Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

64 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

mission very seriously, and he had a target. This was A. R. Orage, and through him The New Age and its readership. It was said of Orage that he was “one of the most influential spirits in England although not one in ten thousand would know his name—because Orage only influenced influential people. He had no other public but writers.”’ This was something of which Mitrinovic was well aware.

Born in Yorkshire, Orage had moved to London in 1905 after twelve years as a teacher in Leeds to pursue his chosen vocation as a journalist. In 1907 he and his friend Holbrook Jackson bought The New Age with financial support provided by Bernard Shaw and Lewis Wallace, a merchant banker. The two new editors aimed to turn the journal sub-titled “an independent socialist review of politics, literature and art,” into an independent forum within which all progressive ideas and schemes might be examined and discussed—something akin to a weekly debating society. After policy disagreements with Jackson, Orage was left as sole editor by early 1908.

From that date until his resignation in 1922, the development of the weekly reflected to a considerable degree the path forged by Orage in his own search for some encompassing and coherent philosophy of man and society that could form a basis for the solution of not only social and political problems, but of spiritual ones also. Thus, during the immediate pre-war year he was particularly influenced by S. G. Hobson and it was during this period that The New Age embraced and promoted the cause of guild socialism. According to Margaret Cole it became “the left-wing paper, which everybody who was anybody read.”* By 1917, however, Orage had begun to suspect that National Guilds, as he and Hobson had formulated the idea, were insufficient on their own. Whilst guild socialism, based on the premise that “men could not be really free as citizens unless they were also free and self-governing in their daily lives as producers,” might be the ideal solution for the problem of industrial organisation, its economic theory was inadequate. There was, Orage suggested, something unsound in “the relation of the whole scheme to the existing, or any prospective, scheme of money.”'° He began to extend his study of socialist economics until, in 1917, he was introduced to Major C. H. Douglas by Holbrook Jackson. By 1919 Orage was converted and from that time until 1922 Douglas’s system of social credit became one of the central concerns of the weekly. It was in the columns of The New Age and through the collaboration of Orage and Douglas that the seeds of the world-wide social credit movement were sown.

However, whilst Orage’s interest in economics and monetary reform grew during the post war period, so did his own personal quest for spiritual certainty intensify. In 1919 he announced that the weekly would undertake “a more