The newly elected Executive
included the seven Essayists, Robert E. Dell, now Paris correspondent
for several journals, W.S. De Mattos, for many years afterwards an
indefatigable organiser for the Society, and now settled in British
Columbia, the Rev. Stewart D. Headlam, Mrs. L.T. Mallet, then a
prominent member of the Women's Liberal Association, J.F. Oakeshott, of
the Fellowship of the New Life, and myself.
The lectures of the early months of 1890 were a somewhat brilliant
series. Sidney Webb on the Eight Hours Bill; James Rowlands, M.P., on
the then favourite Liberal nostrum of Leasehold Enfranchisement (which
the Essayists demolished in a crushing debate); Dr. Bernard Bosanquet on
"The Antithesis between Individualism and Socialism Philosophically
Considered"; Mrs. Besant on "Socialism and the School Board Policy"; Mr.
(now Sir) H. Llewellyn Smith on "The Causes and Effects of Immigration
from Country to Town," in which he disproved the then universal opinion
that the unemployed of East London were immigrants from rural districts;
Sydney Olivier on "Zola"; William Morris on "Gothic Architecture"
(replacing a lecture on Morris himself by Ernest Radford, who was absent
through illness); Sergius Stepniak on "Tolstoi, Tchernytchevsky, and the
Russian School"; Hubert Bland on "Socialist Novels"; and finally on July
18th Bernard Shaw on "Ibsen.
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