At a later time, Bradlaugh debated the question of the Eight-Hours' Day with H. M. Hyndman—their second platform encounter. But both sides were dissatisfied, as neither of them stuck to his subject, and the result was inconclusive. A debate on the same question was then arranged between Shaw and G. W. Foote, Bradlaugh's successor as President of the National Secular Society. In this, Shaw's only public set debate with the exception of one in earlier days at South Place chapel, the question was ably and carefully argued by both parties, without rancour, bitterness, or personal abuse.[63] The debate lasting two nights, and presided over by Mr. G. Standring and Mr. E. R. Pease in turn, was held at the Hall of Science, London, on January 14th and 15th, 1891. The verbatim report, which is still procurable, exhibits the best qualities of Shaw as a cool-headed, logical debater. His two speeches, markedly ironical in tone, are frequently punctuated by the bracketed (applause). Mr. Foote closed one of his speeches with the rather effulgent peroration, “Every question must be threshed out by public debate. Let truth and falsehood grapple—whichever be truth and whichever be falsehood; for, as grand old John Milton said, 'Whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?'”—a sentiment greeted with loud applause. To which Shaw delightfully responded: “I do not know, gentlemen, what a free and open encounter might bring about; but if John Milton asks me whoever saw truth put to shame in such an encounter with falsehood as it has a chance of having in the present condition of society, then I reply to John Milton that George Bernard Shaw has seen it put to shame very often.” Shaw maintained that a reduction of hours would raise wages, not prices, and that doing it by law was the only possible way of doing it. His closing words clearly mirror his view of the mission of Socialism, the reason of its existence.
“I can only say, for myself, that the debate has been a pleasant one to me, because of the friendly terms on which Mr. Foote and I stand. I even imagine there is a bond between Mr. Foote and myself that may serve a little to explain this. Mr. Foote and I, on a certain subject—the established religion of this country—entertain the same views. Now, those views have directed our attention very strongly towards the necessity of maintaining the freedom of the individual to hold what views he likes, to have freedom of speech and association for the purpose of following out all his conclusions, and establishing a genuine culture founded on facts, and not on the dogmas of any church whatsoever. I confess that in the days before I had studied economic questions I was filled with the necessity of individual freedom on these points, and that I also had that strong distrust of the State which Mr. Foote has expressed here to-night. But when my attention was turned to the economic side of the question, I soon became convinced that the real secret of the State's hostility to the advance of reasonable views was that Reason condemned the propertied institutions of this country. Property is the real force that hypocritically expresses itself as Religion. I therefore came to the conclusion that we shall never get out of the mess we are in until the workers come to understand that they are already deprived of individual freedom by the irresistible physical force of the State, and that they can escape from its oppression only by seizing on the political power, and using that very State force to emancipate themselves, and impose their will on the minority which now enslaves them. That is the reason that, just as I urge the importance of individual freedom of speech, so I also urge on the workers that they cannot possibly help themselves by individual action so long as this terrible State is outside them, and ready to cut them down at every point. I believe that they can, by concerted action, not merely in trade unions, but in a united democracy, get complete control of the State, and use its might for their own purposes; and when they once come to understand this, I believe their emancipation will only be delayed until they have learned from experience the true conditions of social freedom.”[64]
There is another feature of Shaw's career as a public speaker which exhibits his attitude towards the work in life he had set before him. Shaw fights for what seems to many less like liberty than licence of speech. He never submitted his intelligence, his will, or his power to alien domination. He has never belonged to any political party, rightly considered, never cringed under any lash, never realized in his own experience what he himself has called the only real tragedy: “the being used by personally-minded men for purposes which you recognize as base.” It was the determination to remain untrammelled in thought and action which forbade his ever accepting payment for speaking. Very often provincial Sunday Societies invited him to come down for the usual ten guineas fee and give the usual sort of lecture, avoiding politics and religion. Shaw's invariable answer to such requests was that he never lectured on anything but politics and religion, and that his fee was the price of his railway ticket third-class, if the place was further off than he could afford to go at his own expense. The Sunday Society would then “come around” and assure Shaw that he might, on these terms, lecture on anything he liked; and he always did. Occasionally, to avoid embarrassing other lecturers who lived by lecturing, the thing was done by a debit and credit entry: that is, Shaw took the usual fee and expenses, and gave it back as a donation to the society. Shaw once related to me the circumstances of a most interesting contretemps, which alone would suffice to justify his desire for freedom of speech, his wisdom in arming himself against the accusation of being a professional agitator. “At the election of 1892, I was making a speech in the Town Hall of Dover, when a man rose and shouted to the audience not to let itself be talked to by a hired speaker from London. I immediately offered to sell him my emoluments for five pounds. He hesitated; and I came down to four pounds. At last I offered to take five shillings—half-a-crown—a shilling—sixpence—for my fees, and when he would not take them at that, claimed that he must know perfectly well that I was there at my own expense. If I had not been able to do this, the meeting, which was a difficult and hostile one (Dover being a hopeless, corrupt Tory constituency) would probably have been broken up.”
As Mr. Clarence Rook has remarked, London first opened her eyes in wonder over the versatile “G. B. S.” when she discovered that in the daytime he preached revolt to the grimy East from a tub, and in the evening sent William Archer and the cultured West into peals of merriment over his Arms and the Man. In those halcyon transpontine days London began to take pains to be present at Shaw's delightful dialectical performances at Battersea. Shaw lectured often in Battersea because it was John Burns' stronghold. Never was Shaw's skyrocketing brilliance more effectively displayed than in one of his orations at the Washington Music Hall, with Clement Edwards in the chair. In this oration he proved that no conclusion could be drawn from a bare profession of Socialism as to what side a man would take on any concrete political issue. In speaking of this remarkable effort, Mr. Shaw recently told me the following incident: “I remember hearing a workman say to his wife as I came up behind them on my way to the station: 'When I hear a man of intellect talk like that for a whole evening, it makes me feel like a WORM.' Which made me feel horribly ashamed of myself. I felt the shabbiest of impostors, somehow, though really I gave him the best lecture I could.” With the exception of his two nights' wrestle with G. W. Foote, Shaw's most sustained effort—an oration lasting about four hours—was delivered in the open air on a Sunday morning at Trafford Bridge, Manchester. Shaw takes pleasure in declaring that one of his best speeches, about an hour and a half long, was delivered in Hyde Park in the pouring rain to six policemen sent to watch him, and the secretary of the little society that had invited him to speak. “I was determined to interest those policemen, because as they were sent there to listen to me, their ordinary course, after being once convinced that I was a reasonable and well-conducted person, would be to pay no further attention. But I quite entertained them. I can still see their waterproof capes shining in the rain when I shut my eyes.”
Courage and daring, as well as fertility and inventiveness, often enabled Shaw to carry his point or to have his say, in the face of violent and almost invincible opposition. He has more than once actually voted against Socialism in order to forward the motion in hand. And once, in St. James's Hall, London, at a meeting in favour of Woman's Suffrage, he ventured with success upon a curious trick, the details of which he once related to me:
“Just before I spoke a hostile contingent entered the room, and I saw that we were outnumbered, and that an amendment would be carried against us. They were all Socialists of the anti-Fabian sort, led by a man whom I knew very well, and who was at that time worn out with public agitation and private worry, so that he was excitable almost to frenzy. It occurred to me that if they, instead of carrying an amendment, could be goaded to break up the meeting and disgrace themselves, the honours would remain with us. I made a speech that would have made a bishop swear and a sheep fight. My friend the enemy, stung beyond endurance, dashed madly to the platform to answer me then and there. His followers, thinking he was leading a charge, instantly stormed the platform, and broke up the meeting. Then the assailants reconstituted the meeting and appointed one of their number chairman. I then demanded a hearing, which was duly granted me as a matter of fair play, and I had another innings with great satisfaction to myself. No harm was done and no blow struck, but the papers next morning described a scene of violence and destruction that left nothing to be desired by the most sanguinary schoolboy.”
Like Ibsen, Shaw has barely escaped the honour of being imprisoned—an honour which, it is needless to say, he never sought. Fortunately for Shaw, the religious people always joined with the Socialists to resist the police. Twice, in difficulties raised by attempts of the police to stop street meetings, Shaw was within an ace of going to prison. The first time, the police capitulated on the morning of the day when Shaw was the chosen victim. The second time Shaw was so fortunate as to have in a member of a rival Socialist society a disputant for the martyr's palm. One can sympathize with Shaw's secret relief when, on a division, his rival defeated him by two votes!
One of the most remarkable speakers in England to-day, Bernard Shaw is not simply a talent, a personality: he is a public institution. People flock to his lectures and addresses, and his bons mots are quoted in London, New York, Berlin, Vienna and St. Petersburg. He is the most universally discussed man of letters now living. Not since Byron has any British author enjoyed an international audience and vogue comparable to that enjoyed by Bernard Shaw. No one in our time is Shaw's equal in searching analysis and trenchant exposition of the ills of modern society. His ability to see stark reality and to know it for his own makes of him the most powerful pamphleteer, the most acute journalist-publicist since the days of Swift. His indictments of the fundamental structure of contemporary society prove him the greatest master of comic irony since the days of Voltaire. Inferior to Anatole France in artistry and urbanity, Shaw excels him in the strenuousness of his personal sincerity and in the scope of his purpose. Shaw's manner of speaking is as individual, as distinctive, as is his style as an essayist or his fingering as a dramatist. That priceless and inalienable gift which has helped to make Jean Jaurès the leader of modern Socialists—the power of touching the emotions—is a quality which Shaw, like Disraeli before him, wholly lacks. In Shaw there is no spark of the mesmeric force, the hypnotic power of the born orator; he lacks that romance, that power of dramatic visualization, which is a quality of all true oratory. While it is true that people do not “orate” in England as they do in America, still there is a vast difference between the born orator, like Jaurès or Mrs. Besant, and the practised public speaker, like Shaw. All that could be acquired, Shaw acquired. Not Charles Bradlaugh himself had a more thorough training than had Shaw. He is facile, fluent and fertile; he does not leave all his qualities behind him when he mounts the platform. In fine, Shaw has fulfilled to the letter his early vow, solemnly taken the night he joined the Zetetical Society. He has delivered considerably more than a thousand public addresses, and the best of them were masterpieces of their kind. And yet Shaw has only a very ordinary voice; and in order to make himself comfortably heard by a large audience he has to be very careful with his articulation and to speak as though he were addressing the auditor furthest from him.
The Cart and Trumpet.