SOCIALISTS AT WAR.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9541, 13 July 1909, Page 7

SOCIALISTS AT WAR.

How some Socialists do love one auother! Just after the recent split of the Labour Party at Home the editor of the ~ "Christian Commonwealth'' asked Mr H. G. Wells for his views on the position of the party. Mr Wells said he could afford to write only a short letter as he was "bound to get on with a book," but in that short letter he contrived to say a good many things unpalatable to some of his fellow Socialists. Mr Victor Grayson he does not believe in, that deplorable young person having "all the levity of youth added to an instability that will last his lifetime. ... I wouldn't lend him a horse." Mr Robert Blatchford, editor of the "Clarion," is, in Mr Wells' opinion, "touchily van and excitable, a shy, obscurable man, overpraised for his valiant roaring. . . . He would insist on roaring during a night attack." Messrs Hyndman and Quelch show "a strong ingredient of spite" in their wrecking tactics. Mr Shaw is described as "a perverse eccentric, a wit with an astr.unding genius for contrast and surprise, a gross senti•v mentalist in cynic's motley, adorable as a friend, and hopelessly tiresome as an associate." Mr Shaw replies in his most trenchant vein. He says that when Mr Wells belonged to a Fabian Society he "insulted it freely, and proceeded to rearrange it according to his own taste," and when he found he could not do this, resigned, explaining to the public that he did so "because we were a parcel of sweeps." "I never met such a chap," says Mr Shaw; "I could not survive meeting such another. I pause to read over this description of him, and am discouraged by its tame inadequacy—its failure to grapple with the outrageous truth." Then Mr Shaw proceeds to defend his friends. There is no use telling the world that So and-so is unfit to be a leader because he is spiteful or vain. Napoleon kicked a man in the stomach for saying that France wanted the Bourbons back, and Julius Caesar, was much vai ier than Robert Blatchford; both these men had some success as leaders.