“There ain’t no trouble,” he responded; “you just go up two flights of steps from the street, and walk right in.”
It was even as he said. At the level of the first landing was a restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance. My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing. It was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room, in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs. But a single step to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a company of Socialists in full session. A man sat beside the door with a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive paper editions for sale. My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.”
“May I go in?” I asked of the man.
“Oh, certainly,” he replied. “Walk right in, and take any vacant seat you choose.”
I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women. By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company from the side, with his back against the wall. Slender and of medium height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident inspiration.
“What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own. We serve no useful end in denouncing the capitalists. They, like us, are simply a product of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and generous men. But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live. How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not be beggars upon the streets.”
Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to be. When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once, appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand, for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title “Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and after.
The well-grown muscular, intelligent workingman was the dominant type among them, but the general average in point of respectability was so high that it gave to the company rather the appearance of a gathering of the bourgeoisie than of proletarians. Had the proportion between men and women been reversed, without change of average status, I might have been in a prayer-meeting. But the prayer-meeting in sustaining the resemblance would have been one of marked vitality.
Speeches were following one another in quick succession. Some were good and some were vapid; some were in broken English, and others were in English more than broken; but all were surcharged with the kind of earnestness which captivates attention. Irresistibly at times one was reminded of the propaganda of a new faith. Much was said the meaning of which I could not catch, but the spirit of it all was not far to seek. Here there was no cant; there was room for none. These men believed that they had hold of a truth which is regenerating society. In the face of a world deep-rooted in an individualistic organization of industry and of social order, they preached a gospel of collectivism, with unbounded belief in its ultimate triumph.
At times there was a malignant animus in what they said, when argument was enforced from sources of personal experience; for men would speak with the intensity of feeling of those who know what hunger is and what it is to hear their children cry for bread, while within their sight is the wasteful luxury of the rich. But a certain earnest moderateness of speech was far more common, and it sometimes revealed a breadth of view and an acquaintance with economics which to me were astonishing.