weekly deficit at £4. In a later letter he says: 'I am now paying for the League (including Commonweal) at the rate of £500 a year, and I cannot afford it.'
The task of editorship, as I have said, from the outset was distasteful to him, not so much because, as is commonly supposed, he felt he had no aptitude for journalism, as because from the circumstances of the case it required him to give so much attention to the mere controversial side of party politics. I have not the least doubt that he would have made as good a shape at the craft of journalism as at the many other crafts which he so successfully took up, had the work enticed him. I can well imagine him collaborating in running a journal devoted to Socialism, or to art, or literature, or to any branch of work in which he was deeply interested, and proving himself first-rate as an editor or contributor. Those who know how invariably lively, instructive, and to the point were his remarks in conversation and in his letters on almost every subject that concerned the affairs of life will, I think, agree with me here. But in writing for the Commonweal, the official journal of the League, he was expected to write, week after week, about the tiresome and now quite obsolete incidents and controversies of Gladstone-Salisbury politics—a task into which he could put no heart.
Scanning his Commonweal notes to-day, one perceives that he is rarely himself in them, but is writing perfunctorily, dealing with matters which he thought it was the duty of the editor of the Commonweal to say. Thus he is often laboriously censorious, and his notes make heavy and dull reading. The niceties, trickeries, and obvious gammon of so much of what was going on in the name of politics were unsuitable for treatment from the serious point of view with which he regarded the plight of the working-class, and the revolutionary struggle which he saw confronting the civilised world. But he was not always laboured or dull; and it was rare for him to write on any theme without saying something fresh and suggestive. Even
