An adequate minimum wage for all adults employed in Government and Municipal services or in any monopolies such as railways enjoying State privileges. Suppression of all sub-contracting and sweating (an ignorant confusion between a harmless industrial method and its occasional abuse). Universal suffrage for all adults, men and women alike. Public payment for all public service. These of course were only means tending towards the ideal, "to wit, the supplanting of the present state by a society of equality of condition," and then follows a sentence paraphrased from the Fabian Basis embodying a last trace of that Utopian idealism which imagines that society can be constituted so as to enable men to live in freedom without eternal vigilance, namely, "When this great change is completely carried out, the genuine liberty of all will be secured by the free play of social forces with much less coercive interference than the present system entails." From these extracts it will be seen that the Manifesto, drafted by William Morris, but mutilated and patched up by the other two, bears the imprint neither of his style, nor that of Shaw, but reminds one rather of mid-Victorian dining-room furniture, solid, respectable, heavily ornate, and quite uninteresting. Happily there is not much of it! Unity was attained by the total avoidance of the contentious question of political policy. But fifteen active Socialists sitting together at a period when parties were so evenly divided that a General Election was always imminent could not refrain from immediate politics, and the S.D.F., like many other bodies, always cherished the illusion that the defeat of a minority at a joint conference on a question of principle would put that minority out of action. Accordingly, as soon as the Manifesto had been published resolutions were tabled pledging the constituent societies to concentrate their efforts on Socialist candidates accepted as suitable by the Joint Committee. On this point the Fabian Society was in a hopeless minority, and an endless vista of futile and acrimonious discussions was opened out which would lead to unrest in our own society--for there has always been a minority opposed to its dominant policy--and a waste of time and temper to the delegates from our Executive. It was therefore resolved at the end of July that our delegates be withdrawn, and that put an end to the Joint Committee. The decision was challenged at a members' meeting by E.E. Williams, one of the signatories of the Joint Manifesto, subsequently well known as the author of "Made in Germany," and in some sense the real founder of the Tariff Reform movement; but the members by a decisive vote upheld the action of their Executive.