"Prosecutions...Are Always Risky Business": Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 "Don't Shoot" Prosecutions

"Prosecutions...Are Always Risky Business": Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 "Don't Shoot"ProsecutionsAuthor(s): Ian Christopher FletcherReviewed work(s):Source: Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer,1996), pp. 251-278Published by: The North American Conference on British StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4052461 .

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"Prosecutions.. .are Always Risky Business": Labor, Liberals, andthe 1912 "Don't Shoot" Prosecutions*

Ian Christopher Fletcher

In the spring of 1912, the British syndicalist leader Tom Mann was prosecuted under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 for his opposition to the use of troops during the great coal strike. He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, but an outcry from socialists, trade unionists, and progressives forced the Liberal government to reduce his sentence and release him early from prison. This much is familiar to historians of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. It is often forgotten, however, that Mann was only one of eight syndicalists and socialists who were prosecuted for their involvement in the "don't shoot" agitation. It is likewise forgotten that Mann went on trial just days before the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Frederick and Em- meline Pethick Lawrence shared a similar fate, amid demands that Sir Edward Carson, the leading opponent of Irish home rule, join them in the dock. Indeed, the Nation, a progressive Liberal weekly, complained that "the country is...getting somewhat tired of political trials."' Perhaps because we assume the relative transparency of the law, historians have failed to scrutinize in detail the origins and outcome of the "don't shoot" prosecutions. George Dangerfield devoted one sentence to them, Elie Halevy a few more; although the "don't shoot" episode has been invoked to symbolize the increasingly fragile relations between Liberalism and the working classes, it continues to receive only brief mention in accounts of Edwardian labor and politics.2 Even Tom Mann's biographers

An earlier version of this article was presented to the Southern Conference on British Studies, Atlanta, Georgia, in November 1992. Crown copyright material in the Public Record Office is reproduced by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The quotation from H. H. Asquith's letter to George V is reproduced from photographic copies in the Public Record Office of original letters preserved in the Royal Archives and made available by the gracious permission of Her Majesty the Queen. The author wishes to thank Mrs. Dorothy Evelyn and the University of Liverpool Library, Mr. Geoffrey Trevelyan, the Trustees of the Trevelyan Family Papers and the Robinson Library, Unliversity of Newcastle upon Tyne, the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, and the House of Lords Record Office for permission to quote from private manuscripts. The author has made every effort to obtain permission for quotations from manuscript sources, but he begs the indulgence of any copyright holders whose identity or whereabouts were unknown to him. He is grateful to Laura Tabili, Jonathan Zeitlini, and two anonymous readers for their helpful criticisms and suggestions.

INation, 25 May 1912.

2George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 (New York, 1961 [1935]), p. 278; Elie Halevy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 6: The Rule

Alhioni 28 2 (SLImmer 1996): 251-278 (C Nortli Ainerican Conference on British Studies 1996. All Rights Reserved.



252 Ian Christopher Fletcher

have shed little new light on his case.3 Yet, the episode helped precipitate Dangerfield's "strange death of liberal England," the prewar crisis of legitimacy which threatened to discredit the state in Britain and Ireland. This article seeks to clarify what happened and why. A new look, based in part on a Home Office file on the "don't shoot" prosecutions recently made available to researchers in the Public Record Office, yields valuable insights into the politics of the labor and socialist movements as well as the government's management of militant protest.4

A dozen years ago Ross McKibbin argued that Marxism attracted little support in Britain in part because working people and Labour politicians were "highly conditioned by inherited ideologies which emphasized a common citizenship, the fairness of the rules of the game and the class-neutrality of the major institutions of the state." Their acceptance of the fundamentals of the political and economic order served to constrain the other classes, for "if a system acquires its legitimacy partly by the strictness with which the rules are applied, the rules must be binding on both sides." But because a crucial element of this consensus was the separation of politics and the market, McKibbin concluded that labor politics were limited to "varieties of reformism."5 More recently, Duncan Tanner and others have shifted the terms of the debate by emphasizing the varieties of radicalism that influenced Edwardian progressivism, Labourism, and socialism.6 of Democracy 1905-1914 (2nd ed.; New York, 1961 [1932]), p. 465; George L. Bernstein, Liber- alism and Liberal Politics in Edwtardian England (London, 1986), p. 136; Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism (London, 1977), pp. 66-67; Bob Holton, British Syndicalism, 1900-1914: Myths and Realities (London, 1976), pp. 114-18; Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900-21: Th7e Origins of British CoImtmull1nism? (London, 1969), p. 146; Standish Meacham, "'The Sense of an Impending Clash': English Working-Class Unrest before the First World War," American Historical Reviewt 77, 5 (1972): 1353; Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics 1867-1939 (Oxford, 1982), p. 157; David Rubinstein, 'Trade Unions, Politicians and Public Opinion 1906-14," in Trade Unions in British Politics, ed. Ben Pimlott and Chris Cook (London, 1982), p. 70; Duncan Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900-1918 (Cam- bridge, 1990). p. 63.

3Chushichi Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 1856-1941: The Chiallenges of Labour (Oxford, 1991), pp. 160-63; Joseph White, Tom Mann (Manchester, 1991), pp. 179-82. See also Tom Mann, Tom Mann's Mem- oirs (London, 1967 [1923]), pp. 230-62.

4I remain grateful to the Departmental Record Officer of the Home Office for granting me privileged access to this file, HO 144/7062/220603, in 1986 when it was still closed and unlisted.

5Ross McKibbin, "Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?," in The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 24, 26, 41 (first published in the English Historical Reviewv 99, 39 [1984]: 297-33 1). Cf. Alan Fox, History and Heritage: The Social Origins of the Br-itish Industrial Relations Systeni (London, 1985), pp. 124-279.

6Duncan Tanner, "Ideological Debate in Edwardian Labour Politics: Radicalism, Revisionism and Socialism," in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalisnm, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914, ed. Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 271-93.



"Prosecutions Are Always Risky Business" 253

In the decade or so before the outbreak of the First World War, new and fractious Edwardian Lefts began to contend with the popular Liberalism of Lib-Labs and Radicals.7 One of these Lefts manifested itself in a plethora of militant and democratic groupings in the women's suffrage movement. Another Left, ranging from disillusioned Liberal trade unionists to all manner of socialists, clustered around independent labor politics. This labor and socialist Left disagreed on many things, of course, including the parliamentary alliance of the Liberal and Labour parties, the centrality of women's suffrage to democracy, the role of the state in the workplace and the working-class household, and the relationship between political and industrial forms of action. Nevertheless, the debates over these and other questions produced a vibrant socialist presence in popular politics. Moreover, a significant overlap existed between the new Edwardian Lefts. One sign of this was the Daily Herald, a newspaper which began regular publication in April 1912 and sought to address a broadly "rebel" readership. As the work of Sandra Stanley Holton and Patrick Joyce suggests, suffragism and socialism grew out of deep and intermingled roots in nineteenth-century popular radicalism.8 Although political minorities, these Lefts could mobilize larger constituencies through the medium of this populist heritage. Acting sometimes in conjunction, sometimes in competition, their roughly parallel struggles against the supposedly opportunistic, middle-class Liberalism of H. H. Asquith and David Lloyd George challenged the limits of citizenship and pushed forward the project of political and social democracy.

If the separation of politics and the market marked the limits of reformism, the apparent separation of politics and the law, summed up in the notion of the rule of law, increased the viability of reformism. A semblance of neutrality and impartiality on the part of the state and the concomitant lack of spectacular examples of political injustice certainly helped secure popular consent. Yet historians of the late Victorian and Edwardian state have discemed an increasingly aggressive response to perceived threats to public order, especially from political and labor militancy. Jane Morgan and Barbara Weinberger have traced the de-

7An admittedly problematic category in modern and postmodern politics, "the Left" remains useful, I believe, if its presumed homogenous and universal character is replaced by a pluralized and relational understanding of its languages, traditions, organizations, and constituencies.

8Sandra Stanley Holton, "In Sorrowful Wrath: Suffrage Militancy and the Romantic Feminism of Emmeline Pankhurst," in British Feminisnm in the Twventieth Century, ed. Harold L. Smith (Amherst, 1990), pp. 7-24; idem, "From Anti-Slavery to Suffrage Militancy: The Bright Circle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the British Women's Movement," in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed., Caroline Daley and Meanie Nolan (New York, 1994), pp. 213-33; Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848-1914 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 75-84.




velopment of extensive Home Office involvement in the policing of strikes.9 Bernard Porter has detected the emergence of a "vigilant state" in the rise of Scotland Yard's Special Branch.10 On a broader plane, Charles Townshend has identified a shift between the 1880s and 1910s in the "English way" of public order from a fairly generous tolerance of disorder to an ever greater anxiety about the requirements of social and political stability."' These historians recognize, however, that heightened concern with public order was embedded within the existing constitutional framework and remained for the most part consonant with supposedly historic English and Liberal ideals like individual liberty and legal equality. While there was increasing talk of compulsory arbi- tration and other novel approaches to industrial relations, the authorities responded fairly cautiously to the strike waves that rolled over Britain and Ireland between 1910 and 1914. That relatively modest interventions during the labor unrest could nevertheless contribute to a sharp crisis of legitimacy is something of a paradox. Its resolution requires a widening of the focus from workplaces to the domain of popular political controversy and the antagonistic meanings generated by uproars like the "don't shoot" episode.

Beyond establishing the context and sequence of events, this article argues that the episode disrupted the prevailing ideological consensus and consequently marked a turning-point in the governability of prewar Britain and Ireland. This consensus was highly contingent, for over the long run it had effectively favored the claims of property before those of labor, and the demands of the politically dominant over those of the politically marginal. As party strife worsened inside Parliament and militant protest spread outside, it became increasingly subject to resistance and renegotiation. While much of the impetus for mass strike movements may have been declining real wages, the militancy of the strikers challenged the authorities as well as employers. The government's reluctant but repeated use of the military in aid of the civil power during strike disturbances was especially contentious. The soldiers put into the field to uphold the law were largely working-class, of course. In inviting the troops to decide for themselves whether to obey orders, the "don't shoot" agitation challenged the notion

9Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939 (Oxford, 1987); Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace?: Policing Strikes in Britain, 1906-1926 (Oxford, 1991).

10Bernard Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London, 1986), pp. 161-94. See also V. A. C. Gatrell, "Crime, Authority and the Policeman-State," in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions, ed. F. M .L. Thompson (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 243-310; Stefan Petrow, Policing Morals: The Metropolitan Police and the Home Office 1870-1914 (Oxford, 1994).

"Charles Townshend, Making the Peace: Public Order and Public Security in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1993), pp. 37-55.




that the working classes were adequately represented in a state which could command some working-class citizens to kill others. From this perspective, the state's lethal power was "class law" and "class justice" in their most extreme forms. In calling for fair play, the "free speech" fight engendered by the "don't shoot" prosecutions appropriated and reworked erstwhile Liberal ideals to em- phasize their collective as well as individual character. The demand for equality before the law proved to be absolutely central to the whole controversy, which might be characterized as "legalitarian" rather than simply libertarian because it implied that citizens were (or should be) constituted within a pluralistic democratic state rather than against a minimal laissez-faire state. First and foremost, the demand authorized a "chain of equivalence" between the varied struggles and identities of socialists, suffragettes, trade unionists, and other radicals around equal rights.12 It also underwrote a loose but nonetheless important alliance between the Left and progressive Liberals who believed that the same law for rich and poor was a necessary precondition of peaceful and constructive social and political reform. The prospect of military intervention in Ulster, where militant unionists were threatening civil war and hinting that soldiers might not relish shooting loyal Protestant opponents of Irish home rule, gave the controversy a further, decisive twist. Only by placing events against this wider backdrop of Edwardian politics can the dynamics and pivotal significance of the "don't shoot" episode be properly appreciated.

II

Many Edwardian socialists and trade unionists could recall the clash at Feath- erstone where soldiers had killed two striking miners in 1893, an incident which had occurred under a Liberal govemment.'3 When soldiers appeared on the streets of Belfast during the dock strike of 1907, many years had passed since the armed forces had been deployed to deal with labor unrest anywhere in the United Kingdom, but once again the Liberals were in power. Perhaps because of Dublin Castle's fabled system of bureaucratic misrule and Ulster's perceived propensity for sectarian violence, the Irish chief secretary Augustine Birrell and the government escaped serious political damage when the troops shot dead two persons during street disturbances in a Catholic neighborhood.'4 The exercise

12This concept is borrowed from Emesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, but I am concerned to his- toricize it in the specific circumstances of the Edwardian crisis. See Chantal Mouffe, "Radical Democracy or Liberal Democracy?," in Radical Democracy: Identity, Citizenship, and the State, ed. David Trend (New York, 1996), p. 24; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 1985), pp. 149-94.

13For the heckling which continually reminded the Liberal leader H. H. Asquith and his audiences that he was home secretary at the time of the Featherstone incident and allegedly bore some re- sponsibility for it, see A. G. Gardiner, Prophets, Priests, and Kings (2nd ed.; London, 1914 [1908]), pp. 53-54, 61.

John Gray, City in Revolt: James Larkin and the Belfast Dock Strike of 1907 (Belfast, 1985).




was not repeated until the South Wales coal strike of 1910, and then only after the home secretary Winston Churchill had first tried to avoid military intervention by dispatching police from London. Even so, he was accused of brutal coercion at Tonypandy and elsewhere in the mining valleys." Such were the political memories that the "don't shoot" agitation could count upon as it emerged upon the scene during the massive summer strike wave of 1911.

The dockworkers' leader, Ben Tillett, set the tone with his denunciations of "the Cossacking methods of the present Government."'6 Jim Larkin's Irish Worker published an "Open Letter to British Soldiers" by the syndicalist Fred Bower. It made a direct appeal to soldiers on strike duty:

Men! Comrades! Brothers! You are Workingmen's Sons. When we go on Strike to better Our lot, which is the lot also of Your Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters, You are called upon by your officers to MURDER

Us.....

"Thou shalt not kill," says the Book. Don't forget that! It does not say, "unless you have a uniform on." No! MURDER IS MURDER, whether committed in the heat of anger on one who has wronged a loved one, or by pipe-clayed Tommies with a rifle. Boys, Don't do it! Act the Man! Act the Brother! Act the Human Being! Property can be replaced! Human life, Never! The Idle Rich Class, who own and order you about, own and order us about also. They and their friends own the land and means of life of Britain..... Your Fight is Our fight. Instead of fighting Against each other, We should be fighting with each other. Out of Our loins, Our lives, Our homes, You came. Don't disgrace Your Parents. Your Class, by being willing tools any longer of the Master Class.

You, like Us, are of the Slave Class. When we rise, You rise; When We fall, even by your bullets, Ye fall also. England with its fertile valleys and dells, its mineral resources, it sea harvests, is the heritage of ages to us. You no doubt joined the Army out of poverty.

We work long hours for small wages at hard work, because of our poverty. And both Your poverty and Ours arises from the fact that, Britain with its resources, belongs to only a few people. These few, owning Britain, own Our jobs. Owning Our jobs they own Our very lives. Comrades, have We called in vain? Think things out and refuse any longer to Murder Your Kindred. Help Us to win back Britain for the British, and the World for the Workers.'7

The rhetoric of the "Open Letter" blended the languages of popular radicalism and socialism, mixing together references to land and industry, family and class,

15Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front: 1900-1955 (London, 1992), pp. 139-45, provides the most recent discussion. For a highly nuanced analysis of the social context and meaning of the strike violence, see David Smith, "Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of Community," Past and Present 87 (1980): 158-84.

16Public Record Office (PRO), HO 45/10649/210615/77, Tillett to Labour M.P.s, 17 July 1911.

17Irish Worker, 29 July 1911.



"Prosecutions Are Always Risky Business " 257

the people and the proletariat into a sentimental, religious, and patriotic appeal. Employers and officers were amalgamated into an "Idle Rich Class," the enemy not only of the working classes but of the whole nation. The "Open Letter" was subsequently printed and distributed as a leaflet during the dock strike in Liv- erpool, where soldiers killed two workers on 15 August.18 They killed two more workers at Llanelli four days later during the brief nationwide railway strike, when Churchill deployed the army on a vast scale to prevent interference with train service. These shootings angered and alarmed many people in the labor and socialist movements. Justice, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) weekly, likened these bloody events to tsarist Russia and offered them as evidence against the govemment's claim that it was "keeping the ring and seeing fair play," while the Labour Leader, the Independent Labour Party (ILP) weekly, declared that it was "simply monstrous that soldiers should be licensed to commit murder by Churchill or any other Home Secretary."'9 The SDP organized a Trafalgar Square meeting, addressed by Tillett, Fred Knee, the Labour M.P. George Lansbury, and others, and circulated a leaflet, "A Word to My Fellow Service Men," appealing to soldiers to serve the cause of the workers rather than that of aristocrats and autocrats.20 Although "English liberty is traditional the world over," Justice predicted that "we shall soon have police spies, Gov- ernment agents, and all the paraphernalia of despotism."2'

The Home Office and the director of public prosecutions Sir Charles Mathews studied the SDP's "don't shoot" rhetoric, but Churchill concurred with the Home Office under-secretary Sir Edward Troup's recommendation against any prosecutions for incitement to mutiny.22 The last such prosecution had occurred in 1804, and the Home Office was reluctant to prolong the outpouring of indig- nation by a clumsy effort to stop it.23 A prosecution would further publicize the agitation, and trial by jury made the verdict uncertain. This decision was con- sistent with a pragmatic style of managing militancy to which the government had adhered since its earliest days in office. The Home Office continued to tolerate angry rhetoric throughout the autumn of 1911, by which time the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) had resumed its suffrage protests

'8Fred Bower, Rolling Stonemason (London, 1936), pp. 179, 182-83.

'9Justice, 26 Aug. 1911; Labour Leader, 1 Sept. 1911.

20The Times, 28 Aug. 1911; Justice, 2 Sept. 1911. A version of this leaflet was later published in Justice, 16 Sept. 1911.

21Justice, 9 Sept. 1911.

22PRO, HO 144/1163/213549/1, Troup minute, 31 Aug. 1911; Churchill minute, 2 Sept. 1911; /2, Troup minute, 2 Sept. 1911.

23The Earl of Halsbury and other lawyers, The Lavs of England (London, 1909), 9: 464-65; David Williams, Keeping the Peace: The Police and Public Order (London, 1967), pp. 178-97.




in reaction to Lloyd George's "torpedoing" of the Conciliation Bill, and restive Ulster unionists had begun to mobilize against the prospect of a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. In fact, when the Home Office official Ernley Blackwell advised against prosecuting Tom Mann for sedition in October, he specifically noted the similarity between Mann's words and those of the Unionist M.P. Sir Edward Carson.24 Mann was left alone.

But the seeming indifference of the authorities, and the appointment of Regi- nald McKenna to replace Churchill as home secretary, did not prevent the Left-now strengthened by the fusion of the SDP, an ILP breakaway led by the militant ex-M.P. Victor Grayson, and several smaller socialist societies into a new British Socialist Party (BSP)-from continuing to denounce the use of soldiers against strikers. The Labour M.P. Keir Hardie published a pamphlet bitterly attacking the government's militarized handling of the railway strike.25 In January 1912, when Mann's Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) published the first number of a new monthly, the Syndicalist, it contained the "Open Letter to British Soldiers." Furnished with a copy by the Special Branch of the London metropolitan police, Sir Edward Troup doubted the "Open Letter" was "likely to have much effect." Passing the file on to the director of public prosecutions, he minuted with characteristic coolness that "I see no possibility of taking action on this paper; but it may be useful in future if Mr. Mann sh[oul]d go further & say what he means more plainly in future issues."26 The Special Branch continued to collect information, and Mathews brought the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs into the deliberations.27 Something had changed in the Home Office's outlook, but it remains too obscure to know whether a willingness to prosecute Mann really existed yet. All that can be said with any certainty is that the involvement of the attorney general, who was not then a member of the cabinet and lacked expert advice on labor matters, complicated the decision-making process.

The labor unrest was briefly eclipsed when militant unionists prevented Chur- chill, now first lord of the Admiralty, from speaking on home rule in Belfast's Ulster Hall on 8 February. The government deployed troops to keep order in the city and the meeting went ahead at a soccer field, but no legal action was

24PRO, HO 144/1163/213549/3, Blackwell minute, 26 Oct. 1911.

25J. Keir Hardie, Killing No Murder!: The Government and the Railroad Strike (Manchester, 1911). For Ramsay MacDonald and Bruce Glasier's disapproval of this "rather ignoble diatribe," see Uni- versity of Liverpool Library (ULL), Glasier papers, 1.2.1911, diary, 10 Oct. 1911.

26PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/la, Troup minute, 17 Jan. 1912.

27PRO, CRIM 1/130, Hansen deposition, 16 March 1912; Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 36, 5th ser., col. 94 (25 March 1912). For a discussion of the close working relationship between the Home Office, the director of public prosecutions, and the law officers, see Sir Edward Troup, The Home Office (London, 1926), pp. 76-78.




taken against those responsible for this breach of the rights of free speech and free meeting. In the last two weeks of February, the labor unrest returned to the fore as the miners pressed their demand for a minimum wage. Negotiations to avert an unprecedented nationwide coal strike stalled and then broke down. A rift now appeared between the War Office and the Home Office over the use of troops. The War Office was prepared for the worst; its contingency plans partitioned the country into thirteen military zones and anticipated food riots if the strike widened beyond the miners. Secret orders were issued to some infantry and cavalry units to be ready for deployment to South Wales by rail, and rolling stock was concentrated for that purpose.2' The war secretary Viscount Haldane foresaw "a very heavy task" ahead, but believed he had "everything ready."29 Given a free hand by Churchill the previous summer, Haldane clearly expected the same from Reginald McKenna. Indeed, the Home Office had begun to receive requests for troops from magistrates in South Wales more than a week before the strike began. But worried that the deployment of troops might be provocative, McKenna opposed any precautionary movements. After conferring with the prime minister, he decided that an announcement of the government's willingness to use soldiers against riot or sabotage, rather than actually making a show of force, was sufficient.30 Local authorities were instructed that, with the exception of serious disturbances already in progress, requests for troops would require approval by the War Office in consultation with the Home Of- fice.3'

The Home Office was also torn between worries about allegedly inciting and seditious rhetoric and concerns that legal repression might backfire. As the coal strike deadline of 1 March approached, socialists, syndicalists, and trade unionists spoke out against the use of troops. In the Derbyshire coalfields, the BSP's Ilkeston branch even published an article in its monthly, the Dawn, urging workers to arm themselves against police and soldiers.32 This case was referred to the director of public prosecutions.33 In South Wales, Edward Tupper of the

28National Library of Scotland (NLS), Haldane papers, MS 6109(1), fols. 222-25, "Notes for the Secretary of State," Macready, 26 Feb. 1912.

29NLS, Haldane papers, MS 5987, fols. 74-75, R. Haldane to M. Haldane, 27 Feb. 1912.

30PRO, HO 45/10674/218781/9, Troup minute, 19 Feb. 1912; Troup minute, 7 March 1912; /32, Troup to Macready, 24 Feb. 1912; Bodleian Library, Oxford University, MS Harcourt 442, fol. 190, Harcourt note, 29 Feb. 1912. For Troup's announcement at a Home Office conference of railway company representatives that the government had no plans for large-scale troop deployments, see PRO, HO 45/10674/218781, "Coal Strike, 1912: London Dock Strike, 1912: Confidential Memo- randa and Correspondence," pp. 11-12. See also Lucy Masterman, C. F. G. Masterman (London, 1968 [1939]), p. 234; Morgan, Conflict and Order, pp. 61-62.

31Scottish Record Office, HH 55/266/33, McKenna memo, 1 March 1912.

32Dawn, Feb. 1912.

33Return showing the Working of the Regulations made in 1886 for carrying out the Prosecution of Offences Acts, 1879, 1884, and 1908..., Parliamentary Papers, 1913, vol. 52 [Commons 154], p. 473.




National Union of Sailors and Firemen made strongly-worded speeches predict- ing that troops would refuse to shoot their fellow workers and asserting that Carson should be prosecuted if he was.34 The attomey general Sir Rufus Isaacs advised the Home Office that the case against Tupper was weak and "as a matter of policy a prosecution of.. .any South Wales leader at the present moment might precipitate the strike which might otherwise be avoided."35 Not about to be rushed into a prosecution, McKenna agreed to ignore Tupper.36

Some militants took the "don't shoot" agitation directly to the troops. Fred Crowsley, a railworker and ILP member, arranged for the National Labour Press, the ILP's Manchester publishing house, to reprint the "Open Letter" in leaflet form. He distributed hundreds of copies first outside the Hounslow barracks and then in the army camp at Aldershot, where he was arrested on 25 February.37 This incident attracted little public notice at first, although George Lansbury and the Liberal M.P. J. C. Wedgwood put questions in the Commons to the home secretary, the attorney general, and other members of the government.38 For its part, Justice demanded to know why the authorities had not acted against the "don't shoot" campaign of the previous summer.39 But in the first days of March, the sheer scale of the coal strike, involving hundreds of thousands of miners across Britain, and the spectacular nature of a simultaneous window- smashing protest staged by hundreds of suffragettes in central London easily overshadowed Crowsley's freelance militancy.

The decision to charge Crowsley under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 and commit him for trial at the Winchester assizes in June presented Isaacs, who took charge of the case, with a choice of further targets for prosecution. The ILP's National Labour Press had printed Crowsley's leaflet, but the text of the "Open Letter" came from the Syndicalist. To complicate matters, the ILP, a component part of the parliamentary Labour party, was contemplating its own

34PRO, HO 45/10674/218781/22, Cardiff lord mayor to Home Office, 22 Feb. 1912; Evening Express cutting, 21 Feb. 1912; /22a, London metropolitan police (LMP) report, 22 Feb. 1912; Daily Express cutting, 22 Feb. 1912; /34, Western Mail cutting, 23 Feb. 1912. Tupper had been tried and acquitted of inciting disturbances during the Cardiff dock strike in July 1911. He remained a source of concern to the chief industrial commissioner Sir George Askwith. See PRO, HO 45/10674/218781/22a, Askwith to Troup, 12 Feb. 1912; Campbell Balfour, "Captain Tupper and the 1911 Seamen's Strike in Cardiff," Morgannwvg: Transactions of the Glamorgan History Society 14 (1970): 76-78.

35PRO, HO 45/10674/218781/22, Troup minute, 23 Feb. 1912.

36Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 34, 5th ser., col. 1545 (29 Feb. 1912).

37PRO, ASSI 26/40, Crowsley to National Labour Press, 7, 16 Feb. 1912; Macnamara deposition, 29 Feb. 1912.

38Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 34, 5th ser., col. 1372 (28 Feb. 1912).

39Justice, 2 March 1912.




"don't shoot" leaflet.40 The Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald told fellow ILP member Bruce Glasier that when he informed Asquith and the chancellor of the exchequer David Lloyd George about it the prime minister "affected to be fu- rious."41 A prosecution of the National Labour Press threatened to place a severe strain on the progressive alliance of Liberalism and Labour.

Isaacs chose instead to prosecute Guy Bowman, publisher of the Syndicalist and a founder of the ISEL, and the brothers Benjamin and Charles Buck, who had printed the Syndicalist and were members of the BSP. They were arrested in London on 8 March and charged with incitement to mutiny. No sooner had these militants been silenced than others spoke up. The next day Justice published "Don't Shoot! An Appeal to the Rank and File of the British Army," signed by Tom Quelch.42 On 12 and 13 March, Nelson King, Thomas Mayfield, and James Morley, the Ilkeston BSP members responsible for the Dawn, were arrested, charged with conspiracy and incitement to murder and disorder, and committed for trial at the Derby assizes in June.43 Unfortunately for the gov- emnment, these arrests simply emboldened Victor Grayson to join the "don't shoot" agitation and dare the authorities to arrest him as well.44 Even more troublesome, Tom Mann came to the defense of his comrade Guy Bowman and reiterated the "don't shoot" appeal while on a speaking tour of northem England. He was arrested in London on 19 March, retumed to Manchester, and committed for trial at the May assizes there.

The govemment had also instituted a conspiracy prosecution against Emmeline Pankhurst and other WSPU leaders for organizing the window-smashing in Lon- don, heightening the impression on the Left that a policy of widespread repression was in operation. Leonard Hall, a militant socialist who had left the ILP to join the BSP, saw the move against the suffragettes as "the prelude to an anti-Labour Union campaign" waged by a "soulless oligarchy of capitalist jack-

40ULL, Glasier papers, 1.1.1912/10, Glasier to Johnson, 27 Feb. 1912; 1.2.1912, diary, 27 Feb. 1912. Glasier took exception to the proposed leaflet because it was ambiguous on such points as the distinction between shooting strikers and "Arabs, Kaffirs, Boers, &c." To MacDonald's em- barrassment, the Huddersfield Worker published the draft. See Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 35, 5th ser., col. 1094 (13 March 1912); PRO, MacDonald papers, PRO 30/69/1156, fol. 163, Riley to MacDonald, 14 March 1912; Labour Leader, 22 March 1912.

41ULL, Glasier papers, 1.2.1912, diary, 2 March 1912. Doubting a sudden conversion to militancy, Glasier speculated that MacDonald was instead engaged, perhaps with David Lloyd George, in "a bit of tactics having for its end the saving of the Liberal Ministry from committing a blunder."


43PRO, HO 144/1192/220104/3, Daily Express cutting, 14 March 1912.

44The Times, 18 March 1912. For a recollection of plans by Glasgow socialists to help Grayson evade arrest, see Harry McShane and Joan Smith, Harry McShane: No Mean Fighter (London, 1978), p. 50.




als and pushful lawyers."45 But the decision to prosecute Mann was inconsistent with both the Home Office's previous reluctance to confront him and Lloyd George's complacent view that "the best policeman for the Syndicalist is the Socialist[, for] one microbe can be trusted to kill another, and the microbe of Socialism, which may be a very beneficent one, does at any rate keep guard on the other, which is a very dangerous and perilous one."46 Indeed, it appears that the attomey general's hand was forced by the head constable of Salford, who, enraged by Mann's recent speeches in his borough, threatened to prosecute him

47 unless the law officers acted. Faced with the risk of a bungled police prosecution possibly leading to either an acquittal or a successful appeal, Isaacs sud- denly had little choice but to move directly against Mann. Isaacs made it clear, however, that he had no intention of being drawn into any further "don't shoot"

48 prosecutions. By the time of Mann's arrest, the ILP, BSP, and ISEL all had comrades in

the toils of the law. Lansbury was quick to call on the whole of the labor and socialist Left for help.49 Hall defined the challenge in constitutional terms: "freedom to criticise the laws and the law-makers and to express opinions upon all the public questions of the day-such freedom of utterance is the very keystone of all freedom of any kind."50 Waming that "precedents for harsh treatment of men (and women) rebels in the future" were being set, the suffragette Mary Gawthorpe used strikingly similar rhetoric in a letter of encouragement to Lansbury:

Let working men not forget it: it is possible and probable that the rights of free speech and the right to rebel even, may be lost to them if they are not "alive in defence" at every turn. Movement is always "progress" as the decay of Civilisa- tions has proved more than once in the past. Working men should know what this freedom for public criticism really stands for. Then they will not lightly regard the hard-won fights of the pioneers; and less ground may be lost.5

45Clarion, 15 March 1912.

46Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 35, 5th ser., col. 1775 (19 March 1912). Lloyd George made this statement the same day Mann was arrested. But for an indication that Lloyd George was prepared to support strong measures to end the strike if the miners rejected a compromise settlement, see Baron Riddell, The Riddell Diaries, 1908-1923, ed. J. M. McEwen (London, 1986), p. 37.

47Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 35, 5th ser., cols. 1895-96 (20 March 1912); NLS, Elibank papers, MS 8803, fol. 29, Norman to Elibank, 24 March 1912. In repeating what the solicitor general Sir John Simon had told him, the Liberal M.P. Sir Henry Norman confused the head constable of Salford with his counterpart in Manchester. See also Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 93-101.

48Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 35, 5th ser., col. 2057 (21 March 1912).

49Clarion, 15 March 1912; Labour Leader, 15 March 1912; Justice, 16 March 1912.


51British Library of Political and Economic Science, University of London (BLPES), Lansbury papers, 5/1/23-24, Gawthorpe to Lansbury, 20 March 1912. Gawthorpe was not the only feminist




Here again was the language of nineteenth-century popular radicalism, with its themes of liberty endangered by tyranny, the rights of the people counterpoised to the privileges of an establishment of industrialists, politicians, and aristocrats, and the class bias of the elite in law and govemment. Adopted and modified by Edwardian radicals, it helped forge a "chain of equivalence" linking their movements with each other as bearers of a common democratic project. As a way of giving meaning to events, it soon proved persuasive in unifying and mobilizing a socially and politically diverse "free speech" fight.

With the coal strike continuing, the Old Bailey trial of Guy Bowman and the Buck brothers took place in London on 22 March. The defense, led by the Liberal M.P. Sir Frederick Low, argued that there was no evidence a single soldier or sailor had seen or heard, much less been swayed by, the "Open Letter." Bowman had merely published an opinion, not an incitement. Exploiting the widespread fear and anxiety, the prosecuting counsel Richard Muir claimed that the troops were "the last resort.. against the violence and pillage and disorder of desperate strikers."52 In his summing up, Mr. Justice Horridge advised the jury to ignore the decrepitude of the statute and the failure of the incitement. The accused were all found guilty, and the judge passed hard-labor sentences of nine months' imprisonment on Bowman and six months' imprisonment on the Bucks. Thus the atrophied Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 was rehabilitated after more than a century of disuse. At the Home Office afterwards, Troup was troubled by Muir's "singularly unfortunate" speech:

He repeatedly speaks as if it were the duty of soldiers to shoot strikers, and so goes far to justify the article. For if soldiers were to shoot strikers who are not engaged in crimes of violence, they would in law be guilty of murder or manslaugh- ter-& it w[oul]d be their duty if ordered to shoot in such a case to disobey the order to shoot. What he ought to have made clear was that soldiers can be ordered to shoot only when riot has to be suppressed or when it is necessary to prevent serious crime-& that they can not be ordered to shoot strikers who are merely strikers... Counsel ought carefully to avoid giving a political complexion to proceedings which are really only for the enforcement of the ordinary law.53

But it was much too late to avoid the overt politicization of the prosecutions, and Troup's unstated worries about public opinion were soon borne out. Shocked by Horridge's "vindictive" court and the "cruelly anti-Labour spirit among the

to concern herself with the "don't shoot" cases. For example, see Jill Liddington, The Life and Times of a Respectable Radical: Selina Cooper (1864-1946) (London, 1984), pp. 217-18.

52The Times, 23 March 1912.

53PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/37, Troup to McKenna, 25 March 1912. The attorney general did not find everything to his liking either. Pressed by Lansbury, Isaacs was obliged to dissociate himself from the Recorder of London's remarks about the syndicalist menace while charging the grand jury on 19 March. See Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 35, 5th ser., cols. 1840-42 (19 March 1912); The Times, 20 March 1912; Labour Leader, 22 March 1912.




smug educated rich class," even Bruce Glasier was persuaded "We must do something."54

On 25 March, Lansbury, Wedgwood, and several other Labour and Liberal M.P.s founded the Free Speech Defence Committee (FSDC) to rally opposition around the country.55 The same day Wedgwood opened the first full Commons debate on the "don't shoot" cases with a rousing speech that placed them in a direct line of succession from the state trials between the French Revolution and the Reform Bill of 1832. Lansbury also appealed to Liberal principles in his recollection of the debate over the Mitchelstown shootings in Ireland in 1887, but went further by endorsing anti-militarism and drawing comparisons between the different treatment of syndicalists and militant Ulster unionists. Isaacs tried to allay fears that the prosecutions were attacks on the press or the labor and socialist movements. He reminded them that "political opinions are expressed sometimes very violently and very forcibly, sometimes going, it would seem, almost beyond the range of what should be allowed, and nevertheless prosecutions do not take place." He went on to reassure them that "the view I have taken hitherto, and the view which I shall always take, is that in the expression of political opinions a man is entitled to the fullest freedom, and no prosecution should be instituted against him for the expression of any such opinion." He denied any intention of suppressing syndicalist or "violent" socialist opinions. He also tried to downplay any inconsistency between the "don't shoot" prosecutions and the govemment's continued toleration of provocative Ulster unionist rhetoric, for he could not "help thinking that many of these wild utterances really were nothing else but bombast... .No one really imagines that behind lurks anything else but a desire to use strong language in a cause in which they feel very strongly."56 Isaacs claimed that Mann's challenge to the authorities unfortunately could not be overlooked. Questioned by Sir William Byles, the Liberal M.P. for Salford, about "who in that borough set the wheels of the law going," Isaacs came close to admitting that he had been pressured into mounting the prosecution:

The steps are perfectly plain and perfectly easily traceable.. .I really cannot tell who set them going in the first instance. All I can say is that the police authorities of Salford made an application, and I convinced myself of the existence of evidence before I authorised the Director of Public Prosecutions to inter- vene....That is how it is that I, as Attorney-General, am in the slightest degree concerned with the prosecution.57

54ULL, Glasier papers, 1.2.1912, diary, 23 March 1912.

55BLPES, ILP papers, Head Office Circulars 3, Johnson circular letter, 23 March 1912; The Times, 26 March 1912. See also George Lansbury, My Life (London, 1928), pp. 117-18; J. C. Wedgwood, Memoirs of a Fighting Life (London, 1941), pp. 80-83.

56Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 36, 5th ser., cols. 91, 94, 105-07 (25 March 1912).

57Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 36, 5th ser., cols. 99-100 (25 March 1912).




Isaacs concluded his defense by staking his personal honor on the matter. When the Commons divided at the end of the debate, the government enjoyed a com- fortable majority despite the defections of a few Liberals like Byles.

The reaction to the debate was predictably divided. While The Times was gratified by the vote in the Commons, the socialist press already sensed that the government was beginning to back down.58 Isaacs stirred mixed feelings in his Liberal listeners. Impressed with his "clever speech," which was "very effective & showed he had been driven from one step to another," Sir Courtenay Ilbert, the clerk of the Commons, nevertheless confessed that "one can't keep feeling that the prosecution was unfortunate & will just lead to trouble."'9 C. P. Treve- lyan, the Board of Education parliamentary under-secretary and older brother of the historian G. M. Trevelyan, complained that "there was not a word to show that he [Isaacs] realized what a hole the government was in."60 Some progressive Liberals came out publicly against the prosecutions. A letter of protest to The Times, signed by G. M. Trevelyan and other luminaries such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the philanthropist Joseph Rowntree, the writer Israel Zangwill, and the historian H. A. L. Fisher, noted the spectacle of "rich and powerful men who incite the Protestants of Ulster" and urged that "this is not an era when we can have one law for the rich and another for the poor in political cases."6' C. P. Trevelyan circularized members of the government with an impassioned defense of freedom of opinion and speech and a warning that the prosecutions might lead to the "imprisonment of every labour leader from Ramsay MacDonald downwards" and thence to Sir Edward Carson. "The great point," he insisted, "is that in the eyes of the working class you are in this case making a differentiation between the indiscretion of the poor man and the indiscretion of the rich man."62

Trade unions, trades councils, ILP and BSP branches, and other organizations held meetings and passed resolutions against the prosecutions. The first Trafalgar Square rally took place on 31 March. At the London Opera House, George Bernard Shaw poured ridicule on the prosecutions and a letter from Ramsay MacDonald was read out criticizing the judicial bench and expressing the "hope that we have not to go through the old battles of the 18th and 19th centuries by which freedom was secured."63 Russell Smart, another militant socialist who

58The Times, 26 March 1912; Labour Leader, 29 March 1912; Justice, 30 March 1912.

59House of Lords Record Office (HLRO), Ilbert papers, H.C. Lib. MS 75, diary, 25 March 1912.

60University of Newcastle upon Tyne Library (UNL), Runciman papers, WR 63, C. P. Trevelyan to Runciman, 25 March 1912.

61The Times, 27 March 1912.

62 .NL, Trevelyan papers, CPT 30, C. P. Trevelyan circular letter, 25 March 1912.

63Manchester Guardian, 4 April 1912.




had joined the BSP, conveyed the sense of unity sought by the Left in his call for "Class-warriors, Fabians, Revolutionists, Syndicalists, Politicians, Reformers, Labourists, Christians, Atheists, every man or woman who values Freedom" to defy the authorities.64 Reporting on the groundswell of support for the "don't shoot" defendants, Lansbury noted that "it has been quite an inspiration to feel that all over the country men and women were able to see the true inwardness of the prosecutions, and, what is best of all, to forget they were B.S.Peers, I.L.Peers, or Syndicalists, and to remember, first and foremost, that they were Socialists."65 Invoking the name of the Victorian freethinker Charles Bradlaugh, even George Harvey of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) declared that his fellow impossibilists were "fighters for freedom" who would join others to "fight to the finish."66 At the center of this fight were the Labour and Liberal M.P.s of the FSDC, whose brief included helping the accused and their families, organizing public protests, and pressing for the repeal of the 1797 Act. Their manifesto described the "don't shoot" agitators as "exercis[ing] an elementary right of British citizenship" and denounced the prosecutions as "a revival of tyranny."67 The campaign particularly emphasized the contrast between the government's prosecution of Tom Mann and its toleration of Carson and the Ulster unionists. Many resolutions and speeches attacked the "Carson party" or "Londonderry- Carson type of patriotic gentlemen," even urging that "if Tom Mann were sent to gaol, he ought to have very good companions in Carson and Craig."68 By 15 April, McKenna reported receiving "about 300 resolutions."69

III

Well before this the outcry had already begun to affect policy. The public- order situation had become critical again during the last ten days of March, as the government's Minimum Wage Bill for miners made its ultimately successful way through Parliament and the danger of violence increased between those miners who wanted to carry on the strike and others who wanted to return to work. The rift between the War Office and the Home Office over the use of troops continued to widen. McKenna objected when Haldane dispatched troops to two mines where tensions between striking and working miners were running high and readied more troops at Aldershot. Their disagreement became so serious


65Clarion, 29 March 1912.

66Socialist, April 1912.

67Clarion, 5 April 1912.

68The Times, 9 April 1912; Daily Herald, 20 April 1912; Manchester Guardian, 6 May 1912.

69Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 37, 5th ser., col. 26 (15 April 1912).




that both men threatened to resign, and the cabinet was forced to arbitrate between them at a meeting on 29 March. The ministers backed the home secre- tar7O.7 The same day McKenna decided to reduce the sentences on Bowman and the Buck brothers.7' Soon thereafter, Isaacs declined to prosecute the fire- brand Victor Grayson for a "don't shoot" speech.72 Sydney Buxton, the president of the Board of Trade, belatedly expressed some apprehension about the prosecutions' "unlooked for advertisement" of syndicalism.73 The change of policy extended to Ireland, where Jim Larkin's Irish Worker had published yet another "don't shoot" appeal, "Halt! Attention!," and socialists like Tom Johnson had distributed a leaflet version to soldiers in Dublin and Belfast.74 The Irish attomey general Charles Andrew O'Connor advised against any prosecution:

The line of defence would probably be that the Manifesto is not to be taken liter- ally, and that everyone with any knowledge of current politics would know that its real and only meaning is that the law is not fairly administered, and if it were, that Lord Londonderry, Sir Edward Carson and others would have been prosecuted just as Tom Mann has been prosecuted. It would be argued that (this being the real meaning) even though the language could be construed as an endeavour to seduce or to incite to mutiny, the publication was not made "maliciously or ad- visedly" for such purpose but for another purpose. A jury (even though fair minded) might possibly take this view and I think it very undesirable to com- mence a prosecution which might fail. 5

The Irish chief secretary Augustine Birrell agreed that "the appeal is very carefully written & I doubt very much whether a conviction ought to follow a prosecution."76 Liberal ministers and law officers were apparently wakening to

70NLS, Haldane papers, MS 5987, fol. 124, R. Haldane to M. Haldane, 28 March 1912; fol. 126, R. Haldane to M. Haldane, 29 March 1912; Baron Riddell, More Pages from My Diary, 1908-1914 (London, 1934), pp. 162, 175; Nuflield College Library, Oxford University (NCL), MS Gainford 39, fol. 41, diary, 29 March 1912; British Library, Bums papers, Add. MS 46334, fol. 74, diary, 29 March 1912; PRO, CAB 41/33/45. Asquith to George V, 30 March 1912. See also Morgan, Conflict and Order, pp. 63-64.

71PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/46, Horridge to McKenna, 28 March 1912; McKenna minute, 29 March 1912.

72PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/55, Wigan chief constable to Dunning, 4 April 1912; Troup minute, 6 April 1912; Mathews minute, 9 April 1912.

73PRO, CAB 37/110/62, "Industrial Unrest," Buxton, 13 April 1912. See also Roger Davidson, "The Board of Trade and Industrial Relations 1896-1914," Historical Journal 21, 3 (1978): 571-91.

74Irish Worker, 13 April 1912; National Library of Ireland, Johnson papers, MS 17146/1, "Statement by Mr. T. Johnson to Bureau of Military History," p. 9; PRO, CO 904/159, Dublin metropolitan police report, 15 April 1912. Sinn Feiners and Republicans were also carrying on their own "don't enlist" agitation.

75PRO, CO 904/159, O'Connor opinion, n.d.

76PRO, CO 904/159, Birrell minute, 23 April 1912.




the futility of repressing the "don't shoot" agitation. When a special effort was made to protest the prosecutions at May Day meetings and marches, and the chief constable of Birmingham provided police reports of speeches by Lansbury and others, the Home Office official H. B. Simpson judged that the "words" were seditious but put the case aside with the telling observation that "they are not likely to spread disaffection among the lieges further than it has gone already."77 An ungainly climb-down was underway.

Meanwhile, the FSDC continued to call attention to the controversy in Par- liament. On 10 April, Keir Hardie moved amendments to the Army (Annual) Bill intended to cripple the power of the authorities to employ troops during strikes. The debate raised serious points about both the policy of the government and the legal position of the soldier. The resulting publicity more than out- weighed the fact that a mere two dozen M.P.s supported Hardie, including Ram- say MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and the Liberals Percy Alden and Sir William Byles.78 Soon afterwards, Lansbury and the Labour M.P. Will Thome submitted motions for debate on 24 April in a striking attempt to capitalize on the issue of legal equality. Thome's resolution called for the removal of Carson, the Mar- quess of Londonderry, and several other Unionists from the privy council because of their "seditious, incendiary, and treasonable speeches" and offered "re- grets that the Govemment when prosecuting poor men in England for sedition has neglected to prosecute rich men in Ireland for much graver offences." When discussion was postponed, Carson asked Thome to pursue the matter on the grounds that "it is an elementary principle of our liberty, that all men and bodies of men (except Trades Unions) are equal, before the law."79 Having failed to force the government to prosecute him for speeches about resisting Irish home rule, Carson was undoubtedly eager to seize this opportunity to score against his Liberal adversaries. On 2 May, Asquith avoided an embarrassing debate by refusing Thome and Lansbury's request for time to consider the resolutions, but he insisted in reply to a question from Carson that the authorities did not make class distinctions among persons liable to prosecution.80 Nevertheless, this alliance of convenience between the FSDC and the Unionists was a sign that the govemment was losing command of the political situation.

On 9 May, a month after the coal strike's end, Tom Mann went on trial in Manchester. Distinguishing between domestic rioters and foreign enemies and noting that members of the armed forces were bound to obey the law like other

77PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/72, Birmingham chief constable to Home Office, 4 May 1912; Simp- son minute, 7 May 1912.

78Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 36, 5th ser., cols. 1305-49 (10 April 1912); Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1912; The Times, 11 April 1912.

79Daily Herald, 2 May 1912.

80Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 37, 5th ser., cols. 2047-48 (2 May 1912).




citizens, he tried to justify the "Open Letter" as a simple plea to soldiers to avoid committing murder. Pointing out that the "Open Letter" had been published elsewhere before it appeared in the Syndicalist, Mann asserted that the governing and propertied classes were the real fomenters of disorder and denounced the selective prosecution of syndicalists:

Others are doing and saying the same as I have done and said, but they are not identified with the particular movement that I happen to be identified with. action is being taken to prevent an ordinary person of my stamp from having the proper right of free interchange of speech. I claim my right, as a man, as a citizen, as a native of this country, as a working man .... I do not wish to have my liberty cur- tailed, but I shall not ask for mercy in any shape or form for the principles of the open letter.81

In his summing up, Mr. Justice Bankes dismissed the suggestion that syndicalism was on trial and discounted many of Mann's points. The jury found Mann guilty, and the judge passed sentence of six months' imprisonment.

No friend of militancy, Bruce Glasier reacted to the verdict by noting that "the whole prosecution is a great blunder[,] the result of which is to make Mann a martyr very cheaply."82 Indeed, the outcry against the prosecutions became even louder. Syndicalists met in Trafalgar Square on 12 May. Lansbury re- quested leave to move the adjournment of the Commons on 13 May, connecting the Mann case to the labor unrest, "an ingenious way of getting over the difficulty about discussing a judicial sentence" according to Sir Courtenay Ilbert, but he caught some of the other Labour M.P.s off guard and failed to garner the necessary seconds.83 On the following day, Hardie introduced a Prison (Po- litical Offences) Bill directing that persons like Mann and the suffragettes be placed in the privileged first division of prison, a penal classification specifically mandated for those convicted of sedition and thus popularly viewed as reserved for political offenders. Hardie laced his speech with quotations from Liberal leaders who had supported separate and special treatment for imprisoned "political and industrial agitators" in the 1880s.84 Another FSDC rally in Trafalgar Square on 19 May attracted, according to the Daily Herald, a diverse crowd of workers and people from "the larger London"; the police agreed, describing it as "very enthusiastic" and including "almost every known anarchist in Lon- don."85 The Liberal press became more outspoken. The Manchester Guardian regretted that the prosecutions had publicized syndicalism and "connected these

8 1Manchester Guardian, 10 May 1912.

82ULL, Glasier papers, 1.2.1912, diary, 10 May 1912.

83Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 38, 5th ser., col. 801 (13 May 1912); HLRO, Ilbert papers, H.C. Lib. MS 75, diary, 13 May 1912; Labour Leader, 24 May 1912.


85Daily Herald, 20 May 1912; PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/98, LMP report, 20 May 1912.




political views, by a bond which though it may be loosened cannot be wholly severed, with some of the great principles of English politics and of English law," while the Nation took an even more critical line, insisting on a reduction of sentence in view of the toleration of the Ulster unionists and threatening protest by disenchanted Liberals against the government.86

When the cabinet discussed the case just two days after the trial, Sydney Buxton only added to the mood of exasperation by repeating his worry that Mann's imprisonment might become a factor in the ongoing labor unrest.87 Asquith informed the king that the prosecution "presented some peculiar fea- tures," which were receiving the home secretary's consideration.88 Indeed, the judge candidly informed McKenna that Mann would have been acquitted if only he had adopted a different defense:

The opinion which I formed...was that if he had been properly defended he would not have been convicted. I doubt very much whether Mann had any idea that what he was saying to his audience would ever reach the eyes or ears of any soldier. The difficulty in Mann's way was one of his own creation at the trial because he addressed the jury throughout on the footing that he was justified in ad- dressing soldiers in the language which was complained of: an argument which gave away his real defence.. It is difficult after the event to say what I should have done in the matter of punishment had Bowman not already been dealt with for a publication of the same language. Had the accused been a less prominent person than Mann I should certainly have bound him over. I do not like after the event to say that I should have done the same with Mann but I should certainly have felt inclined to do so.89

On 20 May, McKenna took another step in the climb-down when he announced his decision to release Bowman and reduce Mann's term to two months' imprisonment. The law had been vindicated and therefore leniency was in order.90 He was unwilling, however, to defuse the situation by transferring Mann to the first division. On the following day, he took two opportunities to underline his opposition to the whole notion of political offenses. In the Commons, he came out firmly against Hardie's bill.9' At the Home Office, he gave a cold reception

86Manchester Guardian, 10 May 1912; Nation, 11 May 1912.

87NCL, MS Gainford 39, fols. 42-43, diary, 11 May 1912.

88PRO, CAB 41/33/49, Asquith to George V, 11 May 1912. The Liberal whip Percy Illingworth feared that Mann's conviction could damage the candidacy of Gordon Hewart, a Liberal barrister who had been part of the prosecution team. In August, Hewart lost the Manchester Northwest by-election in a strong swing away from the previous Liberal poll. See John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Scott papers, CPS 332/112, Illingworth to Scott, 14 May 1912; CPS 332/116, Illingworth to Scott, 30 May 1912; P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 303-05.

89PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/103, Bankes to McKenna, 18 May 1912.


91Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 38, 5th ser., cols. 978-81, 1749-50 (21 May 1912).




to Lady Selborne, Earl Russell, the Liberal M.P.s Atherley Jones and W. H. Dickinson, and other members of a deputation from the National Political Re- form League. He rejected their contention that political and private motives could be legally differentiated as well as their suggestion that the Home Office had discriminated between political and criminal offenders in the past. He implied that the broad definition of political offenses contained in Hardie's bill actually solicited "inhuman" and "immoral" crimes, illustrating his objections with the hypothetical case of a syndicalist enjoying the comforts of imprisonment in the first division for the crime of derailing trains.92 Thus McKenna avoided discussing the ordinary sorts of offenses actually committed by agitators, which were either purely rhetorical or, in the case of suffragette window-smashing, still largely symbolic. The government's management of militant protest was the subject of a wide-ranging debate in the Commons on 22 May.93 The list of grievances had grown by this time to include the conviction and sentencing of the WSPU leaders to nine months' imprisonment, the threatened deportation of the anarchist Enrico Malatesta, and the imprisonment and exiling of Kate Malecka, a British subject, in Russia. The Unionist M.P. Sir J. D. Rees initiated the debate by taking issue with what he took to be Isaacs and McKenna's vac- illating response to political offenses. Hardie questioned whether Tom Mann's sentence was too light or Emmeline Pankhurst's too heavy, but the debate's main interest lay in Ramsay MacDonald's contribution. Wary of syndicalism like Glasier and Snowden, he had not taken a very active role in the "free speech" fight.94 Now playing the part of an honest broker, he agreed with Isaacs that political offenses formed no part of either the criminal law or Liberal policy. Claiming that Mann had merely expressed an anti-militarist opinion, he blamed the prosecutions on an excess of "red-tape justice and legality" that had only produced a broader "don't shoot" agitation. He invoked "the old traditions of Liberal administration and Liberal law" in calling for Maim's transfer to the first division.95 Although both Isaacs and McKenna agreed that purity of motive was a factor in the decisions of judges and ministers, they continued to defend the impartiality of their policy. Isaacs asserted that "there is no such thing known in British law as a political crime" and McKenna, while reserving the right to revise judicial decisions by royal prerogative, rejected any "general rule" in political cases.96 The debate ended without any further government concessions, but on several more occasions in June ministers were forced to defend their

92PRO, HO 45/10684/223719, National Political Reform League deputation transcript, 21 May 1912.


94See J. R. MacDonald, Syndicalism: A Critical Examination (London, 1912), p. 42.

95Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 38, 5th ser., cols. 2008, 2014 (22 May 1912).

96Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 38, 5th ser., cols. 2014, 2028 (22 May 1912).




efforts to cope with strikers and suffragettes.97 The Liberal newspaper proprietor Sir George Riddell noted sympathetically that McKenna was "badgered on all hands."98 Outside Parliament, the spirit of protest showed no sign of abating. On 9 June, another "largely attended" rally in Trafalgar Square was addressed by R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Wedgwood, and Lansbury under a sign which read "Crowsley, Bowman, Tom Mann, Malatesta, Who Next?"99 These converg- ing pressures brought about yet another remarkable step in the climb-down.

Crowsley's trial took place before Mr. Justice Channell at the Winchester assizes on 18 June. An unrepentant anti-militarist, Crowsley did not dispute the prosecuting counsel's statement of the facts. He told the jurors that if they found him guilty it would "bring a stain on you that will remain on you for ever." Channell countered in his summing up that the jury would suffer "an indelible stain" if they did not decide the matter according to the evidence. After the jury returned a verdict of guilty, the prosecution tried to secure a promise from Crowsley to refrain from the "don't shoot" agitation on the understanding that the judge would be lenient about sentencing. Crowsley refused to accept this deal, and Channell handed down a hard-labor sentence of four months' imprisonment.'00 The director of public prosecutions and Home Office officials were taken aback by this result. Mathews had "expected" Crowsley to plead guilty and could only observe that Channell, in Blackwell's words, "seems to have taken a line of his own" when the proceedings went awry. Troup recognized the sentence could not be allowed to stand "but, even if we differ from the view taken by the Judge, it w[oul]d be out of the question to flout him by discharging the prisoner within a day or two."'"' Pressed in the Commons by Lansbury and Wedgwood, McKenna refused to commit himself to more than a review of the proceedings.'02 When he proposed a reduction of the sentence to two months, Channell answered only that an undertaking ought to be required from Crowsley. On the same day, however, the Home Office cancelled the hard labor portion of Crowsley's sentence, and three days later it informed the judge that the home

97Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 39, 5th ser., cols. 872-996 (12 June 1912); Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 40, 5th ser., cols. 37-44 (24 June 1912), 215-19 (25 June 1912), 642-718 (28 June 1912).

98Riddell, More Pages from My Diary, p. 73.

99The Times, 10 June 1912; Daily Herald, 10 June 1912.

'0 The Times, 19 June 1912.

?01PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/109, [Blackwell] note, 18 June 1912; Troup minute, 18 June 1912.

'02Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 39, 5th ser., cols. 1618-22 (18 June 1912). Wedgwood, who may have served as an intermediary between Crowsley and the government, mentioned his advice to the defendant that "if he pleaded guilty he would probably get off, and I had good reason for saying that, but he replied that his conscience would not allow him to plead guilty to what he did not consider a crime."




secretary had decided to shorten the sentence.'03 This was not all. On 23 June, McKenna released Mann from Strangeways prison, one day before his two months' sentence, shortened by deductions for good behavior, was due to ex- pire.'04 The next day, the suffiragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence were also released early from their much longer sentences in Holloway prison and, on 27 June, Frederick Pethick Lawrence was released.

These gestures did not escape the notice of Carson or Lansbury. On 24 June, Carson told a London audience what he thought of the rule of law under the Liberals:

a most extraordinary distinction had been made in relation to prisoners convicted by the Courts. One class of persons were sent to gaol for inciting to violence and another class were forgiven when they had done exactly the same kind of incitement. That was due to the existence of a craven Government, which was beneath contempt. It had been said that he ought to be sent to gaol. Well,...he intended when he went over [to Ulster] to break every law that was possible.105

The next day, Lansbury created a scene in the Commons over the forcible feed- ing of suffragette hungerstrikers, denouncing Asquith's attitude as "beneath contempt" and deriding Liberal "talk about principle and fight in Ulster." He recalled the very different attitude of Liberals towards the Home Rule M.P. Wil- liam O'Brien's imprisonment twenty-five years earlier. When ordered to leave by Mr. Speaker Lowther, who explained that such rebellious conduct would cost the Commons "all respect and authority," Lansbury replied, "it has lost it already."'06 These two angry outbursts showed that it was too late to compose matters by letting a few prominent figures out of prison.

The last trial revealed the full measure of the govemment's climb-down. On 25 June, the Ilkeston BSP members Mayfield, Morley, and King came before Mr. Justice Coleridge at the Derby assizes. Morley's promise to avoid provocative language in future propaganda formed the basis for a bargain with the prosecutor, the Liberal M.P. Sir Ryland Adkins. The defendants entered pleas of guilty to a lesser charge of incitement to disorder in exchange for the with- drawal of the charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder. Coleridge justified this deal in a patemal argument about the proper limits on freedom of speech:

in this country expression of opinion was free to all. Men were entitled to advo- cate whatever views they might hold. There was a great distinction, however, to

103PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/110, Blackwell minute, 21 June 1912; /113, Channell to McKenna, 22 June 1912; Blackwell minute, 24 June 1912; Home Office to Channell, 25 June 1912.

104PRO, HO 144/7062/220603/107, Blackwell, McKenna, Troup minutes, 18 June 1912; Daily Her- ald, 26 June 1912. For Mann's prison experience, see also Ruskin College Library, Middleton papers, MID 24/11, Mann to Brockway, 2 Jan. 1929.

105Manchester Guardian, 25 June 1912.

106Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 40, 5th ser., col. 218 (25 June 1912).




be drawn between an expression of opinion and incitement or advocacy of disorder. The people of this country happily lived under the constitution which provided for the carrying into effect by the legal process of law the desires and wishes of the community at large. The law was bound to take notice, and to pun- ish, any attempts to incite others to disorder. The law made allowances, however, for persons who had been tempted by excitement to use language which they afterwards regretted and undertook not to repeat....He did not think that at the bot- tom of their minds [the defendants] desired to bring about the state of things their conduct might have led to. He was going to deal leniently with the men, believ- ing, accepting, and trusting that they would fulfil the honourable obligation they had entered into.107

Coleridge simply bound over the defendants. Once again the Home Office was unhappy over the prosecuting counsel and the judge, whose actions in the trial seemed to show "neither common sense nor good law." Nevertheless, the as- sistant director of public prosecutions Guy Stephenson assured Home Office officials that Adkins had followed Isaacs's "express instructions."''08 Indeed, Isaacs had probably decided to disregard the serious charges against the Ilkeston socialists in order to resolve the case in line with the deal originally offered to Crowsley.'09

Meanwhile, protests mounted over Crowsley's imprisonment."0 On 30 June, a "huge crowd" gathered in Trafalgar Square to listen to Wedgwood, Tillett, the socialist and women's suffragist Charlotte Despard, and others demand the release of Crowsley and Malatesta. The next day, 1 July, McKenna announced his decision to reduce Crowsley's sentence."' Now it was the turn of Unionists to raise a clamor in the Commons about law and order. Sir J.D. Rees charged that the mitigation of Crowsley's punishment was the result of Labour influence, but McKenna countered that "these appearances exist only in the imagination of the hon[orable] Gentleman.""'2 In the middle of July, several other M.P.s joined Rees to instigate one final debate on the home secretary's use of the royal prerogative in political cases. "' In early August, the "don't shoot" episode

I07PRO, HO 144/1192/220104/5, Derbyshire Advertiser cutting, 28 June 1912. See also The Times, 26 June 1912.

108PRO, HO 144/1192/220104/5, ? minute, 8 Aug. 1912; Simpson minute, 8 Aug. 1912; /6, Stephen- son to Home Office, 14 Aug. 1912.

09It may be noteworthy that the trial occurred just five days before a by-election at Ilkeston on 1 July, necessitated by the War Office parliamentary under-secretary J. E. B. Seely's appointment as the new war secretary following Haldane's elevation to the woolsack as lord chancellor. Even though spared the bad feelings which might have flowed from the imprisonment of three local men, Seely was returned with a significantly reduced majority.

1"0Daily Herald, 21, 25, 27, 29 June 1912.

l l Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 40, 5th ser., cols. 732-33 (1 July 1912).

112Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 40, 5th ser., cols. 1600-1601 (8 July 1912).

113 Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 41, 5th ser., cols. 421-533 (17 July 1912).




finally came to a close with Crowsley's release after forty-six days' imprisonment.' 14 But in the face of continuing labor and suffrage militancy in Britain and Ireland, supplemented by unionist militancy in Ulster, it remained to be seen whether and to what extent the government could reassert the authority of the law and restore its own credibility.

IV In reconstructing the "don't shoot" episode, this article has examined the con-

crete political interaction of the government and its militant opposition as well as something of the wider ideological contention between an increasingly de- fensive parliamentary Liberalism and a revived popular radicalism. The Liberal state supposedly upheld a national interest that transcended those of labor and capital. This separation of politics and the rnarket was not entirely an illusion, for Featherstone and Tonypandy had shown Liberals the political costs of state interference in conflictual industrial relations. At stake was the continued ad- herence of working-class electors to the Liberal party and the preservation of the progressive alliance with the parliamentary Labour party. The Liberal state also supposedly embodied the rule of law. But this separation of politics and the law was more apparent than real, for highly pragmatic public-order policies accompanied the legalistic rhetoric of ministers and law officers. In fact, the government enjoyed considerable political and administrative discretion with regard to the surveillance and policing of protest movements, the prosecution of alleged political and public-order offenders, and the treatment and release of prisoners. It responded to the "don't shoot" agitation's challenge to its right to govern with tactics designed to undercut and deflate militant protest. In August 1911, the government simply ignored the agitation on the assumption that it was buoyed by the summer strike wave and would eventually subside. Six months later, on the eve of the coal strike, Crowsley's arrest provided the jus- tification for a less restrained but still controlled response. While making an example of a few militant agitators, the government sought to delay and perhaps avoid altogether the calling-out of troops for strike duty. But each new prosecution complicated the effort to appear even-handed towards coalowners and miners or silk-hatted Unionists and ragged-trousered syndicalists. These mis- taken calculations, not to mention unforeseen pressure from the Salford police, led the government into the pitfall of prosecuting Tom Mann, "the most striking personality in the Trade Union world."'15 The Liberal state in actuality was far from monolithic; the divergent approaches taken by the War Office and the Home Office, by Whitehall and Dublin Castle, and by one judge after another to rapidly changing circumstances showed that there were limits to the govern-

114Daily Herald, 10 Aug. 1912.

"5G. D. H. Cole, The World of Labour (London, 1913), p. 41.




ment's power to manage militancy. This internal disarray increased its suscep- tibility to the outcry from Trafalgar Square and other venues of popular protest. The groundswell of support for the "don't shoot" agitation certainly registered in the cabinet's growing reluctance to deploy the army. What began as a dem- onstration of strength eventually ended in a display of weakness. At the end of the day, Reginald McKenna and Sir Rufus Isaacs were obliged to abandon any hope of enforcing the Incitement to Mutiny Act even as they took every opportunity to reiterate the constitutional principle that the law knew nothing of political crime and made no exceptions for political offenders. These gestures were insufficient, and the government shared in the opprobrium that clung to the home secretary and the attorney general. As Wedgwood observed during the controversy, "prosecutions by the State are always risky business." 116

If the government endeavored without success to normalize the prosecutions as regrettable but nevertheless necessary measures, the labor and socialist movements depicted them rather more convincingly as arbitrary and illegitimate ex- ercises of official power. By implication the Left took issue with claims con- cerning the separation of politics from the market and the law under the Liberal state. It argued in effect that these cornerstones of the ideological consensus had been undermined and dislodged, the former by military intervention during strikes and the latter by selective prosecution of the government's opponents. The Left achieved an impressive degree of unity during the "don't shoot" controversy, with large numbers of people from many different groups throwing themselves into the campaign to liberate Mann and the others from prison."' This is particularly important to recognize since histories of Edwardian labor and socialism have until recently tended to repeat rather than question the self- proclaimed differences between reformers and revolutionaries, socialists and syndicalists, Marxists and revisionists."8 Although the Left was split up along sectarian lines into the BSP, ILP, ISEL, SLP, Fabian Society, and other formations, the lines of political division ran through rather than between organizations. With its demand for fair play and insistence on the same law for rich and poor, its invocations of historic struggles against both Liberal and Tory repression, its Russophobic comparisons to tsarist rule and anti-Semitic innuendos about Isaacs,

16Parliamentary Debates (Commons) 36, 5th ser., col. 73 (25 March 1912).

117But for the 1913 squabble over who did more to free Mann, the BSP or the Labour party, see BLPES, ILP papers, Head Office Circulars 3, "Memorandum on the Application of the British Socialist Party for Separate Affiliation to the International Bureau," p. 4.

118For a parallel critique of the political distinction between "militants" and "constitutionalists," and the reproduction of this distinction in the historiography of the women's suffrage movement, see Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women 's Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 1-52; Laura E. Nym Mayhall, "Creating the 'Suffragette Spirit': British Feminism and the Historical Imagination," Women's History Review 4, 3 (1995): 319-44.




it was a recycled and renewed popular radicalism, warts and all, that facilitated labor and socialist unity.119 Many socialists and trade unionists found its fused and layered language of class, people, and nation compelling. Even anti-statists like Tom Mann, who claimed during his trial to be defending his rights as a freeborn English workingman, could not purge themselves entirely of inherited popular-radical assumptions and arguments. That his use of such rhetoric was not purely instrumental is perhaps most clearly indicated by the fact that his defense was a political one not intended to secure an acquittal. Given that the whole episode turned on perceived inequalities before the law and therefore referred to the positioning of working-class citizens in the state, the meaning of class was complex and not a little ambiguous. In conjuring up both an older political antagonism between aristocracy and people and a supposedly more modern social antagonism between plutocracy and proletariat, designations like "master class" and "slave class" resonated precisely because of the slippage between social and political identities. Although derived from a longstanding popular constitutionalism, the legalitarian critique of class justice was not nec- essarily backward-looking or atavistic. Suffragists were mounting a similar critique of the double standard to which women were subjected in law and politics. To the extent socialists and suffragists recognized a mutual interest in eliminat- ing exclusive rule altogether rather than replacing one form of sectional rule by another, both Lefts had begun to imagine a pluralistic form of political and social democracy.

The "don't shoot" episode, then, was not a simple by-product of syndicalist- inspired industrial conflict. In a very real sense it was a contest over citizenship, over the inclusion or exclusion of working people in a Liberal state no longer aristocratic but still not democratic.120 McKibbin is certainly right to argue that trade unions and the working classes partook of the broad ideological consensus governing late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. But the elasticity of consensus did not preclude disputes over its interpretation. The same "vulgarized catchphrases"-for example, "British justice"-which he correctly points out as being

119Although beyond the scope of this article, it should be noted that Edwardian socialism and trade unionism were hardly free of anti-Semitism, chauvinism, and racism. With an internationalism tem- pered by triumphal notions of Englishness and Britishness, the Victorian popular-radical inheritance may have exacerbated these tendencies. A full accounting of the labor and socialist Left's stance towards imperialism and its handling of race before the First World War remains an urgent task for historians. But see Logie Barrow, "White Solidarity in 1914," in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. 1: History and Politics, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1989), pp. 275-87.

120For the Edwardian era as an important transitional moment in which voluntarist and Jacobin, or statist, versions of working-class citizenship competed for support in the labor movement, see James Hinton, "Voluntarism versus Jacobinism: Labor, Nation, and Citizenship in Britain, 1850-1950," International Labor and Working-Class History 48 (1995): 71-74.




imbricated with complacent notions of national identity and as having "a highly individualist implication" also possessed an extraordinary contestatory potential in certain charged circumstances. An apparent transgression of British justice could expose the fragile nature of the consensus to considerable stress. The further breakdown or gradual recuperation of consensus depended on the play of political struggle. The conjuncture of the "don't shoot" episode-the coal strike, suffrage militancy, and Ulster unionist resistance to Irish home rule-favored the legalitarian critique. In enabling the Left to elaborate a "chain of equivalence" that drew together disparate struggles into a meaningful political whole, it was this episode that first crystallized the crisis of legitimacy which subsequently unfolded through, among other things, a series of controversial prosecutions of Emmeline Pankhurst, George Lansbury, Sylvia Pankhurst, Jim Larkin, and others over the next two years. By the spring of 1914, when the Curragh incident broke the army on a scale unimaginable during the coal strike, the polarization of politics was complete and the constitution hung in the bal- ance. In a swingeing attack on the Unionists and their middle-class appeasers, J. A. Hobson recalled that the government had been pleased to prosecute and imprison Tom Mann, but now it was too weak and intimidated to enforce the law against the likes of Sir Edward Carson.'22 Although facing a common enemy in die-hard Unionism and in need of a way out of the crisis, the Liberals and the Lefts could take only the most tentative steps towards overcoming their differences and formulating a democratic compromise, notably around women's suffrage. The sudden irruption of war suspended the crisis, of course, but if historians wish to understand such momentous changes as the decline of the Liberals and the rise of Labour, a process arguably more about the remaking of political identities than the growth of class consciousness, we need to look again at episodes like the "don't shoot" controversy and ponder the implications of R. H. Tawney's recognition not long afterwards that "The labour movement, behind all its froth and its intolerance, really stands more than any other movement, for freedom today."'123

121McKibbin, "Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?," p. 24. For Edwardian Unionist efforts to mobilize popular support by construing gendered catchphrases like "an Englishman's home is his castle" in specifically anti-Liberal and anti-socialist ways, see Jon Lawrence, "Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880-1914," English Historical Review 108 (1993): 645-48.

122J. A. Hobson, Traffic in Treason: A Study of Political Parties (London, 1914), pp. 53-54. Hobson was one of a growing number of progressives, disillusioned with the Liberals and concerned about the future of peaceful social and political reform, who had begun to look to Labour.

123J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin, eds., R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book (Cambridge, 1972), p. 47.



Documents

"Prosecutions...Are Always Risky Business": Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 "Don't Shoot" Prosecutions