ervedly the
reputation of an Admirable Crichton. What drew me to him was his mordant
wit (to-day, alas! wasted on anonymous journalism! If he would only
reconsider his indetermination, the reading public would be the richer!)
Together we planned plays, novels, treatises on political economy, and
contributions to philosophy. Those were the days of dreams.

[Illustration: LIFE IN BETHNAL GREEN.]

One afternoon he came to me with quivering sides, and told me that an
idea for a little shilling book had occurred to him. It was that a
Radical Prime Minister and a Conservative working man should change into
each other by supernatural means, and the working man be confronted with
the problem of governing, while the Prime Minister should be as
comically out of place in the East End environment. He thought it would
make a funny "Arabian Nights" sort of burlesque. And so it would have
done; but, unfortunately, I saw subtler possibilities of political
satire in it. I insisted the story must be real, not supernatural, the
Prime Minister must be a Tory, weary of office, and it must be an
ultra-Radical atheistic artisan bearing a marvellous resemblance to him
who directs (and with complete success) the Conservative
Administration. To add to the mischief, owing to my collaborator's
evenings being largely taken up by other work, seven-eighths of the book
came to be written by me, though the leading ideas were, of course,
threshed out and the whole revised in common, and thus it became a
vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of twenty-one, whose literary
faculty had furthermore been pent up for years by the potential
censorship of a committee. The book, instead of being a shilling skit,
grew to a ten-and-sixpenny (for that was the unfortunate price of
publication) political treatise of over sixty long chapters and 500
closely-printed pages. I drew all the characters as seriously and
complexly as if the fundamental conception were a matter of history; the
out-going Premier became an elaborate study of a nineteenth century
Hamlet; the Bethnal Green life amid which he came to live was presented
with photographic fulness and my old trick of realism; the governmental
manoeuvres were described with infinite detail; numerous real
personages were introduced under nominal disguises, and subsequent
history was curiously anticipated in some of the Female Franchise and
Home Rule episodes. Worst of all, so super-subtle was the satire, that
it wa