Parliamentary Party have had something to do with the business, though it may not be so. But I don't think 'tis worth much bothering oneself about; because if they will be parliamentary, names will neither keep them back nor thrust them forward. If it were possible I for one part should be only too glad to see the whole quarrel drop, on the grounds of letting each branch do as it pleases as a branch. Because really the organisation of the League is, and always has been, so loose that if all the branches were merely affiliated bodies doing what they pleased within the necessary Socialist lines of attack on the monopoly of the means of production, pushing the sale of the paper, and communicating often with the Council (which would then be only a body for such intercourse), we should not be worse off than we have been all along, and to boot might escape these weary squabbles.
So on the whole, the least said soonest mended on that point.
As to the Commonweal I by no means feel overwhelmed at the prospect of its again becoming a monthly. It sold well under those conditions before, and had some good articles in it; and that might be so again. True it would be a defeat; but we must get used to such trifles as defeats, and refuse to be discouraged by them. Indeed, I am an old hand at that game, my life having been passed in being defeated; as surely every man's life must be who finds himself forced into a position of being a little ahead of the average in his aspirations.
There is perhaps somewhat of a slack in the direct propaganda at present; but the big world is going on at a great rate to my mind towards the change, and I am sure both that steady preachment of even a dozen men (as in the Christian Legend) will make steady progress for the cause, and also that those who have really learned Socialism can never any more be persuaded that water runs uphill of itself. And you and a few men cannot be prevented from preaching by anything external to themselves. How-
