for Socialism? I answered his questions reassuringly, explaining how that my wife and I were now putting our whole energy into the new party, the I.L.P., and frankly avowing that I had abandoned my old Socialist League opinions against parliamentary action. He listened to my apologia attentively, sitting back in his chair smoking, keeping his eyes fixed on me reflectively while I spoke. He told me, what doubtless, he said, I had gathered from his more recent letters to me, that he himself had now realised that revolutionary Socialism was impossible in England—the working class were too deeply attached by temperament as well as by tradition to compromise and progressive politics to pursue with any genuine zeal abstract principles or revolutionary methods of change. Perhaps they were wiser than we were, even if their wisdom was only what Grant Allen called 'animal instinct.' Animal instinct was quite as likely to be right as armchair philosophy. Anyway they knew their own capacities better than we did. He had, he said, resumed friendly relations with the leaders of the S.D.F., but he still disliked much of their spirit and many of their political methods. He asked me about Keir Hardie, and was manifestly pleased to hear me speak warmly and trustfully of him. 'I have had, I confess, rather my doubts about him,' he said, 'because of his seeming absorption in mere electioneering schemes, but his fight for the unemployed has had something great in it.'
He spoke also of Robert Blatchford, whose extraordinary popularity as a journalist and as the author of 'Merrie England' and editor of The Clarion was then uprising. He had heard, he said, a good deal about the remarkable influence of Blatchford's writings among the factory workers in the North. That, he thought, was a most encouraging sign, for he seemed to have a true grip of Socialism, and appeared to possess the faculty of understanding the mind of the working class and of being understood by them. He (Blatchford) had been to see him at Kelmscott House, and they had had an interesting talk
