an organization might be, always supposing that one believes them genuine in their support of certain principles. It has always seemed to me that the worship of leaders has been a sign of the lifelessness of ordinary Radicalism of late, and that opinion has received fresh confirmation in my mind by last year's events in Ireland and Egypt (especially the latter, where the Liberal 'leaders' 'led' the party into mere Jingoism).
"But further I earnestly wish that the middle classes, to whom hitherto I have personally addressed myself, should look to all these matters, and become discontented also, as they certainly should be, since they themselves suffer from the same system which oppresses the poor; their lives made barren and dull by it; their hopes for a higher standard of life repressed: besides I am quite sure that the change which will overthrow our present system will come sooner or later: on the middle classes to a great extent it depends whether it will come peaceably or violently. If they can only learn the uselessness of mere overplus money, the poisonousness of luxury to all civilization, they will not be so likely to cry out 'confiscation and robbery and injustice' at a system which, while it proposes to give to every man what he really needs, will have no call to take from any man what he can really use: in short, what we of the middle classes have to do, if we can, is to show by our lives what is the proper type of a useful citizen, the type into which all classes should melt at last. I remember a little time ago meeting a clever man in a train who enlarged (without letting me get a word in edgewise) on the woes of the middle class, and how they suffered in comparison with the pampered working classes. I am sorry to say that I was not ready enough to say to him what I afterwards thought: 'my friend, if you would only allow yourself
