would come the motive or the power to effect the change, except in the material factors of civilisation—the inevitable next stage of social evolution.
I heard Hyndman's lecture, as I have said, with real enjoyment. It confounded and exasperated his fellow-respectables in the audience, and it stung and roused the working class. His argument against Capitalism was incontestable. In the field of economics his victory over the opponents of Socialism was, or seemed to be, complete. But the lecture, though it excited, did not inspire. One gained no increase of faith in man's humanity to man from it. There was hardly a ray of idealism in it. Capitalism was shown to be wasteful and wicked, but Socialism was not made to appear more practicable or desirable. There was, in fact, very little Socialism in the lecture at all—it was an anti-capitalist ejaculation.
When I contrasted Morris' lecture with Hyndman's, and compared the two men themselves—their impress on their hearers, their personal qualities—I felt then, as I have felt ever since, that the two lectures were different kinds of Socialism, even as the two men were at heart different types of Socialists. And I then felt, and still feel, that I liked the one Socialism and not the other. And I felt, and now feel more than ever, that the one Socialism is true, universally and for ever, while the other Socialism is at least only half-Socialism, and makes only temporary and conditional appeal, and that not to the higher social but to the more groundling and selfish instincts of the race.
This feeling that Morris and Hyndman represented two widely different conceptions of Socialism was impressed upon me in a curious way by an experience that befell Morris himself on the night of his first Glasgow lecture which I have already described. It had been arranged, as mentioned in the previous chapter, that after his lecture Morris should come along to the meeting-place of our Glasgow branch of the Federation for a short chat with
