Radicalism: A Futile Gesture or a Force for Good?

Case Study of a Radical: George Herbert Perris (1866-1920)

Lecture chaired by Geoffrey Catchpole

Robert Gomme CB

Retired Civil Servant

17 November 2004

The period before, during and immediately after World War I continues to fascinate us as frequent books, radio and television programmes and films testify. This is not surprising as the period qualifies in many ways as the seedbed of much 20^th and 21^st century history.

The War itself lasted over four years and destroyed many illusions of progress as the world experienced the horror of industrial, scientific and technological advance applied to the waging of war. The casualties were enormous. Many of us here tonight will have had relatives killed, wounded or maimed.

Moreover, as well as being a disaster in its own right, the post-war period provided conditions for further misfortunes. As we are acutely aware, successor regimes have often been short lived and new boundaries have proved fragile and have frequently led to international tensions and misery for the populations involved. Dictators seized power and even when they have been removed it has often taken decades for an ordered civil society to be established. Arguably the causes of World War II lie in the battlefields of World War I and settlements that followed. The Balkans and the Middle East are examples of a continuing legacy of unrest.

The fact of World War I was all the more shocking because since the Napoleonic Wars a century earlier there had been no wars involving all the European powers at the same time. There had, of course, been bitter short wars, with significant casualties, between individual nations – the wars leading to the creation of modern Germany and Italy, for example, and the Crimean war. But since 1871 there had been no war in Europe at all save for the two Balkan wars of 1912-13. For two generations before 1914 peace in Europe was the norm and the growth in democracy, in international trade, international law and international institutions seemed to underpin it. During the 19^th century real advancement was made as industrialisation created increased wealth and improved standards of living in western nations. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 therefore came as a profound shock.

However there was a downside – there always is. Material wealth may have increased but there was an underlying malaise; industrialisation brought with it unplanned urbanisation, a maldistribution of wealth and appalling conditions of life for many. Ill health, bad housing, malnutrition and inadequate education were common. Land and property ownership was often grotesquely skewed.

These conflicting trends led to a widespread consideration of how an ideal modern society should be brought about. Discussion of such issues came to the fore from the 1890s. There was a widespread belief among radical thinkers that the potential for a more just world existed through the spread of education and democracy, a more equitable distribution of wealth and a more collective approach to problems both within and between countries. History needed a nudge.

In Britain, for example, the welfare state, citizenship rights, constitutional reform and the provision of state education became prominent issues. New organisations were formed to promote progress. The Fabian Society and the Marxist Social Democratic Foundation were founded in 1884, and the Labour Party soon after. New Liberalism (nowdays known as the Third Way, or a way to pursue radical reform without the encumbrance of stultifying theories or doctrines) revivified the old Liberal party. From Harcourt’s introduction of death duties when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Rosebery’s administration (1894-95) to the great reforming programmes of Liberal governments from 1906, the way was prepared for further reforms.

We see the period, therefore, as one not only of political change but also as one of change, in social, economic, scientific and cultural fields. But the positive thinking just mentioned was offset – I am still referring to Britain - by a growing introspection and self-consciousness. Angst was in the air: people looked back on the mid-19^th century as one of relative certainties. It was not accidental, for example, in a changing world that conservation should emerge as a political issue. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings was founded in 1877, the Footpaths Preservation Society in 1884, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in 1889 and the National Trust in 1895.

Moreover, in Britain there were also widespread fears of foreign competition, which a glorification of imperialism, exemplified by the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, did little to allay. And the unease was heightened when, to widespread international and national criticism, it took 3 years to defeat an army of peasant farmers in South Africa in what became known as the Boer War 1899-1902.

The life of George Herbert Perris, the subject of my recently published biography, who lived from 1866 to 1920, neatly embraces this period. He provides us with a case study of how one person saw current affairs and tried to do something to advance the matters in which he believed. He was a remarkable individual. In many ways he was a typical Victorian in that he always sought to improve the shining hour. His energy seems limitless: if he had bothered to put a recreation in his Who’s Who entry it might have been ‘change of work’, but imbued with a sense of high moral purpose, he saw all his work as directed to a public end. A recent commentator describes such individuals as ‘public moralists’, that is, I quote, ‘those who tried to persuade their contemporaries to live up to their professed ideals…invoked a strenuous ethic and gave such moral considerations priority over other concerns’.

Perris was the son of a Unitarian minister. As for many movers and shakers of the time non-conformity and the manse provided a launching pad. They were poor and knew they had to make their own way but they were comparatively well educated. Perris left school at 14 and at 16 began a career in journalism in Hull with the Hull Express, the town’s evening newspaper. He became editor at 19. Three years later, in 1888, he moved to London and lived there for the rest of his life. In 1890 he joined a new weekly Liberal journal, The Speaker, (later named The Nation, and later still, the New Statesman and Nation). He immediately took up Radical politics and moved in a number of overlapping Radical circles.

He was an early member of the Ethical Movement and the principles of this movement were to play an important role in Radical thinking. As one historian of the period has pointed out, Ethicism ‘became a major breeding ground of progressive Liberalism and served as a fusion point of liberal, idealist, evolutionary and moderate socialist thought and re-directed the traditional liberal concern with morals and justice’. If traditional Christian religious belief was to be modified or disavowed, then the moral values that guided society would need to demonstrate the basis on which they were formed. This task Ethicism tried to fulfil. The movement included some famous names such as the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the politician and later first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and the economist J.A. Hobson, author of the influential book Imperialism.

The first Ethical Society to be founded in Britain, the London Ethical Society, began life in 1886. At first the movement centred on South Place Chapel, in Finsbury, London. South Place was a noted home for dissenters, having been Baptist, then Unitarian early in the 19^th century: it later moved towards a loose form of Humanism. By 1901 there were some forty-two Ethical Societies in existence. In 1894 South Place was able to define its objects as ‘the cultivation of a rational religious sentiment, the study of ethical principles and the promotion of human welfare in harmony with existing knowledge’. For Ethicists the world presented, I quote, ‘the failure of existing economic and political conditions to secure for all classes of society alike reasonable opportunities for a full human life’. Ethicists were campaigners and Perris often lectured or wrote.

In the autumn of 1900, for example, he gave a course of eight weekly lectures at South Place on Tuesday evenings under the title ‘Empire or Democracy’. He asserted what, by the late 1890s, had become accepted opinion among Radicals and non-Imperialist Liberals, namely that ‘the facts and principles of external policy have of late so profoundly affected internal affairs that it is impossible to separate the two aspects, for instance, of government, or of military establishments or of the economics of trade’. But an educated democracy, grown more aware of the wider world through the growth of international trade and travel, increasing international links, the spread of education and co-operation among like-minded groups within nations would eventually lead to an international society based on mutual respect among nations. ‘The worst foes of true patriotism,’ he wrote, ‘are those predatory classes, plutocratic, militarist, aristocratic, which use the word to mask their own cosmopolitan greed and violence.’

Perris contributed regularly to the weekly journal Ethical World, whose first issue appeared on 1 January 1898. In the issues of its first few years there seems scarcely a subject of concern to Radicals that it did not cover; Ethicism, as mentioned, saw itself as a pervasive and comprehensive doctrine.

For the first two years Perris contributed a signed ‘middle article’ of some seventeen hundred words in almost every issue. Zola’s challenge to the French Establishment over Dreyfus occupied him on a number of occasions; and on three consecutive weeks he took Tolstoy, one of his heroes, to task for suggesting that art should be chiefly a moral instrument, ‘a means of union among men’ with no acceptance of pleasure. Later he commended him in ‘Non Resistance as a Method of Revolt’. He was often to display a sharp turn of phrase as in ‘Citizenship and the Board School Machine’ when he said, in urging the teaching of civics, that the system wants ‘children to be good Trinitarians, good Quakers, good Unitarians mayhap; but chiefly good, obedient, contented miners, dockers, clerks and what not’.

In March 1899 he wrote four weekly articles under the general heading of ‘The Weak’. Inequalities in health and health care, the plight of children of poor parents, the exploitation of women in industry and in domestic service and the poor elderly in the workhouse all got extended discussion, the latter ending in a characteristic peroration:

The death of T.B. Potter, Cobden’s successor as MP for Rochdale, the last surviving member of the Cobden circle and a founder of the Cobden Club, gave Perris the opportunity in November 1898 to meditate on Cobden’s legacy of Free Trade. Perris never gave up his belief in Cobden’s intellectual legacy and was to become secretary of the Cobden Club in 1903, when the Protectionist debates of the time generated renewed activity in defence of Free Trade. In 1898, however, Perris lamented that the hopes of the founders of the Free Trade movement fifty years earlier had not been realised. ‘The best of the Manchester men were so busy with the corn and cotton argument,’ he wrote, ‘that they never had time to study other domestic implications of the same fundamental idea... they dreamed no dreams of social synthesis and international brotherhood.’ ‘In particular,’ he continued, ‘the Club has been concerned at the growth of protectionism in foreign countries... the continuance of poverty at home... and the intensification of national jealousies,’ which found expression in the ‘continuance of war, the unceasing growth in armaments and the solidification of military monarchies’.

He offered no panacea; the web of concord, based on contacts at all levels of society, that lies at the heart of relations between peoples is ‘...the Ethic of Free Trade which it remains for us to realise’. ‘Ethical Societies are founded upon a conviction that a good life is desirable for its own sake, and rests upon no supernatural sanction. The organic nature of human society implies that a good individual life can only be attained in a good society.’

An organisation that had close links with Ethicism was the Rainbow Circle called after the Rainbow Tavern in Fleet Street where its early meetings were held. Founded in 1894, it grew out of a growing dissatisfaction with Liberal Party policy early in the 1890s, which, many Liberals felt, was failing to address the challenges to society posed by the manifestations of late 19^th century capitalism. The aim of the Circle was ‘to provide a rational and comprehensive view of political and social progress, leading to a consistent body of political and economic doctrine which could ultimately be formulated in a programme for action and in that form provide a rallying point for social reformers’. The similarities with Ethicism’s aims are obvious and many prominent Ethicists were active members, including Perris. Many Radical bodies of the period had overlapping memberships with the same names cropping up. In the case of the Rainbow Circle, membership included names from the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Foundation, the University Settlement Movement, the Peace Movement, aspiring young Liberals, the Society for Friends of Russian Freedom and Ethicists. Meetings were held monthly and themes were pursued for a whole season. Thus subjects such as workings of democracy, health and welfare, colonies and the empire were considered in depth. Many members went on to distinguished political careers such as Herbert Samuel, Charles Trevelyan and Sydney Olivier. Perris played a prominent role and led discussions on eleven occasions between 1895 and 1914, this number being exceeded only by three other members.

Permanent peace and harmony between nations has long been an ideal, desired by most of mankind. And the active pursuit of international peace sits well with Ethicism for it brought a moral dimension to the consideration of international affairs; indeed, it was argued, foreign policy should be driven by a moral imperative. Perris’s most prominent cause was the Peace Movement. The modern Peace Movement grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and there were soon organisations in many western European countries.

In Britain the early years were dominated by Quaker influence but by the 1830s this influence was felt to be insufficiently active and proselytising and the organisation moved away from its strict Quaker origins. The advent late in the 1840s of Richard Cobden, the great free trader and the companion of John Bright in their anti-Corn Laws campaign, was decisive. He was the British Peace Movement’s first powerful political figure. The simple Quaker message, he said, was insufficient. It was he who argued that wars of self-defence were acceptable, and he also accepted that war in defence of a weaker neighbour might also be necessary. And, pursuing the defensive line of argument, he agreed that a fleet was necessary to protect British foreign trade and safeguard food imports. There was thus no single philosophic position of the Peace Movement. Problems arose, for example, over attitudes to wars of national independence or liberation. Did one support Garibaldi, for example, in his struggle for Italian unification? Turkey generated particular problems. The Bulgarian massacres of the 1870s and the Armenian massacres of the 1890s being cases in point. The events of 1914 illustrate the division. Some such as Perris gave the War principled support: others opposed it for equally principled reasons, and such disagreements often ruptured long-standing friendships.

Modern commentators distinguish between Pacifism - non-violence – and Pacificism, a peaceful approach to international affairs and other countries but which accepts defensive war, and what we would call humanitarian intervention, as in Kosovo, in the last resort. Perris was not a Pacifist in the strict sense but a Pacificist. As a strong internationalist the prevention of war was his highest political priority, but this did not exclude the use of force in the last resort. He even at times seemed to go beyond that position when for example he was so moved by the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks in the 1890s that he advocated sending the fleet to capture Smyrna so strangling Turkey’s trade.

In Perris’s time there were two main organisations in the Peace Movement, in addition to the Quaker based Peace Society, and it was to one of these, the International Peace and Arbitration Association, that Perris devoted much of his time. It was a secular organisation, it appealed mainly to middle class intellectuals and was passionately propagandist. Perris edited its monthly journal, Concord, from 1898 to 1906, served on its committees, engaged fully with its propagandising, and through it became a founding member of the National Peace Council from its beginnings in 1904. He also was deeply involved in the international Peace Movement and regularly attended international conferences of Peace organisations. On the one hand he campaigned for the creation and strengthening of institutions to serve peace, such as arrangements for international arbitration and the spread of democratic government (democracies do not fight one another) and on the other against imperialism and the arms trade. The International Arbitration and Peace Association’s prime aim was to seek a formula for settling disputes between countries by international arbitration. But its doctrines also included non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, a system to bring about international disarmament, the development of an international code of law, anti-colonialism and educating the public.

Perris was not just a writer and speaker. He also took action. In 1896 he formed the Increased Armaments Protest Committee to oppose the increased expenditure on the navy that marked those years. A vigorous supporter of the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899, for which he campaigned, Perris saw the conference as a success. For the first time national governments engaged in a debate about international peace, established an international court and so took the first steps to what later became the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations.

From 1906, when the Liberal Party won a huge victory in the general election of that year, he was a prominent critic of the Liberal Government’s foreign policy and re-armament plans. In 1908 he resigned from the party and joined the Labour Party in protest over issues arising from the Anglo-Russian Convention. However his chief ire was directed at what he saw as the Liberal government’s anti-German stance – the Anglo-French entente of 1904, followed by the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 meant that Germany would see itself as threatened from all sides. In an attempt to offer comfort to the Germans he took a prominent role in fostering friendship with Germany through such bodies as the Anglo-German Friendship Society, of which he was Joint Secretary on its foundation in 1905 in the aftermath of the Moroccan crisis of that year.

As mentioned, it was axiomatic among those in the Peace Movement that democracies do not fight one another. Second only to his work for war prevention was Perris’s work for the creation of a democratic Russia. Russia was the bogeyman for many Radicals. A great people were brutally governed and only democracy could release their creative energies. The number of Russian political refugees in England testified to the repressive nature of the regime. Moreover autocratic Tsarist Russia pursued an imperialistic approach to international affairs and was a constant threat to peace. Perris visited Russia on three occasions, in 1896, in 1904 to visit Tolstoy (of which more later) and again in the summer of 1905 at the time of the Revolution of that year. Perris loved Russia and the Russian people and a number of the political refugees in London became close friends, particularly Sergius Stepniak and Felix Volkhovsky. He named his son Felix as a tribute to Volkhovsky and after his 1896 visit he referred to ‘this strange people of my half adoption’. And after Stepniak’s death in 1895 he spoke of the way Stepniak had widened the lives of all who came into contact with him thus, I quote ‘relieving with a gloss of romantic interest their more immediate and, too often, squalid domestic troubles’.

Perris was a founding member of the London based Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. Among English members were names from the Ethical Movement and the Rainbow Circle. Perris wrote regularly for the Society’s journal Free Russia and also lectured widely. Thus on 27 September 1893 he addressed the Newington Reform Club on ‘Tyranny and Terror in Russia’. He became foreign editor of the newly founded daily Liberal newspaper, The Tribune, in 1906 and through his friendship with David Soskice, its St. Petersburg correspondent, was able to print accurate, comprehensive and up to date information about the turbulent state of affairs in Russia after the 1905 Revolution. The Russian ambassador in London called The Tribune his bête noire. Soskice had been a well-known political refugee in London but went to St. Petersburg with British Government protection. He led a colourful life – in 1917, for example, he became a member of Kerensky’s secretariat. He was the father of Frank Soskice, Home Secretary in Harold Wilson’s administration from 1964-66.

Perris visited Tolstoy in 1904 at the great man’s house at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy and Tolstoyism had a pervasive attraction for Perris, as for many others: many of Tolstoy’s doctrines found resonances in his ethical outlook. Perris wrote two books Leo Tolstoy: the Grand Mujik, a biography, and The Life and Teaching of Leo Tolstoy, a book of extracts with a commentary, as well as numerous articles and lectures over many years. Perris was, of course, only one of a large number of people in the west who felt Tolstoy’s call, some to the extent of changing their lives. A principal part of Tolstoy’s attraction was the all-embracing nature of his doctrines, as expressed in numerous writings from late in the 1870s when he adopted ‘non-resistance to evil’ and broke with the church. Tolstoy’s views subsequently developed into a total view of society based on a system of individual ethics. Society must be transformed from one based on violence to one based on love. The doctrines provided a rich source for critics of society, who could draw upon different aspects to emphasise particular points of view. For Perris and others in the Peace Movement the impact of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8 on Tolstoy’s thinking, and his subsequent revulsion from violence was seminal. Perris wrote:

But it was an unhappy visit and Perris broke with his hero. He could not accept an attitude of total non-violence since he argued that it led to total negation of all social activity. Thus he wrote:

Before I conclude I would like to mention Perris’s work as assistant editor of Home University Library, which he originated in 1910. This series, which some here tonight will recall, provided specially commissioned, cheap, authoritative introductions to academic subjects for general readers. In its first two and a half years it sold over one million copies of eighty titles. In 1899 Perris had founded the Literary Agency of London, one of the early literary agencies, which was in existence until 1916. Its clients included Edward Thomas, Stephen Crane, A. T. Mahon, Jean de Bloch and Aylmer Maude, Tolstoy’s biographer.

On the outbreak of War in 1914, Perris joined the Daily Chronicle as its correspondent with the French Armies (he spoke French). He supported the War reluctantly and it caused him great pain and heart searching before he reached his decision. In his view the decisive act was the unprovoked and ferocious aggression by Germany on Belgium and France; nations had a right to live in freedom from fear. Accordingly, defeat of the Germans was a prerequisite to a new world order, and he particularly singled out the Kaiser and the Prussian governing class as having gone mad. As already mentioned, he was an early supporter of the idea of the League of Nations.

Worn out by years of overwork in the War, Perris died in 1920 of pneumonia contracted while attending a League of Nations meeting in Geneva. In the War he lost a son who, having survived Gallipoli and the Somme, joined the Royal Flying Corps and was killed in a flying accident in July 1918. He also had two daughters. His funeral at Golders Green Crematorium was attended by numerous friends and colleagues from all the organisations with which he had been concerned. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, sent his principal private secretary to represent him.

What are we to make of this man who died still relatively young? In 1911 Perris wrote: ‘the great task of the 20^th century, whether we regard domestic or external, moral or economic, needs, is seen to be the removal of the fear of war, and the burdens of preparation it entails, by the organisation of a settled peace.’

In a political sense he spent a life pursuing lost causes, as have many who thought or think like him. But this is to suppose that history is just about winners or losers. He kept ultimate goals in sight and in so doing strengthened and continues to strengthen the case for democracy.

Necessarily, in order to be brief, and to leave time for discussion I have left out a lot. His early life in London and as a journalist merits attention, as does his time as a war correspondent and his time at the Paris Peace Conference leading to the Versailles Treaty. But for these and other details I refer you to my book. It can be ordered through bookshops or by post.

Robert Gomme

For further details of George Perris’s life see:

Robert Gomme. George Herbert Perris 1866-1920: The Life and Times of a Radical (Peter Lang). The book contains an extensive bibliography.