From the beginning of the modern labor movement we see that the British workmen have shown a strong tendency to organize. Their organizations included at first only the skilled workers. There was a gulf between the trained worker and the unskilled worker. The latter, forming the substratum of poverty, were too abject for organizing.
These two great bodies of workers, skilled and unskilled, have been gradually brought together and their interests united. The Taff Vale and Osborne judgments have forced them into politics. The unskilled have been given the benefit of the experience of the skilled, and a fair degree of homogeneity and group ambition has been reached.
To enter politics a new form of organization was necessary. We will see how one was prepared for them.
We will now turn to the Socialist organizations. They are more numerous than in the other countries we have studied, and more varied in color. But not any of them are as strong as the French or German organizations.
In 1880 William Morris and H.M. Hyndman, a personal friend of Marx, organized the "Democratic Federation." For a few years it was the only Socialist organization. It split on the question of revolution. Morris and his friends, many of them inclined toward Anarchy, founded the "Socialist League." This league has long since vanished. Hyndman and his followers renamed their society the "Social Democratic Federation." It still persists, under the name Social Democratic Party (popularly "S.D.P."), and remains the only organized trace of militant, reactionary Marxianism in England. For a long time it refrained from politics, advocated violence, and was the faithful imitator of the Guesdist party in France. These are doctrines and methods that repel the English mind, and the Federation never has been strong. It has a weekly paper, _Justice_, and a monthly paper, _The Social Democrat_; claims one member in Parliament, elected however by the Labor Party, and (in 1907) 124 members of various local governing bodies. Its aged leader, Hyndman, clings tenaciously to the dogmas of Marx, and all the changes that have come over the Socialist movement during the last decades have not altered his views or methods.[11] The Federation's affiliations and sympathy have been with the International rather than the British movement, and until a few years ago it monopolized British representation on the International Executive Committee.