promise of success, that I went to London in order to attend the Annual Conference of the League, and visited Morris at his house in Hammersmith.
Several weeks before the Conference, Morris had become so much alarmed lest the dissentients should carry the day that he wrote me urging me to get the Glasgow branch to send me or some other delegate to the Conference to withstand the assault.
How paltry now seem the circumstances that caused Morris so much perturbation! How lamentable, one is inclined to exclaim, that the powers of one of the most richly gifted minds of modern days should have been tormented with such trivial and wholly distasteful wranglings! Yet too much has perhaps been made of that aspect of the matter. I am not at all convinced that Morris was really harmed by the experience. I think in some ways the intimate acquaintance which it gave him with the difficulties of political organisation and the recalcitrancy of some of his fellow-men, together with the sense of the helplessness of all his powers to meet the situation, produced a certain shade of work-a-day humility and patience in him that mellowed and enriched his character.
This is, I think, acknowledged by Mr. Mackail in his 'Life of Morris,' and while it is true that in the end these experiences contributed to his retirement from the active ranks of the movement, they were assuredly not the sole cause of his so doing. Besides, I am persuaded that in the six or eight years of his active apostleship he gave the best that was in him to give for the immediate propaganda of Socialism; and that had he continued to work in the movement as he had been doing he would have effected very little result, and might have suffered the loss of that high idealism which, happily as it was, he preserved to the end.
Nor let us forget that his experience of the faction wranglings in the movement (which are by no means so merely fractious or so sterilizing as they often appear to be) was one which has been ordained for all pioneers and re-
