Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb then decided that the time had come to make an attack on old-fashioned Liberalism on these lines. The "Fortnightly Review" accepted their paper, the Society gave the necessary sanction, and in November the article entitled "To Your Tents, O Israel" appeared. Each of the great departments of the State was examined in detail, and for each was stated precisely what should be done to carry out the promise that the Government would be "in the first flight of employers," and what in fact had been done, which indeed, with rare exceptions, was nothing. The "Parish Councils Act" and Sir William Harcourt's great Budget of 1894 were still in the future, and so far there was little to show as results from the Liberal victory of the previous year. The case against the Government from the Labour standpoint was therefore unrelieved black, and the Society, in whose name the Manifesto appeared, called on the working classes to abandon Liberalism, to form a Trade Union party of their own, to raise £30,000 and to finance fifty candidates for Parliament. It is a curious coincidence that thirteen years later, in 1906, the Party formed, as the Manifesto demanded, by the big Trade Unions actually financed precisely fifty candidates and succeeded in electing thirty of them.
The Manifesto led to the resignation of a few distinguished members, including Professor D.G. Ritchie, Mrs. Bateson, widow of the Master of St. John's College, Cambridge, and more important than all the rest, Mr. H.W. Massingham. He was on the Continent when the Manifesto was in preparation; otherwise perhaps he might have come to accept it: for his reply, which was published in the same magazine a month later, was little more than a restatement of the case. "The only sound interpretation of a model employer," he said, "is a man who pays trade union rates of wages, observes trade union limit of hours, and deals with 'fair' as opposed to 'unfair' houses. Apply all these tests and the Government unquestionably breaks down on every one of them." If this was all that an apologist for the Government could say, no wonder that the attack went home. The opponents of Home Rule were of course delighted to find another weak spot in their adversary's defences; and the episode was not soon forgotten.