Cobden-Sanderson, like Crane, was a new personality to our Glasgow audiences, but his name was fairly well known from press notices of his beautiful work in bookbinding shown at Arts and Crafts Exhibitions, and from the circumstance that he had, on becoming a Socialist, given up his career at the parliamentary bar in order to practise in some degree his principles by engaging in work that might be honest, useful, and beautiful. The press, too, had but recently recorded his marriage with Annie Cobden, one of the daughters of Richard Cobden, the famous Free Trade advocate, herself well known as a suffragist agitator, noting also the fact that he adopted his wife's name with his own as a joint surname. He was an accomplished platform speaker, clear and crisp in phrase, keenly argumentative, and with fine animation in his delivery. He told how he had come to realise the wrongfulness of the present class system of society—its falsehood in commerce, in law, in politics, and in personal morality, and how he could no longer with self-respect participate in its deceptions, and had decided to devote himself to some kind of productive work that could be not only honest and useful but beautiful. The speech made a deep impression on the meeting.
Though announced as one of the speakers, Emery Walker did not address the meeting. Morris 'let him off' at his own request, as he shrank much from public speaking. Even on his own special subject of the printers' craft he only lectured on rare occasions. But he was well known in Socialist circles as the Secretary of the Hammersmith branch of the League, and as one of the unofficial art group of London Socialists. Morris esteemed him as one of his closest friends, and consulted him on matters of business and art, a thing he rarely did with others. He was personally known among us in Glasgow from visits he had paid us in our branch rooms when on business in Scotland.
We adjourned from the hall to our branch meeting rooms, where we had an hour's chat, chiefly about the internal
