JOHN BURNS, BERNARD SHAW, AND SOCIALISM.

Evening Star, Issue 12763, 16 March 1906, Page 3

JOHN BURNS, BERNARD SHAW, AND SOCIALISM.

A recent ‘ Clarion ’ has a long article on the . elections by AD G. Bernard Shaw, m which be condemns, with characteristic vigor, vhe tactics of ccrtaoT sections of the Socialist party, particularly as regards their attacks on Air John Bums “ What are you to do with such men?” he asks “ Thev will do exactly the same with Wfir’Tborne to-morrow. They hive already begun to do it with Keir 'llajxlie. If Hyndman had got in, and been made Secretary of State tor India by the present Government—a position which ho could not refuse without an unpardonable desertion of the Indian ryots whose cause ho has championed—a howl of execration would have gone up from Jus most sternly righteous supporters. Even AD Quelch (who stood as a Socialist candidate for Southampton) himself has not passed without rebuke. I can recall an occasion on -which, having been brought into contact with royalty, and behaved with his ordinary good manners to his royal fellow creature, he was severely because he did not seize the oppressor by the throat and hurl him down the red-carpted staircase.” “ Well, John Burns is not out of the Labor movement, and not. out of the Socialist movement,” Mr Shaw continues; “but he is in the Liberal party, driven into it by the Socialists. The Labor party haggled

with-hhrv over £2OO a year when they had dried up his wages fond, and the Liberals jumped in and gave him a portfolio worth £2,000 a year on his own terms. Evidently the Liberals are going - to gwem ns for a ■whale yet, by the' aiViite right of sane people to govern.idiots. The idiots are, as tJKbal. proud of themselves; but the Liberals have got another ten-years’ lease-/of the, delusion that the Socialist merely the left wing of the Liberal party, and that the Labor vote ,at an election should go to the Liberal as a natter of course. It is no use disguising from ourselves that ■ the election lias been an enormous victory for Liberalism, and that the Socialists have done all they could to malm it so. ■ On the war question, on the education question, oh the. Freetrade question, they rushed to the heels of Mr Lloyd George and shouted for peace, retrenchment, reform, passive icsistance, and the great historic delusion of the big loaf versus the little loaf, louder than all the Radicals. They made ■’•■i ;nul Independent Labor candidates more dependent on liberal votes than o.vei. They Radicalised Burnley so completely that they carried their Liberal opponent in against the one Socialist whose success was supremely important to Socialism. They have no guarantee whatever that the new Labor party will l>e anything more than a nominally Independent Trad© Unionist and- Radical group. I apologise to the uniyerse for my connection with such a party.”