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.61 This is most apparent in the array of fin de sièclemovements in which consent and resistance figured in citizen engagementwith the state.In 1902, a leading figure of the ethical movement, Dr.JohnClifford, invoked the rhetoric of passive resistance in a campaign against theEducation Act.Clifford emphasized citizens’ right to resist government op-erating without their consent, and the moral responsibility of citizens to resistlaws contravening Christian conscience and divine command.62 Four years36t h e s o u t h a f r i c a n wa r a n d a f t e r , 18 9 9 – 19 0 6later, in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi assumed leadership of the first In-dian passive resistance campaign against attempts to institute a system re-quiring Indian and Chinese laborers to register with the Transvaal govern-ment, forcing them to leave their fingerprints on file and carry passes whenmoving between home and work.Gandhi’s leadership of the movement tookhim to London in October 1906 to present a deputation to Lord Elgin at theColonial Office and to build up support among Britons for an end to thepass system.Gandhi’s cause received much attention in the contemporaryBritish press.63 Much evidence points to widespread connections between avariety of progressive movements, not least of which was their tendency tobase passive resistance to government authority in the moral authority of cit-izens and subjects.Perhaps the most significant of these connections lay in the networks ofactivists constituting the labor movement, which appeared to many men andwomen of radical persuasion to be the place where women’s political de-mands could best be met.Historian Andrew Chadwick has noted that “dis-cussion over the varying definitions, perceived scope, and means of main-taining and extending, ‘political freedom,’ were crucial in defining thepolitical identity of both the Labour Party and the broader left” in the firstquarter of the twentieth century.64 Trying to understand this movement pri-marily in terms of individuals’ organizational affiliations misses the vitalityand complexity of the labor subculture in the first years of the twentieth cen-tury.While many men and women in the labor movement belonged to so-cialist organizations like the Independent Labour Party (ILP) or the SocialDemocratic Federation (SDF), others crossed organizational lines to workfor broader social and political transformations.65 Radical printer ThomasCobden Sanderson recorded attending an ILP meeting in January 1902 withhis suffragist wife, Anne, at which the lecturer considered the topic “Why So-cialists and Radicals Should Co-operate.” Later that year, Cobden Sandersonenthusiastically endorsed the labor movement as “a movement for the trans-formation of the world in the spirit of the whole, and for justice as the law ofman’s spiritual well-being and for justice as man’s supreme law,” suggestinga far wider scope of political activism than offered by participation in tradi-tional labor organizations.66 Ethical socialists expressed similar beliefs.They were committed to what Sylvia Pankhurst would call “the beautiful life of Socialism,” less economic screed than radical critique.67 Stanton Coit, leader ofthe West London Ethical Society, understood the goal of politics to “makeSociety, in the church, in the school, in the playground, in the factory, in thelegislative halls, a spiritual organism.” 68 The dimensions of this labor move-ment were sketched annually in the Reformers’ Year Book (formerly Labour Annual ), edited by Frederick Pethick Lawrence and Joseph Edwards.Their broad sweep of the groups comprising the labor movement in Britain between 1903 and 1909 revealed a range of organizations devoted to temper-ance, labor, and women, interconnected by personal and ideological com-mitments.6937t h e m i l i ta n t s u f f r a g e m ov e m e n tBut rifts emerged within this labor subculture in the years between 1905and 1907.While women suffragists pursued the question of women’s en-franchisement within the ILP and the SDF, debate intensified over the spe-cific measures labor organizations would pursue
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