seemed to belong to different worlds or civilisations. Hyndman, striking in appearance, with his long, flowing, senatorial beard, his keen, restless, searching eyes, and full, intellectual brow, dressed in the city best, frock-coat suit of the day, with full display of white linen—his whole manner alert, pushful, and, shall I say, domineering—looked the very embodiment of middle-class respectability and capitalist ideology; a man of the world, a Pall Mall politician from top to toe.
I cannot remember the arguments of his lecture; I can only recall the impression made by it on my mind at the time. Brilliant and convincing it undoubtedly was—dealing almost wholly with the economic and political malefactions of the capitalist system, and I enjoyed it greatly. Racy, argumentative, declamatory, and bristling with topical allusions and scathing raillery, it was a hustings masterpiece. But it was almost wholly critical and destructive. The affirmative and regenerative aims of Socialism hardly emerged in it. The reverberating note, in feeling if not in phrase, was 'I accuse, I expose, I denounce.' He seemed to look round the civilised world and see there nothing but fraud, hypocrisy, oppression, and infamy on the part of the politicians and money-mongers on the one hand, and on the other only wooden-headed ignorance, stupidity, and servility on the part of the working class.
Mankind appeared in his view compounded of oppressors and oppressed, fleecers and fleeced, dupers and duped. He was jauntily cynical, or affected to be so. 'I am an educated middle-class man. I derive my living from the robbery of the workers. I enjoy the spoil, because it is in itself good, and the workers are content, and apparently desirous that I should enjoy it. Why therefore should I object to their slaving for my enjoyment if they themselves don't?' Yet nevertheless there was in his protagonism a fiery and even fanatical zeal. He appealed for better things—for justice and democracy—for a new system of politics and economics, though he hardly indicated whence
