Headlam's Political Agenda

a) Towards Equality and Brotherhood: The Socialist Message of the Sacraments

The belief in the sacredness of humanity and the dignity of the individual as derived from his faith in the Incarnation also formed the basis of Headlam's social agenda. While there existed in England thousands of men, women and children whose wants were not sufficiently provided for and who were impeded in their personal growth, he considered it a Christian duty to fight on their behalf for a reform of society²¹². Headlam quoted the diagram published by Leo George Chiozza Money in his book Riches and Poverty²¹³ to show that at present, eighty percent of the population in Great Britain lived in poverty, curtailed in mental and bodily development through a lack of opportunity and of material resources.

Headlam traced the imbalance of wealth and opportunity back to the system of unlimited competition and the principle of laissez-faire which at the time underlay the English economy. He criticised that modern English society had lived on the principle of “every man for himself and the devil take the hindermost”. “We have lived as rivals and competitors instead of living as brothers”, Headlam wrote, “labourer competing against labourer, artisan against artisan, shopkeeper against shopkeeper (...) with the result that very few of us are clothed beautifully and many of us not fed surely.”²¹⁴ Headlam argued fervently that contrary to the teachings of classical political economists, unlimited competition did not give to all equal opportunity to gain beautiful clothes and good food;

it did not even provide the majority with life's essentials²¹⁵.

Headlam called on all members of society to turn against the established modes of dealing with poverty and to rally their forces in order to tackle the problem at its economic and social roots. He accused his contemporaries of having forgotten the traditional Christian values of human dignity and social justice. He quoted the Archbishop of Canterbury who at the Lambeth Conference of 1888 had proclaimed that the factory hand had no right to be content with his meagre pay²¹⁶. Nor should the better-off feel satisfied with and exculpated through occasional donations to individuals or charitable institutions. Headlam turned violently against the century-old tradition of alms-giving which in his opinion only served to cement the present inequalities and to stabilise an inherently

212 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Lessons from the Cross. Addresses given in Oxhey Parish Church on Good Friday, 1886, 1887, p.34f

213 Chiozza Money, Leo George, Riches and Poverty, 1905; as quoted in Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.15

214 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, etc, 1892, p.7

215 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.9

216 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Guild of St. Matthew, an appeal to Churchmen. Being a sermon etc, 1890, p.9

unjust social system. “Though we can never have enough sympathy”, he maintained, “we have had enough sentimental talk and enough spasmodic action founded merely upon sentiment, touching the evils only on the surface, not going to the root of them.”²¹⁷ These evils, he pointed out, could never be alleviated by maudlin charity, but had to be prevented by Christian justice. Headlam criticised that charity of the traditional kind tended to degrade the receiving individual and thus to aggravate the problem. He called for a solution which respected the sacredness of the human being and restored the individual to dignity.

In Headlam's eyes, the sordid conditions of modern industrialised society marred the spiritual and moral welfare of all members of society. It inhibited the rich as much as it did the poor in their personal development. He argued that while the latter found themselves compelled to work excessive hours for a mere pittance with no time or resources for the higher things in life, the former were cheated out of one of the basic pleasures of human existence – the pleasure of earning one's living by the labour of one's own hands or brain. Headlam considered it a Christian's duty to God as well as to “our neighbour”²¹⁸, to get those conditions altered. “When the Social Revolution has come”, he hoped, “the common humanity which, though crushed and covered by our present anarchic conditions, is to be found quite as much among those who are now the rich as among the poor, will be able to assert itself.”²¹⁹

Headlam postulated that Britain discard the individualism of Benthamite utilitarian teachings and instead reclaim as basic social values the two principles which he considered to be the kernel of Christ's political message and which he found expressed in traditional Christian ritual: the ideas of total equality and of universal brotherhood among men. The principle of brotherhood he found commemorated and affirmed with every Eucharist celebrated within a church or chapel. Already through its name, the sacrament of Holy Communion carried the message of communal life.

Headlam argued that it pledged men to a life of solidarity and interdependence²²⁰. In it, all alike became sharers of bread and wine, signifying both material necessities as well as spiritual wealth.

Christ, Headlam believed, had given a clear indication that salvation, whether spiritual or secular, could never be attained individually, but only communally by living as active members of a brotherly society. Holy Communion as a constant reminder of the Incarnation spurred on Christians to follow Christ's example in spiritual as well as social and political life. “Can you face Jesus Christ

217 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Guild of St. Matthew, an appeal to Churchmen. Being a sermon etc, 1890, p.9

218 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Guild of St. Matthew, an appeal to Churchmen. Being a sermon etc, 1890, p.9;

see also Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886

219 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886 p.18

220 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Laws of Eternal Life, etc, 1897, p.97; see also Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.16

Sunday by Sunday”, Headlam asked in his sermons, “ and not be doing your best – more than you have done – to help to make the world more like what He, by His representative specimen work in Palestine, showed that He intended it to be?”²²¹ The Eucharist bound all those who partook in it to help forward the coming of his Kingdom upon earth.

Equality, Headlam believed, was celebrated and manifested in the sacrament of Baptism. He held that through the act of christening, the Christian community claimed every baby born into this world as being the equal with every other baby in a manner more radical than the French Revolution had ever done. Headlam emphasised that the Church did not differentiate between the child of a costermonger or the child of a prince²²². In the act of baptising, neither considerations of social class or material wealth, nor of gender, nor of political affiliations played a part. Baptism demanded nothing of the child, whether in wealth or deed. “[N]ot waiting for conversion or illumination or election or proof of goodness, but simply because it is a human being, we claim it as of right a member of Christ, the child of God and an inheritor - not merely a future heir, but a present inheritor – of the Kingdom of Heaven”²²³, he wrote.

The messages carried by the sacraments of equality and brotherhood formed the backdrop of Headlam's arguments on social questions. For him, the principles of the Christian community translated directly into political rights and maxims for living together in secular society²²⁴.

b) Socialism as the Political Ideology of Christ the Man

In the political landscape of late Victorian England, Headlam thought these principles best embodied in the political ideas of socialism. For his particular brand of his political faith, he borrowed the phrase Christian Socialism (spelling it with a capital “S”) from F. D. Maurice and his friends. Headlam was well aware that some objected to the concept of a Christian Socialism on principle. For many, the two terms sounded contradictory and mutually exclusive, but he relished in the friction they created in many believers' ears. Headlam intended to shock, and he meant to shake Christians into “aggressive militant action”²²⁵. In his eyes, men had been “too contented”²²⁶ with the present shape of society: the leisured classes had shut their eyes to the secular side of Christ's

221 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England,1886, p.17

222 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Meaning of the Mass. Five lectures, with other sermons and addresses, 1905, p.28; see also Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.71

223 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, 1892, p.13

224 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.15

225 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.16

226 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.5

work²²⁷, while the poor submitted too easily to their lot and consented to work for wages criminally inappropriate to the services rendered. Headlam alienated respectable society by speaking, in Marxist parlance, of the need for a “social Revolution”, although he meant it to be a revolution not of bloodshed and violence, but of “reconciliation, (...) peaceful, orderly and legal (...) by means of which, when robbery is prevented, the wolf and the lamb, those who are now the sweater and the sweated, the rich and the poor, shall feed together”²²⁸.

“When people have asked me what is the difference between Christian Socialism and other Socialism”, Headlam explained in the Church Reformer, “I have been in the habit of saying that economically, there is no difference: that the motive power often is different and that we appeal to different people and on different grounds, but that the economic basis is the same.”²²⁹ In his eyes, free education, school meals, shorter working days, minimum wages and the reform of taxation all constituted reforms which any loyal member of the Christian Church ought to work for. In the two fundamental positions which underlay socialist teaching, he detected reformulations of the essential Christian principles of equality and brotherhood. As the first principle, Headlam listed the notion that every man should work. The socialist concept of society provided for no idle class which consumed without producing, no privileged body allowed to live upon the labour of others. “What is this but Christian teaching?” Headlam asked. “St. Paul's labour law, if strictly applied to modern society, would effect a social revolution: 'If any will not work, neither let him eat'.”²³⁰ He criticised the fact that in late-Victorian England, a man was often honoured and enriched in inverse proportion to the amount of useful work he did. Both, the “Christian inheritor of broad acres” as well as the labourer on his estate, were bound by the biblical command to work on six days per week, Headlam held.

The second socialist principle as Headlam saw it called for a more equitable distribution of the produce of labour. This idea, too, chimed in with biblical teaching. “The husbandman that laboureth must be the first to partake of the fruits”, Headlam quoted from the letters of St. Paul²³¹. The object of Christian Socialism, Headlam offered, was to bring about a time when all should work and robbery in the form of the inequitable distribution of produce be abolished²³². He cited calculations from an unknown source which had shown that if all took their fair share in the labour necessary to supply for the material needs of the nation, none would have to work for more than four or five

227 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Service of Humanity, and other sermons, 1882, p.3

228 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Secular Work of Jesus Christ, his apostles and the Church of England, 1886, p.18

229 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Church and Socialism, 1890, p.220

230 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Lambeth Conference and Socialism, 1888, p.181

231 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Lambeth Conference and Socialism, 1888, p.181; see also Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, 1892, p.13

232 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, 1892, p.12

hours a day²³³. Then, Headlam envisioned, work would finally be a joy and fulfilment instead of the grind it was at present to those who had to provide not only for their own living, but for the wants and luxuries of those who considered themselves their social betters. Of course, he conceded, Christ had not himself been an economic socialist. But he had laid down the principles of brotherhood which in Victorian England required economic socialism for their accomplishment. “The banner of Christ is now in the hands of the Socialists”²³⁴, Headlam concluded.

Headlam took pains to stress that for him, secular socialism constituted an economic doctrine, not a philosophy of life. He appreciated his fellow churchmen's worries that socialism take on the form of a religion, dealing with ethical as well as economic questions and opposing Christian teaching on so important a matter as for instance the questions of marriage and the family. Socialism as Headlam understood it had but one end in view, the establishment of righteous industrial and material conditions²³⁵. For Headlam, questions on the family, sex, and eugenics, important as they were, took second place behind the paramount issue of the industrial revolution and should only be addressed once equitable and righteous material conditions had been established. Wage slavery had to be abolished before the finer points of social organisation could even be properly thought about.

Headlam abhorred the fact that policies of the above kind tended to give the impression that socialism aimed at curtailing personal liberty. As a professing Christian Socialist, he assured his readers, he did not dream of reconstituting society in any way in which individuality should be suppressed. In Headlam's eyes, it was on the contrary the present system of unlimited competition and so-called liberalism which undermined social progress by preventing the individual from living a free and full life and destroying social institutions like the family. “We are Socialists because we believe that the abolition of the monopoly in the main means of production will make these organisms much stronger than they are now, not because we think it will get rid of them”²³⁶, he explained.

c) A Classless Society of Brothers

As the logical consequence of Christ's teachings on human dignity, equality and community, Headlam envisaged a society in which all class distinction, whether based on material possessions or social status, would shrivel into nothingness. In the Kingdom of God, he believed, the

233 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.67

234 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.40

235 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.49

236 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Church and Socialism, 1890, p.221

sacramental principle of absolute equality would lead to a re-classification of society. The present social system which the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold²³⁷ had in Headlam's opinion aptly described as a “materialised upper class, a vulgarised middle class and a brutalised working class”

would give way to John Ruskin's model of “Beggars, Robbers and Workers”²³⁸. The category of workers, Headlam specified, comprised the bulk of the population and included all who did not live on the labour or the charity of others, but gave back to society some produce of hand or brain equal to the amount consumed, be it as a manual labourer, as a professional or a captain of industry.

Under the headings beggars and robbers he brandished those who would continue to refuse to contribute their share to the common good. Headlam hoped for a society in which the members of all classes moved closer together to form a common body of loyal and interdependent citizens.²³⁹ Headlam turned forcefully against arguments that Scripture sanctioned the present division of society into rich and poor, educated and ignorant. He interpreted Christ's had blessing of the poor as a praise of their moral strength and personal integrity as opposed to the hypocrisy of the rich and learned Pharisees and Scribes; his remark was, Headlam stated emphatically, not a sanctioning of their social status or material situation²⁴⁰. Jesus' frequently cited phrase “The poor ye shall always have with you”, he pointed out, was in fact a misquotation. The original read “The poor ye have always with you”. The former phrase contradicted the whole of Christ's life and work which in Headlam's eyes was clearly directed at getting rid of misery and destitution. “If He had said that when His Kingdom was established – one object of which was to get rid of poverty – there should still be poverty He would have stultified Himself”²⁴¹, Headlam argued.

God had endowed men with a fruitful earth and with intelligence to make use of it to the common good. In terms of the gross national income, England's wealth had risen phenomenally since the early days of the Industrial Revolution. Headlam considered it a monstrosity that side by side with all this progress in the power and intelligence of man to make much of the resources at hand, there existed such abject poverty. He was adamant that Christ's utterances as quoted above should not be read as a directive as to the proper ordering of society, but an ascertainment of a lamentable fact about human nature. Even under the best possible social and economic system, Headlam agreed, a man who was a loafer and refused to work when he had every opportunity to do so would fall into poverty. But he refused to believe that it was God's will that those who laboured in order to produce

237 Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), son of Thomas Arnold, the educationalist and headmaster of Rugby School. Matthew Arnold is remembered particularly for his poetry which is ranked alongside that of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and which often contained harsh criticism of the prevalent social conditions in Victorian Britain.

238 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, 1892, p.8

239 The idea of a universal duty to work will re-appear in this thesis in the chapter on Leo George Chiozza Money.

240 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Guild of St. Matthew, an appeal to Churchmen. Being a sermon etc, 1890, p.10ff;

see also Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, The Socialist's Church, 1907, p.41

241 Headlam, Stewart Duckworth, Christian Socialism: a lecture, 1892, p.11

real wealth for England should themselves be kept living meagre lives on a bare pittance, producing

“illth”²⁴² for those who did not know the value of the wealth at their disposal.

Headlam called to the workers to stand up for their lawful place in society. Jesus had seen something worthy of respect in every person, however low in social status, he reminded his listeners, and Baptism declared every child to be the equal of every other. In Headlam's eyes, the social superiority of the leisured classes was unfounded and he encouraged his working class

Headlam called to the workers to stand up for their lawful place in society. Jesus had seen something worthy of respect in every person, however low in social status, he reminded his listeners, and Baptism declared every child to be the equal of every other. In Headlam's eyes, the social superiority of the leisured classes was unfounded and he encouraged his working class