Party Notes:

Stirring reports of successful propaganda work have come in during the month. Several Branches record increased membership and in almost every district in which a Branch exists the activity of our members meets with encouraging response.

 

 

In Finsbury Park particularly, our Islington comrades appear to have swept the field, their meetings, entirely sympathetic, numbering from 500 to 1,500 people. At one such gathering 200 copies of The Socialist Standard and the Manifesto were sold.

 

 

The Manifesto with its admirable resume of the historical development of the modern wage slave, its trenchant criticism of contemporary parties claiming to represent working-class interests and its clear-cut arguments in justification of the existence of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, has evoked an interest far greater than our most sanguine expectation. Requests for it have reached us from most unlikely quarters all over the United Kingdom and the first edition of 5,000 copies is well on the way to exhaustion.

 

 

It will be unnecessary for me to emphasize the importance of every effort being made to maintain and increase the sales of the Party literature. Members will be fully aware that this is perhaps the most effective weapon in our armoury.

 

 

Another useful method of spreading our principles is through the medium of public debate. Before this paper is in the hands of readers, Comrade Fitzgerald will have upheld the position of the Party in opposition to Mr. Humphreys, S.D.F., upon the proposition. “Does the S.D.F. deserve the support of the working-class ? ”

 

 

Another debate has also been arranged with Mr. Wilson, Cobdenite, and our Peckham comrades are settling the preliminaries fora similar encounter with Mr. J. J. Stephenson, treasurer of the L.R.C.

 

 

 

With a regret that every member of the Party will echo I have to announce the resignation, through business pressure, of C. Lehane from the position of General Secretary. Our comrade has discharged the duties of his important office with an efficiency that could not easily be excelled and although the work of no member can be extolled above that of another when all are doing their utmost within the limits of their capacities and opportunities, the action of the E.C. in recording their high appreciation of Lehane’s services will, I am sure, be most heartily endorsed.