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 L30,000 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.
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