come in my day, and it'll no come in yours; and it'll no come at a' if you're going to wreck the Liberal Party as some o' your friends are trying their best to do.'[1]
Yet there were present at the lecture (as there were at nearly all our Socialist meetings) a few veteran Owenites who had not wholly lost the faith and hopes of their younger days. These aged Radicals, who were in most instances Freethinkers, listened enrapt to the unfolding afresh of the ideas of the Communist Commonwealth, and were pathetically eager to communicate their joy in beholding once more in the sunset of their years the glory of vision which had filled their eyes in the morning glow on the hill-tops long ago.
This was Morris' first lecture in Glasgow, but it was not the first pronouncement of Socialism before a large audience in Glasgow. Two months previously Mr. Hyndman had publicly inaugurated the new branch of the Social Democratic Federation by a lecture on Socialism to a crowded audience of 1200 people in the Albion Hall. This may be regarded as the first official statement in Glasgow of modern 'scientific' Socialism, though Social Democratic principles had been explained from the platform of the new branch in small halls for several months previously. Morris and Hyndman were then the two most prominent representatives of the Socialist movement in this country, and their lectures in Glasgow in the back-end of the year 1884 mark definitely the beginning of public Socialist propaganda in what has since proved the most active centre of Socialist agitation in the Kingdom.
But what a difference there was between the two lectures, and between the two lecturers! Hardly could a greater contrast be conceived. Indeed, alike in matter and in spirit, both the lectures and the lecturers might have
- ↑ This was an allusion to the Land Restoration League candidatures of Shaw Maxwell and William Forsyth, who contested Parliamentary seats in Glasgow at the General Election, 1884, in opposition to the official Liberal nominees.
