 | This precursor of Atlas Shrugged anticipated the election of a Socialist Labour government in the United Kingdom. First published in 1907, action takes place about 1918 and a few years later. Ernest Bramah Smith wrote adventure and detective books, dime novels. This work shows many of the those features. The workmanship is uneven. The story was apparently inspired by current events of that moment. In 1906 the Labour Party placed 29 MPs in the House of Commons, up from two the previous election. In this story, the Socialists have gained complete control of the government. One man, Gatacre Strobalt, a naval hero, rises to resist.
Taking the name "George Salt," he works with the last politician of any standing with both the Liberals and the Conservatives, Sir John Hampden. Sir John forms The Unity League, a political party with no action plan, except to overthrow the Labour government. They offer no agenda, no programme. They ask only that their members be prepared to sacrifice and, further, volunteer their labor to the cause. Membership is £5, about one month's wages for an unskilled worker of the time, or about $1500 in modern money (perhaps much more). Clearly, these are the upper classes. After winning their battle, they reform the constitution, doing away with one man one vote. They sell voting shares in the government at £10 each, and apparently no limit per person.
George Salt and Sir John Hampden and the Unity League invest two years planning and preparing. They then announce that they will stop buying coal. League members have switched to oil from the fields of the Anglo-Pennsylvanian and Anglo-Baku companies. Calamity follows. Consequences pile up. Salt or other League representatives have pulled strings in France and Germany (surely) and Russia (perhaps) to tax imports of UK coal. There is no market for the product. When struck by the hardest winter in memory, the UK is gripped by starvation and rioting. The government capitulates. The Unity League takes over.
The story opens and closes with Irene Lisle, a middle class girl of clear opinion and clever insight. She discerns that the League is more than it appears and comes to work for it. The action closes with George Salt flying to rescue her from a mob at the abandoned League headquarters.
Bramah offered personal flying via avian mechanism as a hobby. More difficult than swimming, it takes an expected toll. The action begins when Strobalt -- an expert and daring flying -- rescues the daughter of Sir John. With the rescue as a convenient pretext, he asks her for an invitation to her father. With the failure of the political center, Hampden has otherwise walled himself off from outside contacts and is studying insects. Strobalt gives her the name "George Salt" saying only that he is "a sailor" rather than identifying himself as a famous naval hero of recent news. Salt meets Sir John, who is initially very reluctant, but, who agrees to the plan to topple the government.
Those who know Atlas Shrugged well will recognize many elements. Whether Ayn Rand purposely cribbed an obscure dime novel or was only writing within the same genre can be debated, perhaps endlessly. The Socialist junta is very much like the Washington gang, from honest thieves not willing to kill the rich goose laying their eggs, to those leering at the opportunity to loot their own party members when the time comes. A resistant mine owner could easily have come from Atlas.
"Only once did failure threaten to mar his record. A Lancashire colliery proprietor, a man who had risen from the lowest grade of labour, as men more often did in the hard, healthy days of emulous rivalry than in the later piping times of union-imposed collective indolence did not wish to listen. Positive, narrow, over-bearing, he was permeated with the dogmatic egotism of his successful life. He had never asked another man's advice; he had never made a mistake. ... His own brother worked as a miner in his 1500 deep and received a miner's wage."
But, he, too, signs on.
Set not quite one generation in the future of 1906, in addition to personal flying, Bramah also introduced a "telescribe" for instantly sending handwritten messages -- not far removed from the actualy technology of his time. Telephones still work on the exchange system. Telegraphs are more common. The League has an enciphering typewriter, one of six known. Automobiles are rare. Sir John Hampden has an electric car.
As an example of the uneven development, Sir John spends two chapters caring for a dying man and in so doing discovers that the secret of the League's intentions has been revealed to Labour. On the other hand, "Brother Ambrose" and his ragged mob of leftier-than-thou malcontents get only one scene early on. It is hard to see how the Labour clique could have held on for two years against that, but Tubes, Stummery and the boys do maintain their privilege.
And "privilege" needs to be specially understood. This is a book of its moment. Much is colloquial, more common than Conan Doyle, for example, and difficult to understand. A spy worms his way into the League. His loose way of speaking without articles and prepositions is peculiar, though perhaps intended as psychological insight. The modern British labourite, Billy Bragg, is said to have complained to Pete Seeger, that the English lyrics to The Internationale were dated. "... away with the age of cant..." (age of Kant?... age of cannot?) Seeger told Bragg to write new ones. He did. "Freedom is only privilege extended, unless enjoyed by one and all." That nuance of "privilege" appears several times in the dialogues among the Socialists. Today, we would use the word "entitlement."
That this work was forgotten is not surprisng. You would have to be deeply engaged in penny novels of the Victorian-Edwardian era to know Ernest Bramah Smith. The Secret of the League is ideologically muddy. While clearly identifying the upper classes as the creators of weatlh, there is no distinction between landed aristocrats and manufacturers. Moreover, after winning their battle, the League keeps "the good and the practical" of Socialist legislation. Conveniently enough, though England was recently engaged in a furious naval war, the other great powers are magnanimous -- yet also mindful of the USA, which, in support of the UK, extended the Monroe Doctrine to the Suez. Overall, The Secret of the League offered a single compelling idea, wrapped in thin science fiction.
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The Secret of the League by Ernest Bramah
