London, Morris left the meeting, in company with Mavor, and next morning returned to London. Though he could not fail to observe Nairne's inquisitorial behaviour, he was not in the least offended at it, and remarked good-humouredly going downstairs: 'Our friend Nairne was putting me through the catechism a bit, after your Scottish Kirk-Session fashion, don't you think? He is, I fancy, one of those comrades who are suspicious of us poetry chaps, and I don't blame him. He is in dead earnest, and will keep things going, I should say.'
And Morris was right. Nairne was in dead earnest, and kept the Federation going in Glasgow, often almost single-handed, till his death twenty years later. By occupation he was a day-labourer (a stone breaker), with a wife and five children to support, and though industrious and a teetotaler his life was a hard and colourless one, and poetry and art were trivialities to him. He was class-conscious to the last degree. Somewhat sombre in mood, and narrow and intolerant in his political creed, he was nevertheless of a kindly disposition, a good husband and father, and a staunch co-operator and trade unionist. Morris afterwards used to ask in a friendly way about him. He, more than any other, was the founder and pioneer of the Social Democratic Federation in Scotland.
It was, as I have said, a curious circumstance that Morris, as a sequel to his meeting earlier in the evening, when his lecture envisaging the glowing hopes of Socialism had seemed to captivate the minds of a vast gathering of the unregenerate public, should have experienced this sudden transition into a small disillusionising assembly of 'elect brethren,' muffled in the spiritual pride and exclusiveness of the old-world sects. No less curious was it that in the person of his Socialist comrade, Nairne, the nemesis of labour without art, and life without joy, of which he had been speaking, should have been so strikingly personified.
Yet the mystery of the Word abides. How much of the seed sown among the 3000 hearers in the St. Andrews
