the
patriarch of, the Co-operative Movement. In 1869 he
attended its first annual congress. It had now the
glamour of success, and orthodox economists gave it
their blessing. On the platform were Mr. Fawcett, Mr.
Mundella, the Hon. E. Lyulph Stanley, and the Earl of
Lichfield. The movement had definitely taken rank
among the great social creations of the nineteenth
century, and Holyoake, who was elected a member of
the first Central Board, must have recalled with pride
the humble little gathering in Rochdale twenty years
earlier. One of his causes had succeeded beyond all
expectation. There were now 1,300 societies, with a
share capital of two millions sterling and an annual
turnover of eight millions. Nor was it one of the least
satisfactory features that he now found himself once
more a colleague of Lloyd Jones, E. V. Neale, and
Hughes. F. D. Maurice died during the holding of the
first congress. It was Holyoake who drew up the
tribute to his memory which was laid before and passed
by the Congress.
In 1871 a further important step in organization was
taken by the founding of the Co-operative News. Green-
ing and Holyoake sacrificed the little organ by means of
which they had linked together the southern societies.
The northern Co-operator was purchased. The entire
journalistic forces of the movement were concentrated
upon the production of a worthy organ ; and no body
was ever better served by its journal than the Co-opera-
tive Society after 1871. Holyoake drew up the pros-
pectus of the new journal, and he contributed much to
the earlier issues. The editor was an Owenite friend of
his, Mr. Farn.
44 PATEIAECH OF CO-OPEEATIVE MOVEMENT
An unintended, but inevitable, effect of the union of
northern and southern Co-operators was that the feud
over profit-sharing was for the time intensified. Holy-
oake was never reconciled to the new idea that profits
ought to be divided between shareholders and consumers.
He and Greening, and even the editor of the News, held
that the employees should share the profit. Mrs. B.
Webb's Co-operative Movement in Great Britain rightly
represents Holyoake as the leader of the " idealists," but
is quite inaccurate in stating his ideas. The controversy
is now closed, and need not be re-opened. I refer to it
only for the purpose of explaining how it is that one
finds occasionally in literature about Co-operation stric-
tures on Holyoake, just as one finds them in the early
Secularist literature. In both cases he was trying to
secure loyalty to the original Owenite ideal.
The later history of the movement need not be told
here. Each decade of his life Holyoake continued to
render service, and recognition was freely given. In
1869 he was sent to the Amsterdam Exhibition to bring
Co-operation to the notice of the Dutch. Twelve awards
were made by the judges to English Co-operative
Societies, and the British Ambassador, Baron Mackay,
wrote to Holyoake : " Whatever England got at the
Amsterdam Exhibition in Class VII Co-operative
Societies, etc. it owed to you." In 1875 he published
the first volume of his history of the Co-operative Move-
ment, which ensured still further attention from eminent
men. Mr. Whitelaw Keid regarded it as " an invaluable
contribution to the story of the most significant labour
movement of recent times." Lord Derby, a cordial
admirer of him and of the movement, warmly praised it.
Professor Tyndall read it with such interest that he
offered to present a complete set of his works to the
library of any society that Holyoake cared to select.
PATRIARCH OF CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 45
Gladstone, the Tennysons, Earl Grey, Lord Northbourne,
and others, were making the acquaintance of the move-
ment, and lending it the prestige of their appreciation,
through him.
Here, however, we are travelling far beyond the
present stage of my book. Much more work of an
unpopular character would have to be done by Holyoake
before statesmen and prelates would treat him as a
social student of merit and distinction. We must go
back to 1850, to the time when the most pressing work
an honest man could find to do was work that brought
one more blows than guineas, more abuse than flattery.
We will see him again later in the sunny years of the
Co-operative Movement. Let us return to the dark and
stormy days which preceded the springtime of modern
social progress.
V
A CHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
THE institution which Holyoake founded in Fleet Street
in 1853 was officially described as " The British Secular
Institute of Communism and Propagandism." The title
was a sufficient reply to the young Secularists, on the
one hand, who whispered that he fought shy of an
unpopular name, and to the political extremists on the
other, who accused him of hungering for respectability.
He followed his straight path in life, and heeded neither
group. If Sir Joshua and Lady Walmsley, or Sir Harry
and Lady Verney, cared to invite him to tea, he went.
But there were placards outside his shop in the heart
of London, and literature in its windows, which informed
all who cared to read that this was the home of all the
lost causes of Europe in those dark days.
The word " Communism " we must chiefly under-
stand in the old Owenite sense ; but Holyoake now met
and sheltered real Communist refugees from the Con-
tinent, and he made no effort to disentangle their views
from his own. The revolutions abroad had, as I said,
all failed. Europe had returned to the days of the Holy
Alliance, if not of Louis XV. By that time, the middle
of the century, literally hundreds of thousands of men
and women of Germany, Austria, France, Spain, Por-
tugal, and Italy had laid down their lives in the battle
against injustice since the fall of Napoleon. Tens of
thousands of others were in 1850 living in exile in the
dark and chilly northern lands to which they had been
46
A OHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS 47
banished. Half the progressive blood of Europe had
been poured out on its soil. The old monarchs were as
strong and autocratic as ever. The peoples were almost
as ignorant, and quite as powerless, as ever. Louis
Napoleon had duped his nation, and had become
Napoleon III ; and Napoleon III upheld the Papal
States, and indirectly supported Austria in Italy. Eussia
drowned its rebels and Poles in blood, and helped Austria
to attain the same comfortable immunity from criticism.
One can imagine the temper of the cosmopolitan
crowd of refugees in London, and very many of them
met in the room above Holyoake's shop which was
dedicated to "Communism" and "Propagandism," or
was known as the " Political Exchange." The wares
exchanged in that historic little room, in the centre of
Fleet Street, were curses, threats, and plots. There
were Ledru Bollin, Victor Schcelcher, and Louis Blanc
from Paris. There were the German Communists
Weitling and Dornbusch. There were fiery Italians like
Felice Orsini, Eussians like Heinzen, Herzen, and
Bakunin, Poles, Belgians, and Hungarians. When
Fleet Street illuminated in honour of the close of the
Crimean War the Fleet Street House put out a grim
placard about the state of Poland. London swarmed
with conspirators and counter-conspirators (spies of the
foreign Governments). Knives were at times used as if
men were at home in Naples. Spies even penetrated
Holyoake's defences, and for years mingled with the
cosmopolitan groups in the Political Exchange.
With Kossuth, the leading Hungarian refugee, Holy-
oake had little to do ; and the experience, unfortunately,
ended unpleasantly. Kossuth was essentially an aristo-
crat. He associated with none of the democratic
fugitives from the other capitals of Europe. But he
found Holyoake indispensable. Money was needed to
48 A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
keep aflame the hidden feeling for revolt; in Hungary as
well as Italy, and Holyoake was the best man to beg.
W. J. Linton engraved a large card, with guns and
bayonets and martial flags surrounding the signatures of
Kossuth and Mazzini, and British working men sent
their shillings for copies of it. The engraving was once
a proud ornament in thousands of houses. To-day,
I venture to think, I am the only man in London who
displays it on his wall. We forget the heroic days
which gave birth to our freedom ; and there are nations
of Europe which, from their cynical remarks about
England, seem to have equally forgotten that in those
days of fierce persecution England almost alone harboured
and protected their fugitives.
Kossuth passed to America, and in his absence Holy-
oake issued a volume of the speeches he had delivered in
England. The one purpose was to keep the cause of
Hungary before the British mind, for there was more
risk than profit in such ventures, and Kossuth was a
poor speaker of English. Unhappily the Hungarian
leader, on his return, regarded it as an encroachment on
his rights, and there was trouble. With Pulzsky, who
had been Prime Minister of the temporary Hungarian
Eepublic, Holyoake was more intimate. Pulzsky settled
in Kentish Town, and Holyoake often visited him. The
neighbours would have been astonished in those days if
they had known that the crown and royal jewels of
Hungary were kept in boxes underneath a bed in the
cheerful little foreigner's house.
Mazzini also was by temperament aristocratic, and
his mysticism and strong feeling for religion for some
time kept him aloof from Holyoake. He had been in
exile in England from 1837 to 1848. For a year his
spirit had been inflamed by the setting up of a Eepublic
at Rome, and now he was back in London, broken and
A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS 49
melancholy, his large dark eyes shining sadly in his pale,
refined face. He knew Holyoake as an important
member of the Society of Friends of Italy, and, as I said,
he at length approached him, with Kossuth, to ask him
to make a special appeal in the Beasoner. Thereafter
he was more friendly. Though Mazzini was no Chris-
tian, he dreaded "Materialism," and he regarded
Secularism as equivalent to it. He was, however,
forced to recognize in Holyoake a type of character as
fine and idealistic as any that his own ideas could
inspire. Holyoake often breakfasted with him, and
received some of the most interesting of his letters.
A " People's International League " was founded, and
the slow work of preparing the downtrodden nations for
fresh revolutions was organized in London. Meantime
an interesting and important struggle was proceeding in
London itself, and, as Holyoake became closely involved
in it, we may consider it here. It was the fight for the
removal of what were called "the Taxes on Knowledge."
Impatience is a virtue, but it, unhappily, often carries
with it a disinclination to study the facts. As a result,
many of the most virtuously impatient people of our
time do not read history. They have no gratitude to
the great workers of the last century and no knowledge
of what has been accomplished. The great majority of
the workers at the beginning of the last century were
agricultural workers, and their condition was unimagin-
able. When Lord Shaftesbury, whose merits are grossly
exaggerated in modern literature, pleaded eloquently in
the House for the working women and children he
scarcely ever did anything for working men Radicals
angrily asked him what he proposed to do for the
agricultural workers on his father's estates. He was
struck dumb. But even the artisans and factory workers
had, as we saw, a miserable life. Their children died
50 A CHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
like flies in the summer time, and in the frequent periods
of distress the sickness and suffering were appalling.
They submitted, partly, because they were ignorant.
By the middle of the century a larger proportion of
them rather less than half of them could read, but
the Government had a further check on their ambition
to know the world in which they lived. There were a
tax on newspapers, a tax on paper, and a tax on adver-
tisements.
Men like Eichard Oarlile and Henry Hetherington
had made an heroic fight against these taxes earlier in
the century. By these men years in jail were faced
more bravely than some of their successors will face
a five-miles' walk, and there were hundreds to assist
them. More than five hundred Londoners went to jail
for selling Hetherington 's Poor Man's Guardian, which
refused to pay the tax. Holyoake was the successor of
these men, and when a Newspaper Stamp Abolition
Committee was formed in 1849 he entered into close
co-operation with its ingenious secretary, W. Collet.
I need not tell the whole story, but the conclusion of
it must not be omitted from even this slender record of
Holyoake's great work. The Eeasoner was not taxed.
It was not a " newspaper." But the definition of a
"newspaper" was vague, and Holyoake set out to give
Somerset House such tasks in applying their own
definition that they would be willing to drop the tax.
In the summer of 1854 he brought out a very singular
weekly, The Fleet Street Advertiser. It consisted of two
pages. The first was blank ; the second contained the
same news every week, only the order of the paragraphs
was changed. There was, of course, only one customer,
the Eevenue officer. Every week for six months six
copies were gravely sold to him over the counter. It
was undoubtedly a newspaper, and Holyoake politely
A CHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS 51
pressed the authorities to prosecute him. He had, he
cheerfully pointed out, incurred fines amounting to
2,280.
The Crimean War broke out, and he conceived a
bolder measure. He brought out a War Chronicle, and
refused to pay tax on it. He was now confident that
he would go to jail a second time. With painful
memories of Gloucester, he kept a warm cloak and a
little parcel of refreshments under his counter day by
day. He would not allow an assistant to sell the
Chronicle. He served every copy with his own hand.
Still no summons came, and he again pressed the
authorities to prosecute him. By this time they were
thoroughly disgusted with the law which they had to
administer, and the comedy kept Fleet Street in roars
of laughter. " Diplomatic relations between Fleet Street
and Downing Street suspended," Holyoake posted up,
on the lines of a war-bulletin, outside his shop. He
incurred, under the law, fines amounting to about
600,000. He was liable at any moment to lose his
presses and stock, and pass into a fever-stricken jail for
a long period. He goaded the Government to prosecute
him. And in June, 1855, the Government announced
that the tax on papers was abandoned. One need not
add that Holyoake was not the man who reaped the
profit of the cheaper journalism.
The hum of the conspirators continued in the front
room above his shop. It was slow work, desperately
slow work ; and, in spite of all the lessons of history,
some began again to look longingly to what they thought
was the short cut provided by the knife or the bullet.
Holyoake distinguished. War against an oppressive
power he approved. If a monarch left his people no
other outlet of expression than the rifle and gun, Holy-
oake was prepared to supply rifles and guns to such of
52 A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
his people as would rebel. Assassination he did not
advocate. He did not shudder at the very idea while
there were such monarchs as Napoleon III. He knew
scholars, like Savage Landor and Allsop, who then
advocated the assassination of despots. But Holyoake
knew that despots generally find successors, and he felt
that such killing was useless and apt to recoil. Yet we
now find him actually assisting in such a conspiracy.
Among the refugees from the continent who climbed
his stairs at Fleet Street were a French medical man,
Dr. Bernard, and a fiery Italian Apollo named Felice
Orsini. Orsini's portrait, signed by himself, frowns on
me from my wall as I write. He was evidently a living
volcano. He had just escaped, in a way that the Count
of Monte Cristo could not have surpassed and may have
imitated, from a brutal Austrian jail in Italy. His
speech must have been a flow of lava.
And one night Holyoake was asked to meet his friend
Allsop, Dr. Bernard, and Orsini in a hotel near West-
minster Bridge. It bore the very fitting name of
Ginger's Hotel. They showed Holyoake two bombs
metal balls studded with nipples and filled with a
deadly explosive. Would he take these with him on
his next provincial tour and test them ? It was impor-
tant to know what kind of ground they needed to fall
upon to explode. Holyoake promised, and he took the
bombs to his home. One of the most amusing chapters
in his Autobiography is the story of those bombs. He
tells in his inimitable way how he kept them in his
pockets in the train and gave a wide berth to other
passengers ; how he dared not leave them in his lodging
at Sheffield, but took them to the lecture, and placed
them in a bag under the table; how he tried them in
an old quarry near Sheffield and sent to London a
cryptic account of their success.
A CHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS 53
On January 14, 1858, Felice Orsini and three com-
panions flung bombs at Napoleon III. The Emperor
and Empress escaped. Ten innocent people were killed
and hundreds wounded ; and Orsini and a companion
were caught and executed. It was another useless trial
of physical force.
A reward of 200 was put upon the head of
Allsop, who fled to America, and many letters, which
I have read, passed between them. Allsop boasted of
his share in the attempt, and regretted only its failure.
He nowhere speaks of having deceived Holyoake. I
found a letter to Holyoake from another Eadical, Hodge,
of two years later, signed : " A member of the old firm
of January 14." No doubt they did not say to Holyoake
that they meant to kill Napoleon III. They seem, in
fact, to have spoken about the use of the bombs in the
Italian rebellion. But a careful reader of Holyoake's
works will see that he nowhere plainly says that he
believed this. The three men who met him in Ginger's
Hotel were men who believed fanatically that the fate
of Europe depended upon the removal of the French
monarch. Tyrannicide, which a great poet has advo-
cated in our day, had still more distinguished advocates
seventy years ago.
We may conclude from his chapters on this episode
that Holyoake regretted having for once been drawn to
the physical force school. But there was one respect in
which he very strongly believed in physical force. When
Governments like the Austrian, Papal, and Neapolitan
truculently and bloodily prevented their people from
expressing the national will, there was no other way of
securing the fundamental rights of man. Under the
British Constitution, he argued, there was no need for
civil war. An educational campaign could secure the
ballot and manhood suffrage. He was right, as the
54 A CHAPTEE OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
event has proved. But in Italy rebels had only one
weapon, the rifle.
At the beginning of 1859 the cause of the Italians
still drooped. Mazzini haunted the British Museum.
Garibaldi wandered despondently over the globe. Then
Piedmont renewed its war with Austria, and Cavour
authorized Garibaldi to raise a force of volunteers.
Napoleon III again intervened, and for a time the new
hope was dimmed. But in 1860 Garibaldi heard that
there was a rebellion in Sicily, and he and his famous
11 thousand " took ship. The rest is history. The work
went on until the tricolour floated triumphantly over
the whole of Italy.
Holyoake became again a conspirator. He knew
Garibaldi, a fellow Eationalist who had already visited
London ; and in the summer of 1860 there came to his
shop a certain " Captain Styles " with a request from
Garibaldi that volunteers should be raised in London.
Within a month there was a " Garibaldi Fund," with
Holyoake as secretary. A few weeks later the upper
room of the Fleet Street house witnessed the strangest
spectacle it had yet known. Hefty men from all parts
of England were being enrolled there for service in a
rebellion against Naples and the Papacy.
There was little danger in this conspiracy. All
England detested the Papacy in those days. Gladstone
had, in an historic pamphlet, exposed the brutality of
the Papal and Neapolitan administrations, and it was
impossible for Austrian or Papal agents to get any
sympathy. As the war proceeded commanders of British
warships gave groups of their men a few days ashore,
and none asked where they got the wounds they brought
back with them. When a Neapolitan cruiser on the
coast got a chance of a shot at the Garibaldians an
English warship would indolently sail between and stay
A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS 55
there. When Palmerston was indignantly informed in
the House that troops were being recruited in London
for service against a " friendly Power," he airily replied
that he had no right to prevent any party of English gentle-
men from going to see the performances of Mount Etna.
Holyoake improved on the joke. He distributed
blood-red tickets to the " excursionists." As " the
country was unsettled," they would be provided with
"means of self-defence"; and, "with a view of recog-
nizing each other, they will be attired in a picturesque
and uniform costume." He had smiled at jail and
cholera and bombs. He made a jest of war. Eight
hundred and ten men were superbly equipped and
dispatched ; and they arrived just in time to show what
Englishmen could do, before Garibaldi's task came to
an end.
Unfortunately, here again he had sown vexation of
spirit. The bill came to 30,000, and Garibaldi had to
be called upon to pay most of it. All sorts of adven-
turers had been drawn to Naples, and quarrels were
high and unsavoury. At the beginning of 1861 the
volunteers returned, ragged and penniless, and stormed
the Fleet Street house. It took months to clear up the
mess. Yet before the end of that year we find Holy-
oake helping to found a " Garibaldi Italian Unity Com-
mittee " and gathering subscriptions for it.
There was a further sequel. In 1864 Garibaldi came
to England, and men remembered for years the mighty
reception he had ab Portsmouth and London. Garibaldi
himself told Sir J. Stansfeld that " the person he was
most interested in seeing in England" was Holyoake.
But there was a sordid conspiracy to keep Holyoake
away from him ; as if association with the Secularist
leader would be compromising to an Italian who scorned
all Churches ! Holyoake was nearly ejected from the
56 A CHAPTER OF BOMBS AND PLOTS
train. But the quarrel ended by Garibaldi suddenly,
after a conversation with Gladstone, quitting the country.
I have in my larger biography quoted some new docu-
ments on what was at the time regarded as an historical
mystery. Joseph Cowen, Garibaldi's best friend in
England, undoubtedly told Holyoake I have seen the
account, which was written down at the time that
Gladstone asked Garibaldi to leave. Even Lord Morley,
in his monumental Life of Gladstone, endorses the
current statement that Garibaldi was merely reminded
that the strain might injure his health. As Holyoake
wrote at the time, Garibaldi was in perfect health. It
was frivolous. The key to the problem is secret diplo-
macy, not the nerves of a powerful and seasoned soldier.
Once more we have reached what we may regard as
the turning-point of the nineteenth century, the year
1870, and we may briefly fill in the remaining items of
Holyoake's record to that date. The Eeasoner, which
he had sustained for fifteen years, failed in the summer
of 1861. His pen could not rest without some such
entirely free organ, and a few weeks later he started the
Counsellor. He was, of course, doing a good deal of
ordinary journalism in this decade, but it was only in
a paper of his own that he could expound the broad
ideal of human emancipation and enlightenment which
shone as brightly as ever in his mind. The new paper
lasted only a few months, and he then joined other
Secularists on the National Eeformer. As friends had
warned him, it led only to vexatious quarrels, and he
gathered funds and established the Secular World and
Social Economist. But his own world had now greatly
broadened, and he passes into a new phase of social and
political development.
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE (1888)
Facing p. 5&
VI
HOME POLITICS
THE course of events in the fifties has taken us far from
the idea of the reconstruction of England with which
Holyoake had set out upon his public career. For that
we need make no apology. There was not a reformer in
England in those days who was not deeply agitated over
the miseries of Poles, Hungarians, Italians, French, and
even Swiss and Germans. The human struggle went on in
every land, but it was more acute on the Continent than
in England. Conservative as Queen Victoria was, she
would never have sanctioned the bloody and brutal
efforts that were made in half the countries of Europe
to ensure a return to medieval despotism. So Holyoake,
by the force of his own principles, joined the splendid
band of Englishmen from Swinburne to Linton, from
Savage Landor to Watson who helped to win the
final triumph over medieval corruption.
Unlike some of the others, Holyoake saw that kindling
a resentment against injustice abroad was one of the
best preparations for reform in home politics. For the
situation in this country was still one of grave political
injustice and corruption. The overwhelming mass of
the citizens had no share in the control of their collective
affairs. Corrupt practices at elections were almost as
sordid as ever, and there was still no national machinery
for educating the mass of the people and preparing them
for self-government. When Garibaldi won his famous
victories and sealed the doom of Austrian and Papal
tyranny when the sturdy Italian soldier came to
57 E
58 HOME POLITICS
England to remind everybody how they had shared
a struggle against injustice the time had come to return
to home politics. And here once more we get an
interesting illustration of the distinctiveness and inde-
pendence of Holyoake's personality. We shall find the
man who bad been chosen to test bombs for the
foreigner, whose shop had been the meeting-place of the
most desperate radicals of Europe, incurring the warm
anger of the milder Eadicals of his own country and
being misrepresented as a friend of the people's
oppressors.
The acute question in the later fifties was the exten-
sion of the franchise. Naturally, Eadical sentiment
stormily demanded the enfranchisement of every mentally
and morally sane man in the country ; though few then
thought, as Holyoake did, that women had an equal
right. Just as naturally conservative sentiment wished
to keep the workers out of politics, and trusted that
most skilful artist in camouflage, Disraeli, to see that,
if any concession had to be made, it would be qualified
in some way or other. One can, therefore, quite under-
stand the flutter that followed among those with whom
Holyoake had been associated in his foreign agitation
when, in 1858, he spoke boldly in favour of a limited
franchise. In a letter to the Daily Neivs he pleaded
that an "intelligence franchise" should be substituted
for the existing "income franchise." Twice a year
11 Franchise Examiners " were to be sent to every town
and large village, and every aspirant to the vote man
or woman was to have a chance of proving his or her
competence to use it. The subjects might be, he thought,
political economy and English constitutional history.
Those who passed the examination would receive a
certificate which would automatically entitle them to
a vote.
HOME POLITICS 59
The proposal was greeted with equal roars of indigna-
tion and laughter. Holyoake serenely republished his
letter as a pamphlet, an open letter to Lord Russell
(The Workman and the Suffrage], and the anger of the
Radicals increased, while the storm grew worse when
Lord Elcho publicly espoused the proposal, and Lord
Stanley (later Lord Derby) spoke of it in very com-
plimentary language in the House. Sir James Stansfeld,
who would presently be Liberal President of the Board
of Trade, was willing to introduce into the House a Bill
embodying Holyoake's scheme. So these were the
associates of the ex-Chartist and Owenite, the fellow
conspirator of Orsini and Louis Blanc and a hundred
others !
Whether Holyoake's original proposal was " practical
politics," or ever will be practical politics, need not be
considered here. Many would now say that what was
not practical politics in 1860 was probably too good for
the times. In any case, the purity and soundness of
Holyoake's principles are now clear to all, and his bold
assertion of them at such a time was an act of courage
and idealism. Holyoake had found himself confronting
one of the deepest and most serious problems of politics.
His opponents were, on the whole, as sincere as he.
They saw only one principle : that it is the right of
every normal individual to share in the control of the
country. Holyoake saw another principle in addition to
this : that the country has a right to be controlled by
competent persons only. It is the dilemma that will
confront every serious democrat until the obvious solution
is adopted in every civilization that the conditions of
education and life shall be so altered that no normal
man or woman shall remain so ignorant as to be
dangerous.
In the later fifties and early sixties the mass of the
60 HOME POLITICS
people were only slowly emerging from the profound
ignorance and coarseness in which it had pleased their
pastors and masters to keep them for a thousand years.
I find in Holyoake's diary for 1862, for instance, that he
was commissioned by the Newcastle Chronicle to report
the " great " fight of Heenan and Tom King. It is an
extraordinary measure of the general sentiment when
we find a refined and delicate-minded writer able to
follow the brutal and debasing spectacle which a prize-
fight (with naked fists) then was. On every waste plot
of ground I saw it all in an industrial suburb of
Manchester twenty years later men were emulating
the country's idols, King and Heenan. Wealthy and
" educated " people flocked to these spectacles as they
do now to their milder and less repulsive successors.
Violence and drink were the seasoning of life. Any
person who cares to turn back to the journals of that
year, 1862, will find that there was such an epidemic of
garrotting in London that it was unsafe to venture
along Oxford Street unarmed at night.
So, for east-end and west-end alike, Holyoake
demanded some proof of serious personality before a
man should be permitted to choose a representative.
There is a good deal of frothy rhetoric in the language
of his opponents. At that very time, it was notorious,
the great majority of the voters in England literally sold
their votes ; and a large part of those who wanted votes
wanted to sell them (to get from five to fifty guineas at
each general election). No one even questioned these
facts. Many politicians, indeed, resisted reform mainly
on the ground that it would make politics too expensive.
Holyoake at least raised his voice in favour of a pure
political ideal ; and the pure ideal is in the end the only
efficient political factor.
We must not, however, imagine that he was isolated
HOME POLITICS 61
by his pronouncement. He remained during all these
years a very active worker in the Reform Union. He
was London representative of the Northern Union, and
it was he who ook charge of their petition against
corrupt practices at Berwick and got a Committee of
the House appointed. For an outsider to politics he
had a singular influence, which was based solely upon
a recognition of his character. In 1859, when Lord
Palmerston wanted to strengthen his Cabinet by including
John Bright, he asked Holyoake to approach Bright for
him. In 1862 it was largely Holyoake's articles in the
Newcastle Chronicle which secured for Gladstone his
great triumph in the northern city. In 1865, when
there was a general election, he gave considerable
assistance to his old Christian Socialist opponent,
Thomas Hughes, who was candidate for Lambeth, and
to other candidates.
All the time, however, Holyoake's sensitiveness to
real interests and principles kept him on the fringe of
the political world, and made his position even on the
fringe very personal and distinctive. In 1865 he was
elected Vice-President of the Reform League, and there
were few in it whose ideas were more substantially
radical than his. Yet there was a constant muttering
against him. He openly and amiably corresponded with
bishops, the Freethinkers said. He defended and asso-
ciated with peers, the Radicals added. Lord Elcho,
sincere enough in his adoption of Holyoake's political
ideal, but tinged by the atmosphere of his world, was
reported to have said that " there was a large dilution
of beer in the cream of the working classes." In a
public-house this would have been hailed as a witty
expression of an indisputable fact in 1865 ; but it was,
of course, infamous to say such things seriously. Yet
Holyoake brought Lord Elcho under his wing to a
62 HOME POLITICS
Eeform League meeting in St. Martin's Hall, and wrote
to the Times in defence of him.
More amusing still, to us who look back dispassionately
from the heights of half a century later, was an occurrence
in the summer of 1866. It brought more vituperation
than ever upon Holyoake from his Radical opponents
(who were largely spurred on by personal enemies), yet
it merely illustrates once more how inflexibly he held to
his individual sense of duty and natural interest in spite
of popular clamour.
The agitation for an extension of the franchise was
approaching its climax, and the Eeform League sum-
moned a monster meeting in Hyde Park. The Home
Secretary, Walpole, prohibited the meeting. The Presi-
dent of the League, Beales, with Vice-President Holy-
oake and a few other officers, waited on Walpole and
discussed the matter. Walpole was a weak and waver-
ing man, and he left the Leaguers uncertain as to his
final word. Beales said that he allowed the meeting.
Holyoake said that he reserved his decision. At all
events, the League procession, with Holyoake among
the officers at the head of it, marched upon Hyde Park
on the Sunday evening, and London gaily gathered for the
fray. Hawkers sold little bottles of " Walpole' s tears " to
the crowd, and feeling was very high. The gates were
closed and held by the police. The procession went on in
good order to Trafalgar Square, but the crowd tore down
the railings of Hyde Park and made the respectable
metropolis shudder once more in apprehension of revolt.
The League, led by Beales, turned the whole of the
blame upon the detested Home Secretary, and there was
strong feeling when the Government met the onslaught
in the House by announcing that Mr. George Jacob
Holyoake, Vice-President of the League, had been to
the Home Office to testify that Walpole had not
HOME POLITICS 63
authorized the meeting ! The trouble was largely due
to a postal accident. Holyoake had received notice to
attend a second deputation to the Home Office, and had
not received a later notice that the idea was abandoned.
He therefore found himself alone at the Office, and, in
his usual frank and courteous way, he told Walpole's
secretary, who talked with him, his opinion of Walpole's
words. But there was very serious resentment against
him. It was said that he saved the Government.
Shortly afterwards he sat on the platform at the Agricul-
tural Hall and faced 20,000 fire-breathing Eadicals.
He attributes his escape from affront to the fact that
he sat in company with John Stuart Mill ; but there is
plenty of evidence that, except as regards an unthinking
few, he needed no protection.
It is a matter of history how the mighty agitation
ended in one of the most curious " deals " in the inner
world of English political life. Gladstone was forced to
propose a measure of enfranchisement, and the secession
of some of his leading followers like Eobert Lowe
(another friend of Holyoake, the Leaguers would notice)
into their " cave of Adullam " broke his power and let
in Disraeli. But no statesman could now live unless
he granted reform, and in 1867 Disraeli, unblushingly
throwing over his new supporters, extended the franchise
and "dished the Whigs." Eadicals were breathless.
They had got all they hoped for, but they had got it
out of one of the most cynical and insincere movements
in the whole political game. And Holyoake, always
serenely independent, wrote to congratulate Disraeli !
In this case it seems clear that he had not taken time
to study the situation thoroughly. One can only appre-
ciate the personal feature of character which led him,
as usual, to do what he thought proper in complete
disregard of popular clamour.
64 HOME POLITICS
But in the next advance of political improvement
Holyoake took the lead. One of the roots of the pro-
found corruption that still accompanied every election
was that the voting was open. When you bought a
man's vote for ten guineas you could see that he cast it
for you. Tories, Whigs, and, generally, Liberals clung
to this misguided arrangement. Gladstone stoutly
refused to favour the ballot. Even John Stuart Mill
and Thomas Hughes were opposed to it. The manly
voter was to brave the anger of the world and assert his
opinion openly. And so on. Holyoake delivered so
eloquent a speech on the ballot that the League printed
it (A Neio Defence of the Ballot), and the resentment
against him ebbed. It seems, indeed, that he had some
share in the conversion of Gladstone, and therefore in
securing the great reform. He sent Gladstone a copy
of the pamphlet, and he understood, and incautiously
stated, that Gladstone, in acknowledging it, spoke
favourably. Gladstone was annoyed, and repudiated
Holyoake's interpretation ; but within two years he
openly accepted the reform.
Disraeli, with all his skill, could not long maintain
the strange position in which he had placed himself. In
1868 he was defeated, and what came to be known as
the great age of Liberal reform opened. Those of Holy-
oake's opponents who were quite sincere now expected
him to reap the reward of his supposed adhesion to the
" enemies of the people." It became known that Holy-
oake was going to contest a seat. Surely he would be
a Liberal candidate and have the beneficent influence of
the leaders ?
Holyoake's conduct in this interesting phase of his
career could never be calculated in advance. So it
seemed, at least, to the majority of those who were
interested in him. In politics you do not look for
HOME POLITICS 65
simple conduct, and Holyoake's action was always
simple. He was still, essentially, a Chartist, an Owenite,
a rebel. To call it compromise or apostasy because he
had dropped the simple " manhood suffrage " point of
the Charter was merely silly. He had not, in theory,
dropped it. He wanted to see all men and women
enfranchised ; but he wanted them fitted to do more
than sell votes for guineas and beer. If bishops and
peers approved his plan, he had no more objection than
Eobort Owen had had before him to friendly intercourse
with them.
Those who suspected some sort of cringing to the
Liberals in his actions were surprised when he appeared
at Birmingham as an " independent labour candidate."
He was one of the pioneers in that department of
English political life. He opposed both Tories and
Liberals, and called upon the working men of Birmingham
and elsewhere to appoint representatives of their own
class. The Liberals were, he said, " the master class,"
and could not be expected to legislate disinterestedly for
the workers. " A democracy," he said in his election-
address, "is a great trouble. The Conservative is
enraged to have this necessity put upon him ; the Whigs
never meant it to come to this ; and I am not sure that
many of the Eadicals like it." A heavy retort on the
Radicals who had been accusing him of deserting the
workers !
It was curious that even in this Holyoake was merely
following the dictate of his own conscience. He had
very little support among the working men of Birming-
ham, and he very soon withdrew his candidature. His
words were not rhetoric drawn from him in the heat of
a popular campaign. His best friends in Birmingham
were middle-class manufacturers like Joseph Chamber-
lain and Jesse Collings, who would certainly not be
66 HOME POLITICS
flattered by his description of Liberals. No doubt they
were not disturbed by the menace of Holyoake. " At
the General Election of 1868," says the leading historian
of English political life a foreigner, of course " corrupt
practices prevailed to a greater extent than at all the
elections of the preceding half -century." The newly
enfranchised electors sold their votes with a cheerfulness
that made all the rhetoric of the campaign look tawdry.
Both of the great parties bribed and intrigued unscru-
pulously. It was, moreover, the first year of the adop-
tion of the Caucus by the Birmingham Liberals, and no
independent candidate had the slightest chance. Indeed,
all over the country the " friends of the people " were
heavily defeated, and the enfranchised working men sent
to the House of Commons the wealthiest body of national
representatives that had ever yet sat in it. Disraeli, in
spite of his defeat, smiled.
Holyoake did not find consolation in the cynical
observations which it would have been easy for so
sprightly a writer to pen in the circumstances. He did
not hastily thrust his election-manifesto out of sight as
if it were a piece of extremist opportunism a common
enough combination that had failed. He published it
as a pamphlet (Working-class Representation), and put
in it even stronger language. He urged the workers to
organize and create an election fund. They ought, he
said, no longer to cast about for "a rich Eadical," or
" inane people with money bags about them," but choose
their own men and put their pence together to elect
them. Eadicals now thought him as eccentric as they
had done when he pleaded for an " education franchise."
His supporters were Liberals, or even Conservatives ;
and it was no small confirmation of his belief that there
were just as good friends of the people in those ranks
that one really could form a national party of men of
HOME POLITICS 67
goodwill when Mr. Somerset Beaumont (brother-in-law
of Stopford Brooke) sent him fifty pounds towards his
election expenses.
In 1869 a Labour Kepresentation League was formed,
and Holyoake joined the Council of it. He was at the
same time on the Council of the Eeform League, the
Education League, the Financial Eeform Union, and
the Land Tenure Keform Union. He was busy in the
Co-operative Movement, the Secularist Movement, the
Sunday League, and other bodies. But he remained to
the end an outsider to politics, apart from his journalistic
work. He was himself quite conscious that, even if a
constituency seemed likely to secure his return, there
was a fatal bar against his entering the House of
Commons. He would be summoned to take the oath ;
and an oath he would under no circumstances take. He
must remain outside that inner political world in which
men of his high ideals and character were most urgently
needed. For the rest, we need only say that he became
more definitely Liberal in politics as time went on. To
the end he was for the Liberal- Labour candidate, not
the " rich Eadical." But the fine legislation, as he
conceived it, which now came from Mr. Gladstone,
egged on by such men as Chamberlain, Dilke, and
Morley, made an ardent Gladstonian of him.
VII
THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION
HAD Holyoake not constantly reminded the world, by
his championship of the class from which he had risen,
that he had once been a manual worker, probably no
one in London would have suspected it. He had not
even the gift of boisterous oratory which so often lingers
in such cases. In appearance he was always dressed as
if he had been educated in the art of dressing ; and his
high courtesy, refined aspect and manner, and extremely
cultivated vocabulary had not the least trace of having
been acquired. He mingled easily with men whose
names were known, or would be known, all over England,
if not the world John Bright, Chamberlain, Forster,
Mundella, Dilke, J. S. Mill, Morley, Huxley, Tyndall,
Tennyson, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Woolner, Lowe (later
Lord Sherbrooke), Sir J. Stansfeld, Francis Newman,
Stopford Brooke, and many others. Most of these were,
of course, secretly or openly in sympathy with his
Secularism, but his character outweighed his heresy in
the minds of all. He rarely set out in those days to
prove Secularism in words. He lived it.
At this period he lived, as journalists do, in chambers
in town. Mrs. Holyoake and the family had a small
house at Sudbury, and he joined them at the week-ends.
His life was mainly public, and was full of action. He
was parliamentary secretary to Mr. Co wen, at whose
house he often spent the night. From among the
journalists he looked down, day by day, upon the arena
68
THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION 69
which he would fain enter, but from which he was
excluded by the idealist eccentricities of his opinions.
Yet he was much more than a journalist, though he
wrote regularly for the Newcastle Chronicle, the Glasgoiv
Morning Journal, the Echo, the Saturday Post, the
Boston Globe, and the New York Tribune. In 1869 his
name appeared on a handbill with those of Gladstone,
Bright, Mundella, Huxley, and Tyndall, to promote
Workmen's International Exhibitions of an educational
character. His suggestions always carried weight. The
Foreign Office as Lord Clarendon publicly stated, when
it was disputed adopted from him the idea of publishing
special reports on industry abroad for the workers just
as they did for the manufacturers. From him also the
Home Office received the suggestion to have a limelight
burning in the Clock Tower when the House was sitting,
so that members (and their secretaries) need not waste
so much time. In 1871 he obtained a knighthood for
his employer, Cowen.
One of the first reforms to which the Liberals
addressed themselves was education, and there was none
in which Holyoake took a keener interest. It was now
forty years since he had striven to attain an education
in the difficult circumstances even of the family of a
superior artisan. We saw how ho had had to work
twelve hours a day, and then burn the midnight candle
in his attic over books of geometry and history. In
the intervening forty years England had become the
wealthiest, most powerful, and we may say at least of
that time most advanced civilization on the earth.
There was hardly a nation in Europe that had not
oppressed and vilely treated its reformers, and the gates
of England had been opened wide to them all. Yet
the state of education in England even in 1870 was
abominable. Nearly half the children of the country
70 THE STEUGGLE FOE EDUCATION
between the ages of six and ten received no education
whatever ; and what most of the others received was
education in little more than the name, and ceased at
the age of ten.
In the later sixties the demand of education was
thoroughly organized, and the new Parliament was
bound to bring in a great educational measure. That
a national system of education would at last be created
was taken for granted. What Holyoake was chiefly
interested in was that it should be a purely secular
system. For fifty years the Church of England had
hindered the progress of educational reform by insisting
on its own right to control it, and by 1870 the Noncon-
formists were so strong that a grave struggle threatened
if the religious element were to be admitted at all.
The logical solution was secular education, and it may
be said that in 1870 there was a predominant sentiment
on the side of that solution. Holyoake lectured all over
the country and found enthusiastic audiences. His
private correspondence, which he invariably preserved,
illustrates the period in a very interesting way, as it
always does. The letters to him from Mr. Joseph
Chamberlain, for instance, are probably more accurate
pictures of that statesman in his mid-career than any
that have been permitted to dim the shining orthodoxy
of his later years. It was not until 1875 that Chamber-
lain and Holyoake got into friendly correspondence, but
it was mainly in connection with the continued struggle
for secular education. Mr. Chamberlain was nominally
a Unitarian, but the general tone of his letters to Holy-
oake in the seventies very strongly suggests that he was,
like many Agnostics who felt it politic to conceal their
opinions, merely sheltering under the hospitable umbrella
of the least dogmatic of the sects. Eef erring to an
article in the Contemporary, in which Holyoake had
THE STEUGGLE FOB EDUCATION 71
scolded the Radicals for bringing Gladstone's term of
office to a close, Chamberlain made friendly excuses for
his party, and, apropos of education, said :
You have correctly expressed the views of Non-
conformists on the subject of Forster's Bill, but you
have taken no note of the objections of Radical
educationists, like myself, who care nothing about
the sectarian quarrel, except so far as its continued
agitation renders all progress, in the shape of a
national system, impossible.
They became friendly, and in many later letters Mr.
Chamberlain expressed a very high opinion of Holyoake.
In a letter in 1876 he told Holyoake that one of his
aims was " to wrest education out of the hands of priests
of all shades," and he added : " This is really a branch
of the Disestablishment movement, to which I am more
and more convinced the efforts of all Radicals should
now be directed." A little later in the same year Holy-
oake sent him a copy of the new rules of the Secularist
organization, and Mr. Chamberlain assured him that he
had " succeeded admirably."
These are elements of the situation in the seventies
which later writers and biographers have somewhat
obscured. Gladstone, at the same period, occasionally
invited Holyoake to breakfast more frequently at a
later date but Holyoake clearly understood that the
great Liberal statesman was interested in him only as
a social reformer and a fine personality. Chamberlain
seems to have been in actual sympathy with his views ;
though after 1886, when the Irish quarrel occurred,
Holyoake violently severed such relations as he had
with Chamberlain. Sir C. Dilke was in the seventies
another very drastic Rationalist and anti-clerical who
counted in politics. He was a warm admirer of Gambetta
and the Parisian anti-clericals, and he wrote on their
72 THE STEUGGLE FOR EDUCATION
lines a short story, The Fall of Prince Florestan, which
in later years he gladly suffered to remain in oblivion.
Holyoake often dined at his house from the beginning
of the seventies. Jesse Collings, secretary of the
Birmingham Education League, was a warm personal
friend of Holyoake, but a sincere Unitarian. He advo-
cated the retaining of Bible lessons in the schools.
The whole Radical group, in fact, which supplied the
11 ginger " to the Gladstonian Administration was anti-
clerical and generally in favour of secular education.
But the Nonconformists themselves were in those days
so eager for a unified national system of schools that
they were, as a body, willing to accept secular education.
Three hundred Nonconformist clergymen waited on Mr.
Forster at Downing Street and asked him to make the
new education purely secular. Holyoake tells us that
Forster replied that there would be no Bible lessons in
the new schools. But he knew Forster well, and had
himself no illusions about him. He says that Forster
told him, before he entered Gladstone's Cabinet, that he
would not favour secular education. Holyoake's inter-
pretation of Forster's " apostasy " is that he was above
all things ambitious, and that he yielded to clerical
influence in the hope that it would promote his political
career. There is no bitterness in the suggestion. In
1875 Forster contributed twenty pounds to a fund that
was got up to make a presentation to Holyoake.
The fight was lost, as far as secular education was
concerned, though Holyoake and the Radicals maintained
it, with decreasing vigour, for a few years. Holyoake
himself was compelled to abandon it by a prolonged
period of ill-health. Indeed, he was threatened with
blindness, and had to have an operation on the eyes by
Mr. Brudenell-Carter. He was idle for the greater part
of 1875, and he was forced to realize once more the
THE STKUGGLE FOB EDUCATION 73
inconvenient side of the picturesque work of a reformer
the hand-to-mouth existence which leaves him a victim
of every economic accident and opens out the prospect of
old age on very narrow means. As usual, his friends
hurried to his assistance, and a sum of 2,254 was
subscribed. Five hundred pounds were given him to
meet his immediate needs, and an annuity of a hundred
pounds a year was provided with the remainder.
He was now, we must remember, nearly sixty years
old, and both he and his friends must have thought that
the time had come for relaxing his strenuous activity
and thinking of the long rest. None dreamed that he
would live well into the twentieth century. For most
of the men and women of his time he was already a
veteran reformer, and he felt that his life was finely
rounded and rewarded. He had seen most of the older
men pass away with their dreams unfulfilled. Owen
had died in obscurity in 1858. All his colleagues of the
Owenite and Chartist movements were either in unknown
graves or were entirely lost to the public mind. The
men who had condemned him as wrong at every step
were completely forgotten, while he had lived to see
nearly every cause he had espoused well on the way to
victory and the man who had espoused them treated
with distinction.
To him now fell all the social honours for which
ambitious men struggled in the metropolis. He break-
fasted, lunched, and dined with everybody of note.
The sculptor Woolner got him to meet artists. The
Tennysons often asked him to tea. But we have
incidentally named most of the distinguished men
and women of the London of the seventies who were
friendly with him. Mr. (later Sir James) Knowles
knew as well as any man in London who counted or
did not count, and he had little room in his life for
F
74 THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION
enterprising nonentities. When he founded the Nine-
teenth Century in 1877 he wrote to Holyoake : "I
earnestly wish to be allowed to add your name to the
list of my supporters." A year later there was formed
the brilliant debating society which called itself The
Association of Liberal Thinkers. Huxley was President,
and the Vice-Presidents were Professor Tyndall, Pro-
fessor Clifford, Dr. Kalisch (one of the finest orientalists
of the time), and George Jacob Holyoake.
I have heard many explanations of this singular position
of a thorough rebel in politics who dined with the most
eminent statesmen, a thorough rebel in religion who had
the high esteem of Gladstone and met prelates in great
amity. "Compromise" is, of course, a customary expla-
nation. We have seen how at each step of his career he
followed his own singularly independent judgment and
conscience, and left a shoal of critics behind him. But
he made no compromise. He was to the end of his
life an outspoken Agnostic, and he had a large share
in organizing movements for the dissolution of all
theological opinion. He founded Secularism in 1851,
and wrote in defence of Secularism, in the precise sense
in which he had first defined it, all his life. In 1896 he
published his Origin and Nature of Secularism, in which
his heresies were re-affirmed as strongly as ever, and he
sent copies of it to Gladstone and to his clerical friends.
As to politics, he held from the start the Owenite ideal that
co-operation between the middle-class and the workers
was possible and essential, and he thought that he found
the practical form of this in the Co-operative Movement
and the Liberal Party. He compromised in nothing.
More friendly and more truthful is the criticism that
he was a "tuft-hunter." The only weakness of this as
a criticism is that it is not a criticism at all. We have
yet to discover the man who has done something in
THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION 75
public life which merits recognition, yet who declines the
association with distinguished men and women that it
would procure for him. Holyoake liked to meet them.
They were not people with mere names or wealth. They
were the outstanding personalities in a world of great
achievements of every kind. And, beyond the personal
pleasure and interest, Holyoake had a legitimate pride
that the lowliness of his origin and rebelliousness of his
whole career could be so honourably crowned, and the
far deeper and more solemn pride of seeing in this honour
no small triumph of the causes to which he had devoted
his life.
He opened his seventh decade of life with a still
larger and warmer experience of the world's new hospi-
tality to reformers. We have seen that the British
Foreign Office had accepted his suggestion of publishing
reports on labour abroad for English workers. There
was one aspect of this work about which Holyoake was
not satisfied, and he found time, as usual, in spite of
his strenuous life, to make disinterested research into
it. He heard that America was already overstocked
with labour, yet the tide of emigration was as strong as
ever. As early as 1870 he urged the American Social
Science Association to take up the matter. The Canadian
and United States Governments, he thought, ought to
issue an " Emigrants' Guide Book." It was again the
vein of Owenism showing itself in his composition.
Statesmen cared nothing what became of the emigrants
who left them or the immigrants who came to them.
Employers of labour regarded them only as material
for selection. Steamship companies looked upon them
merely as profitable merchandise. Scores of interests
were against any interference, so it was not " practical
politics." But Holyoake continued for nearly twenty
years to press for this humane institution.
76 THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION
In 1879 he resolved to go to America and find out
what the conditions were. From the start his progress
was encouraging. Liverpool pressmen chiefly Sir E.
Russell gave him a parting banquet to speed him on
his way. He may have reflected on the time when he
had left its quays for the Isle of Man decades before,
and only an Owenite or two knew him in the great
city. In America he expected no recognition. A few
Abolitionists like Wendell Phillips would remember
him, but he had no reason to expect enthusiasm.
With Robert Ingersoll, the great American Rationalist,
he was at that time not even acquainted. His old
Owenite friend Hollick was now in medical practice
in New York, and he and one or two others had been
told of Holyoake's coming. But he had changed ship
at the last moment, and he stepped upon the dingy
quays at New York, and pushed through the mean
streets of the lower part of the city to the nearest hotel
a stranger in a very strange land.
Within a day or two the fact of his arrival was
telegraphed to the one hundred and twenty-three
journals of the United States, and he was amazed to
find how well and honourably he was known. One
fears that in this case Holyoake, being a journalist
with a keen eye for the picturesque, had his impressions
formed before he arrived. His letters sparkle with play
upon the familiar (and quite unjustified) reputation of
the Americans for energy. With his customary love of
paradox in light writing, he said that he used to sit in
New York restaurants to see the famous " quick
lunches"; but that, although he saw hundreds enter
and pay bills as they left, he never caught the actual
dispatch of a meal. He pointed the sad contrast of
John Bull :
Like the oxen of Cuyp, he stands meditating on the
THE STEUGGLE FOE EDUCATION 77
edge of his verdant little island, looking as though he
was going to think ; but he is so long about it that
the spectator never feels sure that he did it.
Seriously, Holyoake took a depressing view of England's
commercial future in competition with America, but the
statistics of the last forty years, down to the abnormal
recent period, have not justified his impression of
America's superior vigour. He was nearer the truth
when he described New York as "a Paris taken to
business."
A fine opportunity was offered to his lively pen when
he was taken to the Republican Convention, at Saratoga,
for selecting a candidate of the party for the President-
ship. The distinction of Liberal and Conservative,
which seems to us founded upon a law of nature, did
not appear to fit American politics. Holyoake was
delighted when an American friend explained to him
that the difference between their two historic parties
was : " The Republicans profess to be honest ; the
Democrats don't." From the pantomime of the poli-
tical meeting he went to the Convention of advanced
thinkers at Chautauqua, and saw how dreadfully serious
a serious American can be. Everybody seemed to have
come with " an armful of first principles." After listen-
ing for a few hours, Holyoake retired to draw up a series
of regulations for the conduct of the meetings, which
included such clauses as
That each speaker be allowed reasonable time for
denouncing everybody and everything, and after-
wards it is hoped that everybody will proceed to
business.
That, if more imputation be desired by any
speaker, the proprietor of the hotel shall be requested
to set apart a Howling Room, to which all such
persons shall retire, attended by as many reporters
as can be induced to accompany them.
78 THE STEUGGLE FOE EDUCATION
He liked America, and America liked him. In New
York he was entertained at the Press Club, Manhattan
Liberal Club, and Brooklyn Philosophical Society, and
he made friends for life wherever he went. Wendell
Phillips took enthusiastic care of him at Boston, and
introduced him to Emerson, Josiah Quincy, Col. T. W.
Higginson, G. W. Curtis, and all the notabilities. Colonel
Ingersoll invited him to Washington, and became a most
ardent admirer of his. Ingersoll was very much of an
individualist in his work, and he had no very deep
esteem for English Eationalists generally, but Holyoake's
fine sparkling personality won him. His letters to
Holyoake, for the rest of his life, were full of the most
generous language. He saw that Holyoake had an
opportunity of pushing his work on behalf of emigrants.
President Hayes, General Mussey, General Sharman,
and other leading politicians discussed the matter very
sympathetically with him, and, as was the way of
Washington " the lotus-land of business " did nothing.
Holyoake went to Canada, and saw the Premier, Sir
John Macdonald, who, being a Scotchman, was less
polite and more attentive. In fine, after a ten weeks'
stay, he received a farewell banquet of considerable
distinction at New York. President Hayes sent a letter
of regret that he could not attend. Peter Cooper,
Whitelaw Eeid, E. L. Godkin, Heber Newton, and
many other of the biggest men in New York were
among the eighty guests.
It was a triumph for one who was neither an orator
nor a popular novelist : a pure tribute to personality and
solid work. Holyoake gave many lectures on social
themes, but, though his speeches had much wit and
charm of language, he was without the robust physique
and voice that he would need to address large American
audiences. They appreciated his worth and his work;
THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION 79
and to him it was no small gratification to find that
appreciation so widely extended over a second continent.
After his return to England he urged his proposals on
behalf of emigrants more warmly than ever. Professor
Thorold Rogers pressed the matter on Gladstone's atten-
tion, and Holyoake received a Government grant of a
hundred pounds to return to America and continue his
work. With his daughter Emilie (now Mrs. Holyoake
Marsh) he covered about eight thousand miles of the
United States and Canada, and in the Dominion he had
the satisfaction of seeing his suggestion adopted. His
older friends received him cordially, and many new
admirers were annexed. A committee was formed to
arrange an imposing banquet in his honour at New York
at the completion of his journey, and he could take pride
in the simple words in which they expressed the ground
of the affection and liberality he had experienced among
them :
Your unselfish devotion to human interests, your
wise moral and economic counsels, and the beneficent
practical results you have achieved endear you
greatly to us.
The reformer may, as a great American poet said, have
his crown of thorns, but he does not entirely miss
the roses.
VIII
IN THE MATURE CO-OPEEATIVE MOVEMENT
CHIEF among his services to social progress in the mind
both of America and London was his loyal work for the
Co-operative Movement during thirty years. In much
of his work he was, to the conventional mind, still
" eccentric." He demanded political equality for women.
He pleaded that arbitration should replace war. He
pressed for an entirely systematic and effective national
structure of education. He wanted workers to be
co-partners in the industries at which they worked. In
these and a score of other things, most of which are
now or soon will be platitudes of a properly ordered
national life, he was before his time ; though he held on
with the serene confidence he had learned from Owen,
humanized by the zest of life which so markedly distin-
guished him from the great master of reformers.
With the Co-operative Movement it was different.
Not merely captains of industry and politicians, but
economists of the most humanitarian school, smiled upon
the growth of the Co-operative Movement precisely
because it was an alternative to State Socialism ; and
Socialists naturally (at that time) retorted with hostility
to the Movement. We have to make allowance for this
when we find Holyoake honoured in two continents, in
spite of his heresies, as one of the chief pioneers and
apostles of the Co-operative Movement ; but it is only
part of the truth. The Co-operative Movement, which
is much more than a system of conducting trade on the
80
IN MATURE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 81
consumers' own capital, was a splendid expression of
the new social idealism in the mind of a very large
proportion of the workers. We may add that Holyoake
himself did not agree with the Individualists in chanting
the praises of competition. The Co-operative Movement
seemed to him the ideal economy; no competitive
struggle for individual gain, yet no compulsion.
Here again, as we briefly noticed in an earlier chapter,
his idealism made him a rebel and a fighter within his
own camp. Vast as the Co-operative Movement is
to-day, few know anything about it except its own
members ; and many of the latter are quite at sea about
the great struggle which was maintained in it for nearly
three decades. Mrs. S. Webb has rather misrepresented
it in her history of the Movement. The main issue was
whether the original principles of Co-operation did or
did not imply that the profit of any concern productive
or distributive should be shared by the employees as
well as by the consumers and shareholders. Holyoake
held that this was almost a religious principle of
Co-operation one of the chief features which gave it
some tinge of an idealist nature as contrasted with
ordinary business. He and his friends were, in fact,
known as " the Idealists."
In the Co-operative Movement the strife was long
and, on the part of some of Holyoake's friends, bitter.
But Holyoake was never bitter or malevolent, though
the apostle of ideals is granted much licence in that
direction ; and he remained to the end one of the greatest
figures in the Movement. He wrote regularly, and far
more attractively than any other, in the Co-operative
News, and he was a member of the Newspaper Board
until near the close of his life. He edited the proceed-
ings of the early Congresses, and had the remarkable
record of attending every Congress but two until he
82 IN MATURE CO-OPEEATIVE MOVEMENT
died. When he revived his Eeasoner in 1871, half the
paper was devoted to Co-operation ; and at the annual
Social Science Congresses, which he attended as he did
those of the British Association, he spoke constantly for
the new Movement. He was also a member of the
Southern Section of the Central Board, and lectured for
it in all parts of the country.
His position in the metropolis enabled him to render
services to the growing Movement which few others
could render. We have seen that so many distinguished
people esteemed him largely on the ground that he was
one of the founders and apostles of the Co-operative
Movement. Through them he secured further goodwill
and advantages for it. In 1869 there was an Inter-
national Exhibition at Amsterdam. Mr. Somerset
Beaumont, who often gave Holyoake money for special
advertising of his Co-operative lectures, sent him to
Holland, as many of the new societies were competing
for prizes. The result may be told in the words of
Baron Mackay (Lord Keay), our ambassador at the
Hague, who wrote admiringly to Holyoake : " Whatever
England got at the Amsterdam Exhibition in Class VII
it owed to you." There were twelve awards to English
Co-operative Societies.
Large numbers of influential people were interested
sympathetically in the Movement by Holyoake. Glad-
stone, who learned much from him, said that he looked
to Co-operation as the new influence which should
reconcile the mighty powers of labour and capital."
The Tennysons frequently summoned him for a talk
about it. It was, Mrs. (Lady) Tennyson said, "the
great work of the world," and " we and our sons are
honoured in proportion as we can help it." Holyoake's
History of Co-operation, the first volume of which
appeared in 1875, was a most important contribution to
IN MATUBE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 83
its growing popularity among scholars and statesmen.
It was, Whitelaw Eeid, editor of the Tribune, wrote
from New York, "an invaluable contribution to the
story of the most significant labour movement of recent
times-." Professor Fawcett, Lord Derby (an earnest
friend of the Movement), Mr. G. H. Lewes, and others,
wrote to congratulate Holyoake. Professor Tyndall
was so impressed by the volume that he offered to
present a complete set of his works to the library of any
society that Holyoake cared to name.
We of these comfortable and prosperous times for
such movements are apt to underrate the importance of
distinguished patronage of this kind. But as late as
1879 the Co-operative Movement encountered a danger
with which Holyoake was particularly fitted to cope.
Individualist shopkeepers were alarmed at its growth,
and they succeeded in getting a Parliamentary Com-
mittee appointed to inquire into it. Holyoake at once
offered to give evidence. Attempts, of a kind familiar
in that crooked world, were made to prevent him from
being heard, but he knew the ways of the House, and
he had to be admitted. Lord Northbourne, a member
of the committee, wrote him afterwards that his evidence
was decisive.
In spite of the protracted quarrel about profit-sharing,
Holyoake had constant evidence that he was appreciated.
In 1882 the Congress was held at Oxford, and Lord
Reay presided at the opening meeting in the Sheldonian
Theatre. Professor Goldwin Smith moved a vote of
thanks to the President, and in congratulating the
British democracy on its comparatively peaceful develop-
ment he said that this was due to its leadership :
It has been led by men like Mr. Holyoake, who
were not self-seekers, who were not demagogues,
who had nothing at heart but the real interest of
84 IN MATURE CO-OPERATEVE MOVEMENT
the working classes, and who, when conflicts arose
between employers and employees, were not for
interminable war, to their own profit, but for peace
with justice.
There was a conservative tinge in the passage which
some may have resented, but, whatever injustice may
have been done to other leaders, the just characterization
of Holyoake fired the mighty audience, and the theatre
rang with applause.
From the beginning of the eighties Holyoake had the
deep satisfaction of seeing the Movement spread over the
Continent one of the surest indications that it met a
world-need, and was no mere outcome of temporary
conditions of English life. More than once he had
discussed the Co-operative ideal with refugee democrats
in the fifties and sixties ; with Saffi and Mazzini of Italy,
with Nadaud and Louis Blanc of France, with all who
had a vision of something beyond the enthralling political
issue. They were, for the most part, back in their
homes when his little history of the Rochdale Pioneers,
and of the sequel to that humble beginning, appeared.
He sent copies abroad, and it was translated into
French, Dutch, German, Hungarian, and Italian. It was
a definite foundation-stone of international Co-operation.
France, developing its new and higher life after the
Revolution of 1870, was the first country to have a
large movement of its own. Relics of old Socialist
sentiment of Saint Simonianism and Fourierism and
Communism lingered in it, and crystallized round the
new and more practical ideal. In 1882 we find the
French Minister of the Interior consulting Holyoake
about it. In 1885 he was proud to receive an invitation
to attend the first Congress of the French Co-operators.
He had found time in his busy life to acquire a moderate
knowledge of French, and he at once accepted. He
IN MATURE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 85
went with E. V. Neale, and with him was appointed
Honorary President " of the Congress. He visited the
Fourierist colony at Guise after the Congress, and struck
up a warm friendship with its philanthropic founder,
Godin. It was an almost perfect realization of the
old Owenite ideal of an industrial community.
In the following year, 1886, he received a warm
invitation to the first Italian Congress. " In this labour
of concord among social interests," it ran, "you are
a master having authority The Italian Co-operators
ardently desire your presence, because you will be for
them an affectionate and fraternal guide." The land of
Mazzini and Garibaldi, of Giordano Bruno and the
Renaissance ! His blood quickened at the prospect ;
but it chilled again when he contemplated the journey,
as it was thirty-five years ago, and his ignorance of the
language. They would, however, take no refusal. " We
want your presence at any price," they wrote. Neale
offered to go with him, and he consented. He was now
united with the Christian Socialists, Neale and Hughes,
in the struggle for the idealist element in the Movement,
and until they died he was a cordial friend of both. Neale
had a character no less charming and elevated than his
own, and the two veterans set out on the long adventure.
Neale was seventy-five years old ; Holyoake seventy.
Holyoake's pen was as lively as ever, and his descrip-
tions in the Co-operative Neivs were good reading. They
ran through " English rain, French mist, Belgian fog,
German haze, Swiss moonlight, and Italian sunshine."
Neale was so useful to his companion that Holyoake
was at last moved to write out an advertisement and
stick it on the window of the carriage :
Dismembered Bradshaws taken in.
Pocket-books neatly repaired.
Purses attended to.
86 IN MATUEE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT
At Monza they were to break the journey. Neale
descended, but some blundering official sent Holyoake
back, and he soon found himself travelling alone in a
land of which even the place-names were worse than
Greek to him. He had, for such contingencies, thought-
fully brought a phrase-book ; and Neale had borrowed
it just before he left the train. Voluble passengers
gathered round the Englishman and discussed him. He
took out a copy of the Secolo and pointed to the
announcement of the Congress. A Co-operator present
promptly underlined the name " Holyoake," and sym-
pathy grew to respect. At last they ran into a large
station, and found a soldier who knew a little English.
They were about to send Holyoake back to Monza,
when he bethought himself to ask the name of the
station they were in. It was his destination, Milan.
They put him out on the piazza to wait for a certain
bus ; and the reputation of England rose as the crowd
saw him placidly produce the Daily News and a cigar,
and sit down on the steps of the piazza.
Italy had now 248 societies, with 74,000 members,
so the Congress was declared annual. But before Holy-
oake could return to the land of the sun he was to enjoy
the highest Co-operative honour in his own country.
In a letter of delightful sentiment Neale (who was
secretary of the Union) informed him early in 1887 that
he was to preside at the Congress that year. The honour
was the greater as up to this time only distinguished
outsiders peers, prelates, or economists had been asked
to take the chair. Indeed, Lord Eosebery and the
Archbishop of York were asked in 1887, and Holyoake
was not a little proud to figure as third on such a list.
He gave, as will be imagined, the oration of his life
"the incisive, brilliant, epigrammatic utterance of my
friend Mr. Holyoake," Sir Wilfrid Lawson called it,
IN MATURE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 87
in proposing a vote of thanks. It was more. Naturally
it took the form of an historical survey ; an eloquent
picture of Rochdale and Owenism, of the brave men and
women of the dark early days, of the mighty structure
that now spanned the land. He said little of himself ;
but the great audience rose spontaneously to its feet at
the close and rolled out " He's a Jolly Good Fellow."
He had entered his eighth decade of life, and might well
have retired on such successes. But he still travelled
thousands of miles every year in the interest of Co-oper-
ation, lecturing and attending Board meetings : to say
nothing of his other causes, which will be noticed in the
next chapter. He wrote for the French, Dutch, Italian,
and American Co-operators. He gave counsel to Horace
Plunkett in his difficult early days in Ireland. Even
the Japanese Government consulted him. Very fitly
Chambers' s Encyclopedia invited him, as " the foremost
living exponent of the principle of Co-operation," to
revise the article on the Movement for its forthcoming
edition.
Journeys never daunted his shrewd and cheerful spirit.
In the same year in which he presided at Carlisle he
attended the French Congress at Tours. In the follow-
ing year he added the Presidency of the Brighton Society
to his many active functions, attended the annual
Congress at Dewsbury, and set out in October for the
third Italian Congress. " We venerate you as a
master," they said, imploring him to come ; and Neale
and he responded. It was one of the most memorable
and inspiring tours of his life. Count Aurelio Saffi,
whom he had known in exile, translated Holyoake's
speech to the Italians " a brilliant speech that endowed
political economy with poetry," the press said and then
took him to his estate for a few days. Sam's wife also
was an old friend, a sister of E. H. J. Crawford, who had
88 IN MATUEE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT
helped him with the Garibaldi Legion. At Lendinara
he stayed with another old friend of the fighting days,
Jessie White Mario. At Rome he saw not merely the
world's central treasures of art and history, but the
crown of one of the great combats of his early life. At
Venice he met Browning and Ruskin. Fate granted
him all that he had asked as regards Italy. And every
year afterwards there came to his house at Brighton
a festive cake baked by the Italian Co-operators ; and,
when he slept at last after the long day, his shroud was
the flag of the Garibaldi Legion.
But he had still nearly twenty years of life before
him, and for some time they were to be strenuous years.
In 1884 the " Idealists " had decided to found a distinct
organization, within the Co-operative Movement, to push
the idea of profit-sharing. Mrs. Webb's history rather
gives the reader the impression that Holyoake and his
friends were a very fervent and small minority, whom
the bulk of the Movement regarded as amiable cranks.
The impression is quite wrong. The Labour Association
for the Promotion of Co-operative Production (the fore-
runner of the Labour Co-Partnership Association) was
founded by 250 delegates to the annual Congress at
Derby. Neale was its leader, Hughes its chief fighting
man ; and year by year the most distinguished Presidents
of the Congress spoke in favour of co-partnership. Neale
remained secretary of the Union, and wanted no hostility.
The new body was to be chiefly propagandist, -though it
would inspire the founding of workshops in which the
employees should share the control and the profits ;
and any informed person will recognize here one of the
most advanced Labour ideals of our own time.
Holyoake did not like even the appearance of disrup-
tion which the new movement bore, and for two years
he took no prominent part in it. In 1886 he joined its
Photo by Mills, HampstoaJ
THE MEMORIAL ON G. J. HOLYOAKE'S GRAVE IN
HIGHGATE CEMETERY
Facing p.
IN MATUEE CO-OPEBATIVE MOVEMENT 89
executive, and from that date until his death he had a
large influence on the fortunes of the Co-Partnership
Movement. We need not here tell all the details of the
great fight which enlivened the annual Congresses until
1896. Instead of being a small body, the Idealists
dominated the Congress for several years, and got a
resolution passed that the profit-sharing scheme should
be recommended to all societies. Neale died in 1892,
profoundly respected and regretted by Holyoake, and
Hughes pressed for more violent action. He had all
the pugnacity of Tom Brown to the end of his life, and
Holyoake's correspondence with him is a constant and
wise moderation of his ardour. It was a strange issue
of things for the veteran Christian Socialist to find
himself looking to the Secularist to keep the idealist
element alive in the Movement. Hughes passed away
in 1896, and the younger men decided to ruffle the
temper of the annual Congress no longer. Co-Partner-
ship became a separate movement, and Holyoake was
its " Grand Old Man " until he died.
He was, indeed, now indisputably the Grand Old
Man of the whole Co-operative Movement. Hardly a
man whose name was well known survived besides
himself from the heroic days, and he had a record of
service and achievement that none could hope to equal
In 1891 he wrote his Co-operative Movement To-day,
which was included in Gibbins's series of " Social
Questions of To-day." In 1892, when the Congress
was held at Rochdale, he addressed a great crowd in the
cemetery, over the graves of Cooper and Smithies. It
seemed incredible to the young that forty-nine years
earlier Holyoake himself had put the Owenite germ of
the Co-operative Movement into the minds of these
venerated Pioneers. The Milanese Co-operators struck
a bronze medal in honour of the Pioneers, and sent
G
90 IN MATURE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT
Holyoake a replica of it. Another bronze medal came
shortly afterwards from the Musee Social at Paris.
The crowning honour and consolation fell in 1895.
The International Co-operative Alliance had arisen, and
the first International Congress was held in London.
Delegates came from France, Italy, Belgium, Germany,
Austria, Holland, Rumania, and the United States.
England had now 1,730 societies, a million and a-half
members, and an annual turnover of more than sixty
million sterling. Earl Grey presided, and, in calling
upon Holyoake to speak, he described him as "the
Father of Co-operation." None would gainsay that;
and it was a child of whom one might be proud. It
would not be said of him, as it was said of Owen : " His
good works were interred even before his bones." Earl
Grey was a warmer personal admirer of Holyoake than
any of them knew, and he was a judge of men. At the
Crystal Palace in 1898 Earl Grey, after a speech,
received a little pencil note from Holyoake congratulating
him. The aged statesman wrote something on it, and
asked those about him on the platform to pass it back
to Holyoake. His message to Holyoake was : " I should
be very proud if you would put your signature and the
date to this paper I should like to keep it as an
autograph." But we shall see later an even stronger
expression of his admiration.
One by one, as the century drew near its end,
Holyoake resigned his active functions. He had never
been a sleeping partner in any of the scores of idealist
businesses whose executive he had joined. He had now
entered upon his ninth decade of life, and it would have
been folly to try to keep up his activity. Yearly, however,
his striking personality appeared in the front row on the
platform at each Congress, and his cheerful and carefully
chosen words hailed the annual extensions of the Move-
IN MATUEE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT 91
ment. He had completed fifty years of service in it ;
and to him it was a symbol of the more prosperous,
more self-conscious, democracy which the labours and
sacrifices of himself and his colleagues had brought to
succeed the cowed and downtrodden people of his
youth.
IX
THE CROWNING PHASE
IN order to give a rounded picture of Holyoake's intimate
connection with one of the most successful creations of
the new social spirit we have run on over several decades
of his later life. The defect of this is that it does not
represent the full activity, the broad idealism, the
persistent element of courage in his life at the time.
He was very far from being merely a Co-operator at
any time. Half the world, indeed, thought of him
mainly as the founder of Secularism. To others he was
a shrewd and effective political worker of the Gladstonian
school. To others But a more continuous chronicle
of his days after he had passed the sixtieth milestone of
his course will better show the fullness of his life.
On returning from his second trip to America he had
many small proofs that the long struggle was culminating
in victory. An amusing illustration was that the
manager of some Turkish baths asked his influence to
obtain a good position in America. " A movement of
Holyoake's finger," a client of some distinction had told
him, was all that he required. Mr. Cyril Herbert, son
of the painter, asked him to help in getting one of his
father's pictures accepted by the American Congress.
Henry George, from the other side, requested Holyoake's
aid in placing his new book, The Irish Land Question,
on the British market. Froude, the historian, entered
the large circle of his distinguished acquaintances as a
result of the tour. Holyoake had visited Carlyle's
92
THE CEOWNING PHASE 93
sister, Mrs. Harming, in Canada, and had received from
her some documents for Froude. It was the time of
the unhappy squabble over Mrs. Carlyle, and Mrs.
Hanning considered that Froude was right. " My
brother was always for the truth, and so am I," she
wrote to Holyoake. It led to friendly relations with
Froude.
Holyoake's immediate task after returning to London
was to write a biography of Joseph Eayner Stephens.
Before the time of Kingsley there was only one clergy-
man in England who took any prominent part in the
reform movement Stephens. He was at first quite the
ordinary type of country parson, a bluff Tory and
Eoyalist ; but the horrors of the factory system, which
Owen forced upon the attention of at least part of the
country, stung him into action. And there was no half-
heartedness about his conduct. His language almost
equalled that of Feargus O'Connor. Holyoake had
known him well, and it was a labour of love for him
to depict this singular Tory clergyman defying his eccle-
siastical authorities and lashing the vile industrial
system of the time. But the public had already
forgotten those days and the men who had changed
them. Holyoake turned to the tasks of the hour.
Had he been the man whom some of the more narrow-
minded of his critics described, Holyoake would now
have accepted the hand which respectability tendered
him from every side and confined himself to tasks of
which all approved. The broad Secularist ideal which
he had inherited, without the name, from Owen would
easily lend itself to such an adjustment of his life to
the new conditions. It meant, positively, that men and
women must concern themselves with the betterment of
this world. Like the ideal of the wisest and ripest
thinker of ancient Athens, Epicurus, it glanced at
94 THE CEOWNING PHASE
theologies only as distracting systems which diverted
energy from this world. In the full flood of constructive
social and political work after 1870 a man might easily
persuade himself that these theologies were no longer a
real element of distraction. Clergymen were joining in
great secular tasks everywhere. Bishops presided at
Co-operative Congresses. Heretics were invited to the
tables of the greatest statesmen. One could easily be
tempted to believe that the real reason for criticizing
theology had ceased.
It is an important part of the study of Holyoake's
personality that he never at any time yielded to this
very natural suggestion of a change of policy. It is the
more creditable as he made very little of his income by
Secularist work in the narrower sense. Unpopular
work of that kind has usually to be done by men who
do nothing else. It is the man who attempts other
work in addition to it who has to pay the price; and
nine-tenths of Holyoake's time was occupied with other
things. But he would not abandon a task which he felt
to be included in his duty ; though it was still the most
unpopular of all propagandas, and, curiously enough, it
brought him more trouble from non-Christians than
from Christians.
What sustained him most in this section of his work
was the high esteem of Robert Ingersoll. Every man
who was active in the popular Rationalist movement in
England had a profound respect for the American
orator. His judgment of men was decisive ; his serious
praise mere compliments he tossed lightly enough
was a thing to win. He was not only one of America's
foremost barristers, but he was a man of the strictest
ideals and warmest sentiments. For Holyoake he had
such admiration as he bestowed upon the few and elect.
It will be enough to quote a few sentences from the
THE CBOWNING PHASE 95
glowing letters which he wrote to Holyoake at times
when Holyoake was being criticized by English Secu-
larists :
You are the model man. You are so kind, candid,
just, forgiving, and generous, and withal so uncom-
promising, so perfectly true to conviction, so ready
to do and to suffer for the right, so severe with
yourself and so easy with others, that we cannot
help admiring and loving you I know what you
are, and how infinitely true how unspeakably
honest and brave you have been, are, and always
will be. There is no living man for whom I have
greater respect and admiration To see your
writing on an envelope sends a thrill through my
blood. I feel the grasp of your hand, and for an
instant look into your eyes You have shown me
such a great and generous heart such a clear head
such serenity such candour such trust, after
all, in the blundering world, and in even the accidents
of this wondrous succession of stumbles towards the
right.
As Ingersoll did not hesitate to write these things in
American periodicals which reproduced some of the
English criticisms of Holyoake, his opinion was known ;
and to Holyoake it was compensation enough for the
inevitable hostilities and meannesses which occur in
every movement in the world where two or three strong
personalities are more or less in a position of rivalry.
Narrow-minded people professed to be puzzled that
Churchmen like Gladstone, and even bishops, avowed
the same esteem as Ingersoll. It is really a remarkable
tribute to Holyoake's character; but it happens that just
about this time he did something which very easily
explains the opinion of Gladstone and others. I once
heard an estimable social worker, but a man who had
lived much among Holyoake's opponents, say : " Holy-
oake never did a generous action in his life." I have,
96 THE CROWNING PHASE
I think, recorded many, but the following incident of
the year 1881, which I rescued from the oblivion to
which Holyoake himself had committed it, will suffice.
Holyoake did not make the income which his con-
siderable literary and journalistic skill entitled him to
expect, and in 1881 he was approaching the fateful
" three score years and ten." Some of his friends there-
fore represented to Mr. Gladstone that there was no
more fitting candidate for a Civil List pension than one
who had such a record of service connected with his
name. The amiable little intrigue, if one may so call it,
was proceeding quite satisfactorily when its promoters
received a surprising letter from Holyoake. He had
recently found his old Chartist colleague Thomas Cooper
ending his days in poverty. Cooper had deserted early
Secularism (with which he never entirely agreed) for
a liberal Christian faith, and his name was constantly
flung at Holyoake as that of the chief seceder to the
Church from his views. He remained friendly with
Cooper, and in 1881 found him living at Lincoln in great
distress. He at once wrote to those who were pressing
for an annuity for himself to say that it must be trans-
ferred to Cooper. He saw Mundella and Forster, and
induced them to work for this. He then wrote direct to
Gladstone, and, in a letter of singular delicacy, dignity,
and self-sacrifice, represented that Cooper "going out
in his seventy-sixth year to preach Christianity, to which
he is devoted, in inclement weather " was a fit subject
for a pension ; and he positively refused to accept any-
thing himself. He concluded :
I have always taught self-help and self-reliance
with the force of a passion. I always lived within
my means. When I had none, I never had a debt.
I have never appeared among those who sought
anything for themselves, and, unless blindness comes
THE CEOWNING PHASE 97
again, or decay finds me helpless, I should invalidate
what I have taught by accepting public aid.
Gladstone read the letter at the next Cabinet meeting.
One who was present told Holyoake that the Premier
feelingly remarked that he had "never received a like
one before." To Holyoake himself Gladstone wrote
that " it heightens the respect and regard which I have
felt for you ever since I have had the advantage of
knowing you." A grant was made to Cooper; none to
Holyoake though he might never again have his name
submitted to so friendly a Cabinet. Gladstone in time
learned more that surprised him. He learned that
Holyoake bought a large-type Bible for his mother in
her later years, and used to read it to her. He learned
that a clergyman at Harrow recommended an old lady
to read the Bible, but did not provide the spectacles
without which she could not read it ; and Holyoake
bought the spectacles. These things moved the Christian
statesman to say something in a letter to Holyoake in
1897 that Lord Morley will pardon me for saying this
is one of the best points omitted from his biography.
He spoke of " the superiority to myself and sometimes
to others besides myself in moral tone in persons hold-
ing (what I think) inferior beliefs."
On such things, not on any compromise for Holyoake
very plainly discussed religion with Gladstone, and sent
him his most outspoken writings was based the high
esteem of Holyoake in the mind of eminent Christians.
It is therefore unnecessary to speak at any length of the
friction which Holyoake had with Secular colleagues.
It is to his honour that, though every attempt to
co-operate was perversely frustrated, and friends strongly
pressed this fact on him, Holyoake repeatedly tried to
restore Secularism to its original meaning. In the early
eighties he collaborated for a short time with Mr. Foote
98 THE CROWNING PHASE
in the British Secular Union, but he found vulgarity
permitted, and he withdrew. In 1883 Mr. Foote was,
as is well known, condemned to a year in prison a
brutal sentence for lack of taste and there was much
grumbling because Holyoake would not sign a petition
which asked for " mercy." The phrase was, of course,
merely formal ; but we have seen that Holyoake would
never condone insincerities even if they were merely
formal. He wrote a personal and manly letter to the
Home Secretary, Sir W. Vernon Harcourt, sternly
asking for justice, not mercy ; and in it he claimed that
Mr. Foote had merely followed his own sense of duty.
He afterwards spoke at meetings for the repeal of the
Blasphemy Laws.
There was a sequel of some interest. The original
charge against Mr. Foote had (wrongly) included Mr.
Bradlaugh, and it came on soon afterwards before the
Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge. The moderation of
Lord Coleridge's ruling and conduct of the case surprised
Eationalists as much as the pitiful behaviour of Mr.
Justice North had angered them. Holyoake wrote, as
was his custom, to express his appreciation to Lord
Coleridge. He did this the more readily as he had used
hard words about Lord Coleridge thirty years before in
connection with another trial for blasphemy in which
Coleridge had been prosecuting counsel. Lord Coleridge
replied politely, but he evidently resented the suggestion
that his conduct had changed. " I cannot," he said a
strange thing for a Lord Chief Justice to say " expect
my countrymen to be at the pains to study the character
of so very unimportant a person as myself." A friendly
correspondence ensued, and Holyoake found another
eminent admirer. " The world would be a better place
if all men were as fair and honourable as you," he wrote
to Holyoake. The chief interest of the matter is that
THE CROWNING PHASE 99
Holyoake throughout assumed that Lord Coleridge was a
Christian ; and one can imagine his astonishment if he had
read the life of Baron Bramwell in 1898 (after Coleridge's
death) and learned from the correspondence of the two
great judges that both of them had completely discarded
11 ecclesiastical Christianity " (as Lord Coleridge called
the current creed) decades before. It would have
encouraged Holyoake to work for a state of things in
which all men could freely state their opinions.
In 1883 Holyoake once more dissociated himself from
other Secularist leaders, and founded The Present Day,
a monthly which ran for three years. " I know that
nothing unworthy of the pen of a gentleman will be
published in your paper," Professor Tyndall wrote, in
subscribing to it. The aim was to preach Secularism as
Holyoake first conceived it. Co-operation and other
" secular " matters were discussed in the same proportion
as questions of religious controversy. But the public
which shared that broad ideal was small. " I have,"
Professor F. Newman wrote, " all along esteemed your
uprightness, and believed you in your sphere to be a
valuable worker and an aid towards truth." These
select spirits could not support a paper. Holyoake's
opponents were right in principle, if questionable in
taste. Criticism of theology could not be blended with
social work. The paper died in the odour of sanctity
for Holyoake was gratified to find himself appointed an
honorary member of the Cobden Club.
In the first month of 1884 Mrs. Holyoake died. When
she had begun to fail Holyoake brought her to Brighton
and cared tenderly for her. It was nearly half a century
since she had put out with him in his frail vessel on the
stormy sea of early Victorian propagandism. She had
been proud of his success and distinction; and on his
part he had never attempted to make a Secularist of her.
100 THE CKOWNING PHASE
She remained substantially a Unitarian, though she
expressed a wish that there should be no religious rites
at her funeral. Stopford Brooke was asked to speak,
but was unavailable, and Holyoake conducted such a
service as she desired. He read a page of the Bible
the conversation of the angel Uriel and the prophet
Esdras and a letter that Stopford Brooke had written.
Then he spoke a few words, and Mr. Collet sang Harriet
Martineau's humanitarian hymn, Beneath the Starry
Arch. Another link with the world to which he essen-
tially belonged was broken.
He belonged, that is to say, in his entire history to
the fighting days before 1870, but one must not imagine
him a veteran resting on the farm and living on recol-
lections of remote victories. He was identified with
every living cause of the end of the nineteenth century,
and his activity was still very considerable. It was
(1884) the year of the South Kensington Exhibition, and
letters of his to the press secured a "refuge" (the first
of its kind) in the middle of the busy street near the
Exhibition. He was busy, also, agitating for the opening
to the children of the poor of some fields belonging to
Lambeth Palace. He was busy in the Co-operative
Movement, as we have seen. He was, as we shall see,
about to make a new attempt to enter Parliament. And
in the same year (1884) he brought to a successful
conclusion one of the agitations that he had maintained
tenaciously for several decades, of which it will be
interesting to say a few words.
Co-operators know that they owe many things to
Holyoake, but few of them know, when they go to their
annual congresses or on local excursions, that he was one
of the great fighters for cheap travel. Trains, when they
were invented, had been put on a level with stage-
coaches as far as taxation was concerned. The tax had
THE CROWNING PHASE 101
in 1842 been reduced to five per cent.; but it was an
infamous tax on poor people, and there was constant
agitation, In 1844 the Government passed a " Cheap
Trains Act"; but this merely compelled railway com-
panies to run one train each day at a penny a mile, and
it was to stop at every station. In 1874 the Board of
Trade modified this, but its action was illegal. Holyoake
and his friends formed a Travelling Tax Abolition Com-
mittee, and prepared their practised weapons. The
secretary was Mr. Collet, Holyoake's valiant colleague
in the " Taxes on Knowledge " campaign. Holyoake
was chairman, and for ten years he worked hard at this
unremunerative task. The tax on third-class fares was
abolished largely owing to Holyoake's private pressure
on the Home Secretary in 1884, but the Committee
continued until the entire tax was withdrawn. Our
generation is too busy to think of the men who did these
things. The only recognition that Holyoake received
was a free pass on the Midland Railway.
We saw that Holyoake's sacrifice in regard to the
annuity was all the greater because at that moment he
would certainly have received it, whereas the turn of the
political wheel might bring in at any time an unfriendly
Administration. As things were, he was highly esteemed
by, and friendly with, Gladstone, Chamberlain, Forster,
Childers, Mundella, James, Morley, and Dilke. The
Liberals had been in power again since 1880, but the
Irish trouble was just appearing stormily on the horizon.
Holyoake followed Gladstone through every phase of it,
except that, with his recollection of fights against force
in the early part of the century, he never approved of
coercion. It seemed, in any case, a suitable time for
a fresh attempt to enter the House, and in 1884 a
vacancy occurred at Leicester.
Holyoake was well known at Leicester, which was
102 THE CROWNING PHASE
then one of the most progressive towns in England. It
was a busy Co-operative centre, and it had a Secular
Society, with handsome premises, that was from the
start, and remains to-day, " Secular " in Holyoake's
broad conception of the term. These were not precisely
recommendations to the general electorate, yet Holyoake
was not mistaken in his estimate. Knowing that he
would under no circumstances take the oath, he must
have had a rather vague idea as to how he would enter
Parliament if he were elected ; and at that particular
time, when Gladstone needed support, constituencies
would not care for merely nominal representatives.
There must have been some understanding which I have
been unable to trace. The fact is that Holyoake offered
himself to the Liberal Council as candidate. "If you
think it worth while," he said, in his distinctive manner,
"to assist in opening a door into Parliament through
which a gentleman and an honest man can enter without
shame and humiliation, I offer you my services." The
other names before the Council were Passmore Edwards,
J. Allanson Picton, Frederic Harrison, Joseph Arch, and
Herbert Spencer ! A Secularist and Co-operator
Liberal shopkeepers detested a prominent Co-operator
worse than a Secularist would have little chance, one
would think, in such competition ; yet Holyoake got
fifty votes on the Council, and no candidate got a
hundred.
He issued an election address, but left the matter
there. His Liberal friends were clearly not disposed to
have on their hands a second struggle over the oath.
Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, with whom he dined occa-
sionally and corresponded much, wrote him : " Whatever
happens at Leicester, I shall always feel the greatest
respect for your consistency, courage, and integrity."
Two years later Mr. Chamberlain dissented from Glad-
THE CEOWNING PHASE 103
stone on the Irish question, and Holyoake spoke angrily
of him as " the quick-change variety artist of the political
stage." He does not seem to have patiently studied
Chamberlain's position, and he, of course, did not know
what we know to-day about the development of Glad-
stone's Irish policy. Chamberlain retorted by making
a handsome subscription to the fund for purchasing an
annuity for Holyoake in 1889.
His extant correspondence shows that Holyoake was
more active in politics than was generally realized at
the time. There are many letters from men who ask
him to find constituencies, and from constituencies which
ask him to find men. The conditions of the political
world had to some extent beaten him. He had to find
men with money ; and at times his vigilance in looking
to their other qualifications was deceived. There was
an amusing case at Brighton. Holyoake seems for
many years to have had his eye on Brighton as a good
place for agitators to go to before they die. He often
stayed there with friends, and he was interested in civic
affairs. In 1882 he seems to have aspired to become
a Brighton alderman, as there is a letter from a local
friend saying : "I am very much afraid that you are not
eligible for an aldermanship in our august body, as we
only appoint those who know not how to do anything."
At the General Election of 1880 the Brighton Liberal
Council privately consulted him as to the qualifications
of a certain candidate. The financial qualifications were
excellent, but Holyoake, as usual, made conscientious
inquiries about the man. He was assured by Lord
Morley (then Mr. Morley) that they need not hesitate,
and the gentleman was elected. To their dismay the
new member soon afterwards changed his political com-
plexion, but retained his seat. Holyoake was now
invited to help them to eject this " parliamentary presti-
104 THE CEOWNING PHASE
digitator who was performing at Brighton in a patent
reversible overcoat," as he put it. Chamberlain spoke,
more plainly, of the man's " brazen impudence." For
the next election Holyoake secured for them an excellent
candidate in the Lord Mayor of London. The letters
show clearly that the affair was left entirely to him. In
1889 Sir Eobert Peel contested the seat for the Liberals,
and Holyoake seems to have been as active as ever.
" I really feel most grateful," Sir Kobert wrote him after
the election, " for your ever-present countenance and
support, and for the warm-hearted sympathy you have
shown to me during this arduous contest."
The Irish schism, the rending of the Liberal world in
which he had seen the practical realization of his social
ideals, detached him to some extent from political life.
He made new friends among the Irish leaders, and was
to the end a zealous Liberal ; but the group of personali-
ties to which he had been attached was bitterly divided.
The right to affirm instead of taking an oath was won,
but it came too late for him. One may doubt, however,
if he would ever have figured prominently in Parliament.
His gifts were not of the robust type that secures success
in that field. He was not made for the world of
" practical politics "; and after the close of what he
regarded as the great Gladstonian constructive period,
when the parliamentary game of "ins and outs" was
resumed, he realized that the sphere in which he had
worked, and still worked, was a greater and more
inspiring world in the best sense of the word. He
passed into the phase of reminiscences, of rest, of
tranquil enjoyment of the reward.
A SUNLIT AGE
IN 1886 Holyoake married a second time, and he took
the house at Brighton, Eastern Lodge, where he was to
spend the last, and not least happy, two decades of his
life. Neighbours may, as he was now seventy years old,
have considered it a judicious retirement. Holyoake
himself conceived that he had merely " moved into the
suburbs." Every admirer of his must have read the fine
work of Mr. C. W. F. Goss, Librarian of the Bishopsgate
Institute, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of
G. J. Holyoake (1908) ; a labour of love if ever there
was one, and an extraordinary literary and journalistic
record. Not the least remarkable feature of it is the
volume and variety of work done by Holyoake after his
seventieth birthday. And this vast amount of good
writing was only half his work. He was, we saw, as
busy as ever in the Co-operative Movement and the
Co-partnership Movement ; and we shall find him taking
on half-a-dozen new committees or councils in the next
twenty years. He took a keen interest in Liberal,
Labour, and Co-operative affairs at Brighton, and
founded a "Civic Centre" in which the workers in
these and other movements might meet. We shall
find him at the age of eighty wielding a vigorous pen
on behalf of the pier bandsmen and their trade union.
We shall find him near the age of ninety suffering the
seizure of his furniture as a " passive resistor " and
haranguing a crowd on the beach over the iniquity of
the education rate.
105 H
106 A SUNLIT AGE
His admirers thought that the time had come to
augment his comfort, if he would not curtail his labour,
and the collecting-box was sent round once more. Dr.
Joseph Parker, Mr. Thomas Burt, and Mr. Eobert
Applegarth were on the committee. They got 700,
part of which was invested in a new annuity of 40.
The Manchester Branch of the Co-operative Wholesale
Society very generously considering how often he had
felt bound to criticize it sent 50. The Victoria Dramatic
Club (employees of the Civil Service Supply Association)
raised 150 by a performance of Caste. Holyoake now
* told his friends that he would be ashamed to die within
a reasonable number of years of their purchasing an
annuity for him. In his printed thanks he said : " After
seventy-two years of life a man bacomes interested in it,
and is pardonably curious to see how some of his specu-
lations will turn out."
The name of Dr. Joseph Parker in connection with
that of the founder of Secularism surprised many,
but they were cordial friends, and the friendship did
honour to both. We shall see presently how intimately
Dr. Parker would write to Holyoake. The Eev. K. J.
Campbell was then at Brighton, and he also was a friend
of Holyoake. The Rev. Hugh Price Hughes was another
clerical friend. Such friendships never restricted Holy-
oake's action for a moment. We shall see that this was
precisely the most outspoken decade of his life in regard
to religion since his early manhood.
Nor was there any shade of compromise on the
political side. He was now definitely a Liberal, and a
Brighton Liberal. Radical critics sneered. But he was
a Liberal of a peculiar type. Once settled in Eastern
Lodge, he opened the trunks of papers and documents
which contained the story of his long fighting life, and
began to write his reminiscences, This was the origin
A SUNLIT AGE 107
of his Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life, one of the most
interesting and entertaining autobiographies, with the
smallest amount of egoism in it, ever written. The
title was suggested by Joseph Cowen, who accepted the
little sketches which compose it for the Newcastle
Chronicle. Holyoake was too drastic for Cowen, who
rejected several chapters and modified others. One of
the most amusing rejections in view of the occasional
suggestion of compromise on Holyoake's part was that
of a chapter on tyrannicide. When Cowen would not
have it, Holyoake sent it to the London Chronicle. The
acting editor was Mr. Adams, who had in 1858 asked
Holyoake to publish for him a pamphlet on tyrannicide.
Holyoake had refused ; and he was now amused to learn
that Adams thought he " put the case for tyrannicide
only too well," and rejected his article. Holyoake boldly
published it as a pamphlet (Murder as a Mode of Progress).
He had, in fact, so little idea of surrendering to the
respectability of Brighton that in 1889 he outraged it by
beginning to publish an " occasional magazine " with
the title (anticipating Mr. H. G. Wells) The Universal
Bepublic !
Curiously enough, at the very time when the veteran
agitator was flaunting his Eepublican colours in the eyes
of Brighton and the metropolis, his friends in the north
were startled by the categorical assurance in a Lancashire
paper that he had "embraced the Eoman Catholic faith."
The strange rumour seems to have grown out of a remi-
niscence he had published in The Present Day in 1886.
Among his papers he had, to his own surprise, discovered
a card of membership of an Orange lodge. He had been
enrolled in 1866, but could not even remember the cir-
cumstances. After thus telling that he was an Orangeman ,
he went on to speak of a friendly experience with Catholics.
A friend had taken him to the house of the Catholic
108 A SUNLIT AGE
architect Pugin, and he had given a small donation to
an orphanage maintained by Pugin. With their usual
feverish eagerness for " conversions," the Catholics had
regarded this as a hopeful sign, and had collected 15 to
pay for masses for Holyoake's enlightenment.
Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life appeared in two
volumes in 1892, and ran to five editions. The shower
of congratulations included more than one message that
moved him. One was from Sir Henry Parkes, the great
Australian statesman, reminding him that they had been
school-fellows at the Birmingham Mechanics' Institute
" poor boys together on the streets of Birmingham,"
he put it half a century earlier. Another was from
the manager of the Eagle Foundry at Birmingham.
There was now only one man left in it from the days
when Holyoake had worked there, but all were proud
of him. Another highly appreciative letter was from
Carron Wright, the famous statistician of the Washington
Department of Labour; another was from Professor
Goldwin Smith in Canada. It was a long stretch from the
Foundry to such honours as now fell on him, particularly
by the road he had chosen.
He chose just this time for re-affirming the most
drastic of his heresies Republicanism and Rationalism.
In 1887 he suggested to Mr. Braekstad, the assistant
editor of Black and White (and later Norwegian Vice-
Consul), that there ought to be a Central Bureau for
Freethinkers." In 1890, when he found a practical
collaborator in Mr. Charles A. Watts, the Propagandist
Press Committee was founded, with Holyoake as
Chairman. He remained Chairman when it became
the Rationalist Press Committee, and ultimately the
Rationalist Press Association. At last he had found
himself working in a movement for the criticism of
theology in his own serious and refined manner. He
A SUNLIT AGE 109
was Chairman also of the Liberty of Bequest Committee.
That one still had to make genuine sacrifices for such
work he was constantly reminded. In 1893 he was
elected an honorary member of the National Liberal
Club. This was to him not only a considerable distinction,
but a source of comfort that he no less appreciated.
Holyoake himself never spoke of sacrifices never pre-
tended that, in his ardour "for the cause," he either
lacked the material comforts that other men had or was
indifferent to them. All his life, and particularly in his
later years, he did a large amount of work that was
unpaid. But where a movement was fairly provided with
funds he made it pay his expenses liberally. He lived
comfortably, and had not the slightest desire to conceal
from anybody that he lived comfortably. He had lived
with the windows open all his life, and he disdained the
hypocrisy of certain " apostles " who talked of their
sacrifices.
The Liberal Club was therefore a very desirable nest
in town. But the manner in which the honorary
membership came to him reminded him that nationalism
was still a darker heresy than Eepublicanism. In the
days when he was familiar with half the Cabinet, Lord
Morley had proposed that this honour should be conferred
on him. The committee had privately requested him
not to press the matter at that time Lord Morley told
him that it was because of his opinions and he con-
sented to wait. Very rightly he, after waiting for some
time, got the subject re-introduced, and he received
notice that he was admitted as an ordinary member.
When he pointed out that this was not the form in which
he was nominated, he was informed (nothing had been
said before) that ten members of the committee were
needed to propose an honorary member. Within a short
time the committee had the proposal before them once
110 A SUNLIT AGE
more with twenty-three names (including that of Mr.
Herbert Gladstone) attached to it, and he was elected.
He was a picturesque figure at the Club for ten years
afterwards. Politicians whose memories went back to
1832 were now rare, and few could make reminiscences
so entertaining, or had so rich a variety of experiences
to tell. It was hard to believe that he had begun life
as a working man and had mainly educated himself.
Keen-eyed, his longish white hair brushed back from
his ever fresh and refined-looking face, quick of humour
and fertile in epigram, he always gathered a notable
group about him in the smoking room. And he was
often there. He still attended almost every meeting of
the various boards and committees of which he was
a member, to say nothing of more pleasant functions.
For a moment in 1893 it seemed to those who
marvelled at his vitality that the end had come. After
attending a meeting of the Co-operative Board in Leman
Street he was knocked down by a lorry and taken to
the London Hospital. He was sent back to Brighton
and bed with his head swathed in bandages. This was
on September 20. Five weeks afterwards the old man
he was in his seventy -seventh year delivered two
lectures in one day at Liverpool !
The person least concerned was Holyoake himself, for
few men had become as accustomed as he was to
accidents. With all his prudence he was constantly in
some mishap. " I was never more mad than was
necessary," he once said. He meant that no peril or
price would hold him back when honour bade him go ;
but he took all his cautiousness, as to detail, with him.
There is a fine chapter on his numerous cab accidents in
his Bygones Worth Remembering. After a time he chose
his cab with the greatest caution, and even wrapped
himself in a thick rug to minimize the shock. Once he
A SUNLIT AGE 111
chose a fat cabby whose weight alone promised to keep
the vehicle right side up. The man upset him in Pall
Mall. The insurance company refused to keep him on
its books any longer. "Life would be worth living,"
he wrote to his friend Sir E. Russell, " if cabmen would
let us try it." Once he was thrown down by an
omnibus. As the horses did not kick him, he sent
them " two bags of the fattest feeding cake the Co-opera-
tive Agricultural Association could buy." Who else
would have thought of it ?
The accident of 1893, however, affected his health for
a year or two, and, unfortunately, these were years
of renewed trouble with the Secularists. I do not
intend here to discuss the merits of these differences.
It is quite obvious that his character needs no defence.
From the bundles of letters belonging to this period
which he preserved I quote a few sentences penned
by men whose judgment was objective and authori-
tative. The Eev. Dr. Robert Collyer writes him from
New York : " Take care of yourself, my man. There
was only one impression when you were struck off."
Sir Wilfrid Lawson writes : "I have long thought
that you are one of our few original thinkers and
writers." Jacob Bright says : " I value highly your
judgment." The Marquis of Ripon says: "I am glad
to see your handwriting again." Mr. Isaac Roberts,
the eminent astronomer, asks : " How many men living
could show such a record as yours of work done and
progress achieved ? Long may you be spared to enjoy
the fruits." Mr. Cluer, the magistrate, writes : " Your
portrait hangs in our dining room, and I heartily con-
gratulate you on your noble age." Lord Morley says :
" I have admired your courage and elevation and single-
ness of mind all my life." " I wish we had a thousand
Holyoakes," says Mr. Hodgson Pratt. " I hold your
112 A SUNLIT AGE
character, not in admiration only, but in grateful
reverence," says Dr. Joseph Parker. " On any day your
beautiful present would light up the room," the editor
of the Athenaum tells him. " I have not known a man
of more unselfish purpose or more philanthropic aim,"
writes Mr. Justin McCarthy.
These are a few sentences culled only from letters of
the period ; and I might add Lord Hobhouse, Herbert
Spencer, Sir Lewis Morris, Sir Joseph Ewart, and many
others. But we have seen so much of this that even a
biographer must blush. I would add only a tribute of
so extraordinary a character never mentioned by Holy-
oake before his death that it would seem ludicrous if
it did not come from the pen of one of the gravest and
most conscientious of our colonial statesmen Earl Grey.
He was having a monument prepared to commemorate
the triumph of truth and justice, and he told Holyoake
that it would include figures of " the four men who have
opened the eyes of mankind most widely to the truths of
human brotherhood." The four were, he said, Christ,
Mazzini, Owen, and Holyoake. He was dissuaded by
Holyoake.
" Honour is the wine of age," Holyoake said. One
rejoices that he had it in plenty to compensate him for
the meanness of a few and to put a crown upon his fine
years. In 1896 he was made a member of the Institute
of Journalists, and of the Societe de 1'etude pratique de
la Participation. He was invited to speak at a dinner
of the London Chamber of Commerce. On the day
before his eightieth birthday he had the greatly valued
tribute of a banquet at the National Liberal Club, which
made splendid amends for the timidity of its former
committee. The letters and press notices that followed
completed his pleasure. " The National Liberal Club,"
said the Daily News, " did honour to itself as well as its
A SUNLIT AGE 113
guest he has lived to be honoured of all men." Sir
Charles Dilke, though no longer the rebel of the seventies,
wrote him : " I should have wished to have been counted
as one who, any way within my power, would have
helped in doing honour to one who so well deserves it."
Those who live into the ninth decade of life are apt to
pass from autumn to winter. Holyoake did not. The
few other survivors of old times wrote pessimistic things
to Holyoake, and he sent back a little of his own sunny
optimism. Even Dr. Parker wrote : " I am so lonesome
and miserable at times as to be no longer a Christian ;
but the light will come." In Holyoake's reply we have
the piquant spectacle of the aged Agnostic giving bright
counsel and consolation to the aged Christian orator, as
they both look forward to approaching death. I have
noticed a somewhat similar development in Gladstone's
later correspondence with Holyoake, but for these and
similar letters I must refer to my larger biography. His
days were full of work and wit. In a letter to Sir John
Robinson about a man who had just joined the staff of
the Daily News he says :
He was Liberal two days a week, Tory two days,
and mad the remainder. Do not let him impart
these qualities to the Daily News. True, I read
him in his mad days, from congeniality of tempera-
ment. But lunacy is not general among your
readers.
To the Southport editor, Mr. W. Ashton, an esteemed
friend, he writes :
When a friend asked Douglas Jerrold if he had
a mind to lend him a guinea, he answered that he
had the mind, but not the guinea. I have a mind
to write you a hundred pages, but I have not the
time to.
But eighty years are eighty years, his friends reminded
114 A SUNLIT AGE
him. Eeluctantly he began to take more care of himself.
I have spoken of his shrewdness, and no doubt his great
age suggests that he was exceedingly attentive to his
comfort. I have even said that he was, and I make no
apology for it. He was a healthy man, and quite devoid
of hypocrisy. But the impression must be qualified.
Until well into his seventies he treated lunch, on work-
ing days, as a nuisance. He often made it wait an hour,
sometimes two hours. His daughter and secretary, Mrs.
Holyoake-Marsh, had to drag him to it ; and, with that
pleasant naiveness of much of his character, he tried
sometimes to bribe her to take no notice of the clock.
Once a compositor made him say some utter nonsense
in setting up his manuscript, and, when Holyoake
laughingly protested, he said placidly : " I thought it
was just one of your quaintnesses of speech, Mr. Holy-
oake." There was the same delightful quaintness in his
manner and mind as in his writing. He liked his tea
strong. " Tea for two water for one," he would ask in
a teashop. " Goose for dinner," he writes in his Diary
on Christmas Day, 1895. " Pain for breakfast," he
writes the next morning.
In some ways he actually began his ninth decade of
life with new activities. He was still on the Travelling
Tax Committee, the Eationalist Press Committee, the
Liberty of Bequest Committee, the International Alliance,
and the various Co-operative Boards. He attended the
Co-operative Congress in Holland in 1897, and wrote
the history of the Leeds Society. He took up the Peace
Movement more strongly than ever, and presided so
vigorously at the dinner of the International Peace
Association in 1899 that he was nominated a delegate
to St. Petersburg.
One of the mysteries of his career is how he ever came
to be accused of compromise. As soon as he became
A SUNLIT AGE 115
a citizen of Brighton he lit it up with Republican propa-
ganda. When he found himself looking down upon the
faces of hundreds of prosperous manufacturers at the
National Liberal Club banquet in 1896, he said in the
middle of his speech :
This world is not fit for a gentleman to live in
while undeserved misery exists in the neighbourhood
of his mansion. I am no Socialist, but I can see
that honest industry is defrauded somewhere while
it needs charity or State aid.
As to his opinions about religion, they became clearer and
firmer in their negation as he grew older. In his Origin
and Nature of Secularism (1896) he was just as keen on
proving that Secularism did not mean merely concern for
secular things as he was to show that it did not mean
theological criticism only. " Secularism," he said, to the
disappointment of his many clerical admirers, "does conflict
with theology." He sent that to Gladstone and to Dr.
Parker. But he had seen that concentration on criticism
alone led to a decay of taste and character, and he pleaded
for strong humanitarian ethical culture indeed, general
mental culture of a positive sort, in art, science, and
morals. On the whole, however, he now looked to the
nationalist Press Association to carry out the critical
side of his ideals.
In the last decade of his life he found, as we saw
a new and deep interest in the Peace and Arbitration
movement. It was, of course, the movement that was
new, not Holyoake's detestation of war. From first to
last he retained all the breadth of Owen's humanitar-
ianism. But it was only in the last decade of the
nineteenth century that a pacifist movement with some
definite promise of achievement arose, and Holyoake
worked in it as no other man of his age would. Hence,
when the thrill of the first Hague Conference was
116 A SUNLIT AGE
succeeded by the gloom of the South African War,
Holyoake was saddened. He had lived to see a new
century, and it opened with a war ! Even now, however,
his playfulness was not quenched. I find him writing
in the usual vein to Mr. Ashton : " My mind is sodden
with the rain. I have not a dry idea in my head. My
conversation is damp, and would give you influenza." In
May (1900), moreover, he had another accident. Trying
to avoid a crowd at London Bridge Station, he fell over
an obstacle, and the police sent him home, bruised and
bleeding, in a cab. A week later he wrote a humorous
account of the accident to a friend. He went out to post
the letter and was knocked down by a cyclist. The man,
it seems, had either to run down Holyoake or a lady.
So, says Holyoake, "as I have always favoured the rights
of women, I did not complain."
He ended " zero year," as he called it, so strong and
cheerful that his nephew, Mr. Bottomley, who was then
editing the Sun, handed over the paper to him for a
week, and he came to town and undertook the full range
of editorial duties. In an article at the close Mr.
Bottomley assured his readers that Holyoake had done
everything that a busy editor ought to do. The only
departure from ordinary routine was that the bodyguard,
which usually protects an editorial den, had to be doubled
or trebled, to stem the rush of admiring friends.
In the autumn Mr. Stead took him for his character-
sketch in the Review of Revieivs, and he did full justice
to the richness of his material. Stead disliked Secularism,
and his verdict on Holyoake's personality is impartial.
11 It is probable," he said, " that there is no other man
of eighty-four now living in this country who has so
honourable a record." And his record was not closed.
In that year he undertook new reforming duties. He
became President of the National Democratic League
A SUNLIT AGE 117
and Vice- President of the Land Nationalization Society.
In 1902 he unveiled the fine monument which the
Co-operators had raised over the grave of Robert Owen.
But the best proof of his vitality at this extreme age
is his further collection of reminiscences, Bygones Worth
Remembering. It took the form, as did the earlier work,
of little detached sketches, because it first appeared
serially in the press (chiefly the Weekly Times and Echo).
His memory was as keen, his wit as sprightly, as ever.
Everything he wrote was a tonic to his readers. He
knew the early nineteenth century too well to tolerate
talk about " good old times " and " modern degenera-
tion." The world had, in every single respect, made
incalculable progress since he had first opened mature
eyes upon it in the thirties, and he wanted the workers
to realize it. He was by no means insensible to the evils
that remained, as his bold words at the Liberal Club
showed ; but he knew the mischief of idealism divorced
from facts. Never in his life had he indulged in mere
rhetoric, though he had a high capacity for it.
Bygones appeared in two volumes in 1904. Then the
light began slowly to fail. In March he had startled
Brighton by appearing as a passive resistor." Large
numbers of Nonconformists were, it will be remembered,
refusing at that time to pay their rates, and Holyoake,
with a more comprehensive objection than any of them
to the use of public money for giving religious instruction,
refused to pay the education rate. The officials were
bound to act, and they seized one of his pictures and put
it up at auction. Holyoake gaily attended the auction
and made a sort of speech to the bidders. Then a crowd
adjourned with him to the beach, and he discoursed on
the iniquity of making citizens pay for the teaching of
the religion of other citizens.
A few weeks later came the first premonition. He had
118 A SUNLIT AGE
an attack of vertigo, and fell. Still he did not take it too
seriously. He attended meetings and penned articles.
But his eyes were failing, and the surgeons would not
attempt an operation. In the diary which he still kept,
the entries begin to reflect a faint shade of resignation.
He has to cancel engagements. The writing sprawls over
the space ; sometimes he has held his diary, while he
pencilled in it, wrong side up. But his mind was perfect,
and his serenity in face of death unclouded. There is
an entry in February, 1905 : " Felt often of late like one
approaching the end of the world." Then his irrepres-
sible humour gets into his pencil, and he adds : " But
see no more than others what lies beyond." He had not,
in fact, the slightest doubt what lay beyond nothing.
Those who think this a depressing prospect should read
the full story of Holyoake's last years and compare it
with those of a dozen others.
His three red-letter festivals now were the Co-operative
Congress, the Eationalist Press dinner, and the annual
celebration of the Leicester Secular Society. Not sadly,
nor with the sternness of a Stoic, but with his own bright
serenity, he cancelled all three for 1905. He was not
going to be more mad than was necessary. The Co-
operative Congress was to -be at Paisley, and^ Scottish
Co-operators implored him to let them "mark their
appreciation of the life-long services you have rendered
to the cause." He knew that it would be a foolish form
of suicide. His duty was to wait at Eastern Lodge for
the last opiate. The Congress sent him a splendicLtribute
from Paisley.
One great joy relieved the tedium of waiting. An
election occurred, and he made a last effort to induce
Brighton to oust the gentleman in a " reversible over-
coat," for whom he felt responsible, and accept a Liberal.
His candidate won by a majority of 800, He recovered
A SUNLIT AGE 119
a little and went out in a bath-chair. Friends were
amazed presently to find him writing in the Chronicle
and the Nineteenth Century, and to hear that he was
finishing his History of Co-operation. His letters, in
fact, are almost as lively and vigorous as ever. " I am
still a young man in my mind," he writes to Mr. B,. J.
Campbell, " and prize incentives to improvement." Mr.
Campbell had just reviewed one of his books. Instead
of reading Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, or Seneca's On
Consolation, he was re-reading Balzac and Boccaccio. In
August he " ran up " to London, and took a last survey
of the Liberal Club "looking hale and hearty at the
age of 88," the papers said.
One of his last articles was on behalf of women
suffrage. After that there were a few bright letters in
the Co-operative News, then even the diary is blank.
His last lines were laboriously written in his pocket-
book a plain and firm statement of his rejection of all
religion. He was now living and sleeping in his library,
and just waiting cheerfully. He knew that he was slowly
dying. In December he sent for his dearest friend and
fellow Co-operator, Mr. E. O. Greening, and bade him
a serene good-bye. " I have cared more for Co-operation
than for any other public movement," he said; and
Co-operators proudly inscribed the words on the hand-
some monument they put over his grave. Robert
Applegarth was summoned for the next farewell. To
that kindred spirit and fellow soldier Holyoake said,
quoting W. S. Landor :
" I have warmed both hands at the fire of life ;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart."
He was true to his self to the last. He never cast against
life the sacrifices he had made, but always said that it
had been good to him. In January his gently sinking
vitality passed into a comatose condition. He had used
120 A SUNLIT AGE
the remainder of ifc in December to dictate a last appeal
to the workers of England, which filled a column in the
papers. The General Election approached. There were
signs of coming triumph for his Party, and he rejoiced.
He passed into unconsciousness before the election
occurred ; but he recovered at times during the long
fortnight, and they told him of Liberal victories every-
where. He lay back once more, and on January 22 the
last breath of his great spirit failed.
Of the princely funeral, and the glowing tributes in
the press of the world, and the magnificent gratitude of
Co-operators who raised 25,000 to build " Holyoake
House " in Manchester there is no space to speak, Sum
it all up in the words of George Meredith, who never said
an insincere word : " One of the truly great Englishmen
of our time Such men as he are the backbone of the
land. They are not eulogized in monuments ; they have
a stouter memorial in the hearts of all who venerate a
simple devotion to the oppressed, the labours of a clear
intelligence, contempt of material rewards, and unflinch-
ing courage."
PRINTED BY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET ST., LONDON, B.C.
FN McCabe, Joseph
5123 George Jacob Holyoake
H6M3
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