Editorial: Our Tenth Volume. (1914)

Editorial from the August 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

With this issue we close the 10th volume of the Socialist Standard. When the history of the final struggle for working-class emancipation comes to be written, the history of these ten volumes will form so integral and by no means uninteresting part of those records. The story of the bold shouldering of the heavy responsibility, both financial and journalistic, of the production of such an organ, by the few men and women who founded the Socialist Party; the struggle to maintain the paper against the attacks of those who saw in it a working-class weapon that was to be feared, and therefore hated; the long and bitter fight for the foremost place in working class political papers: all these are phases of working-class striving that will not be forgotten when the struggle is over and classes are no more.

At the moment, however, the most interesting as well as the most important thing to he pointed out is that the 10th volume closes exactly as the 1st commenced —the free and untrammelled weapon of working-class revolution and emancipation. The reason of this is not far to seek. It is simply that at its founding it was placed upon the firm base prescribed by the principles in the light of which the Socialist Party shape their every action. Hence its continued and growing success as a revolutionary weapon is a further triumph for, and vindication of, those principles.

It is quite as it should be that the circulation of our official organ is larger now than it baa been at any time in its existence. In this it marks the steady progress of the Party and the Party’s propaganda. Resolutely declining to trust to the fickle favours of passing sensation, we have to fight hard to gain ground—but once we have gained it we never lose it: it is ours for all time.

It is this steady march, sustained not on the seductive sweets offered in sensations and side issues, but on the solid bread of Socialist knowledge—the propaganda of the principle of the class struggle—that makes us feared and hated by the master class of this country and their henchmen as no other political party is feared and hated.

To this result, desirable because it is a certain symptom of a successful fight, the Socialist Standard contributes in a very large degree, hence it behoves all those who desire to see the progress and triumph of the revolutionary propaganda, to give their whole-hearted, ungrudging, and consistent support to our Party organ, to the end that it may go on from success to greater success in its mission of fitting the workers for the struggle that lies before them.