formal unity between the different sections of the movement. This Committee, which comprised delegates from the S.D.F., the Fabian Society, and the Hammersmith Socialist Society, and included, among others, Hyndman, Quelch, Shaw, Webb, Walter Crane, and Morris, after weeks of discussion drew up a united Socialist manifesto; but no practical result, however, came of it. Morris was greatly disappointed over the business. Though he never had much hopes of, or indeed belief in, what was termed 'Socialist Unity,' this further experience of factional prejudice and fruitless effort in connection with the mere mechanism of Socialist organisation, following upon the break-up of the League, was very discouraging to him. It closed up the only prospect then visible to him of forming a great Socialist Party with broad but definite and inspiring Socialist aims. True there was the new political Labour movement in which Socialists and Trade Unionists were combined, of which the recently formed Independent Labour Party (the I.L.P.) was the chief expression but this movement, operating, as it did, mainly in the North, hardly came within his view in London. He was not in touch with its leaders, nor did he quite understand its Socialist position. His friends of the Social Democratic Federation had no good word to say of it, and his Fabian friends were hardly more sympathetic in their attitude towards it. What appeared to be its intensely electioneering character repelled him, though later on he came to form a more favourable and just opinion of its principles and objects.
Thus he felt isolated from the general throng of Socialist factions and forced back into his own idealist world, his still almost undiminished creative energies finding scope during this period of declining bodily vigour in his new printing schemes for the Kelmscott Press and in the writing of his splendid prose romances. To the last, however, he preserved his connection with the Hammersmith Socialist Society, keeping unbroken his comradeship with his old friends, and occasionally, as far as the state of his health
