imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of past ages guide his hand, and as part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days in the world will be happy and eventful.'
And again, writing in the Commonweal on Bellamy's 'Looking Backward,' he says: 'Mr. Bellamy worries himself unnecessarily in seeking, with obvious failure, some incentive to labour to replace the fear of starvation which at present is the only one; whereas it cannot be too often repeated that the true incentive to useful and happy labour is, and must be, pleasure in the work itself.'
That single sentence, as Mr. Mackail rightly observes, contains the essence of all his belief in politics, in economics, in art. I doubt if he ever delivered a lecture without reaffirming it as a cardinal principle of his Socialist faith. It might indeed be said that it was from his perception of the direful blight which the degradation of labour has upon the whole tree of life, and his abounding hope in the regeneration of life, which the uplifting of labour to its true dignity and delight would bring, that all his Socialist aspirations sprang. Thus in 1879, several years before he saw his way into the path of Socialist agitation, we find him declaring in an address on 'The Art of the People' to the Birmingham Art students: 'If a man has work to do which he despises, which does not satisfy his natural and rightful desire for pleasure, the greater part of his life must pass unhappily and without self-respect. Consider, I beg of you, what that means, and what ruin must come of it in the end.... The chief duty of the civilised world to-day is to set about making labour happy for all, and to do its utmost to minimise unhappy labour.'
We also find him in what was almost his last Socialist testament, 'News from Nowhere,' giving final emphasis to this principle. My readers will know how in that Utopian romance he makes old Hammond reply to his visitor from the nineteenth century, who expresses astonishment that
