For instance, in any other State than our own, my new acquaintance, Clement Blaine, would have been safely disposed in a convenient prison cell, and his flamingly seditious journal would have been promptly and effectually squashed. In England the man was free as the Prime Minister, and a Department of State, the Post Office, was engaged in the distribution of the journal which he devoted exclusively to stirring up animosity against that State, and traitorous opposition to its constitution.
Further, Mr. Blaine's vitriolic outpourings, his unnatural defilement of his own nest, were gravely quoted in every newspaper in the Kingdom, without a hint of recognition of the fact that they were fundamentally criminal and a public offence. The sacrosanct "liberty of the subject" was involved; and though Mr. Blaine would have been forcibly restrained if he had shown any tendency to injure lamp-posts, or to lay hands upon his own worthless life, he was given every facility in his self-appointed task of inciting the public to all sorts of offences against the State, and to a variety of forms of national suicide.
It was the commonest thing for a Member of Parliament, a man solemnly sworn and consecrated to the loyal service of the Crown and State, to fill a signed column of Clement Blaine's paper, with an article or letter the whole avowed end of which would be the championing of some national enemy or rival, or the advocacy of means whereby a shrewd blow might be struck against British rule or British prestige in some part of the world.
I recall one long and scurrilous article by a Member of Parliament, urging rebellious natives in South Africa to take heart of grace and pursue with ever-increasing vigour their attacks upon the small and isolated white populace which upheld British rule in that part of the Continent. I remember a long and venomous letter from another Member of Parliament (a strong advocate of the State payment of members) defending in the most ardently sympathetic manner both the action and the sentiments of a municipal official who had torn down and destroyed the Union Jack upon an occasion of public ceremony.
We called this sort of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it, they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent—that was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the basest creature ever outlawed from any community—that was certain of ready and eager hospitality in the columns of The Mass.
I can conceive of no infamy which that journal was not ready to condone, no offence it would not seek to justify—save and except the crime of patriotism, loyalty, avowed love of Britain. And this obscene, mad-dog policy, so difficult even to imagine at this time, was by curious devious ways identified with Socialism. The Mass was called a Socialist organ. The fact may have been a libel upon Socialism, if not upon Socialists; but so it was.
Be it said that at Cambridge I had rather surprised the evangelical section of my college (Corpus Christi) by the part I played in founding a short-lived institution called the Anonymous Society, the choicest spirits in which affected canvas shirts and abstention from the use of neckties. As Socialists, we invited the waiters of the college to a soirée, at which a judicious blend of revolutionary economics and bitter beer was relied upon to provide a flow of reasonable and inexpensive entertainment. The society lapsed after a time, chiefly owing, if I remember rightly, to an insufficiency of funds for refreshments. But I had remained rather a person to be reckoned with at the Union.
I regarded my meeting with Clement Blaine as something of an event, and I very cheerfully and quite gratuitously contributed an article to his journal dealing with some form of government subvention which I held to be a State duty. (We wasted few words over the duties of the citizen in those days.) It was as a result of that article that I was invited to a Socialist soirée in which the moving spirit, at all events in the refreshment-room, was Mr. Clement Blaine. Here I met a variety of queer fish who called themselves Socialists. They were of both sexes, and upon the whole they were a silly, inconsequent set. Their views rather wearied me, despite my predisposition to favour them.
They were a kind of tepid, ineffectual anarchists, unconvinced and wholly unconvincing. Broadly speaking, theirs was a policy of blind reversal. They were not constructive, but they were opposed vaguely to the existing order of things, and, particularly, to everything British. They pinned their faith to the foreigner in all things, even though the foreigner's whole energies might be devoted to the honest endeavour to raise conditions in his country to a level approaching the British standard. Any contention against the existing order, and, above all, anything against Britain, appealed directly to these rather tawdry people.
In this drab, ineffective gathering, I found one point of colour, like a red rose on a dingy white tablecloth. This was Beatrice, the daughter of Clement Blaine. I believe the man had a wife. One figures her as a worn household drudge. In any case, she made no appearance in any of the places in which I met Blaine, or his handsome daughter. Beatrice Blaine was a new type to me. One had read of such girls, but I had never met them. And I suppose novelty always has a certain charm for youth. One felt that Beatrice had crossed the Rubicon. Mentally, at all events, one gathered that she had thrown her bonnet over the windmill.