ent drawn by
abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not
a description of 'Socialism' as it exists for the greater number of its
supporters. The need of something which one may love and for which one
may work has created for thousands of working men a personified
'Socialism,' a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the
hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer. The need of
some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and
certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but
a final and authoritative creed. Such a creed appeared in England in
1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from
Mr. Hyndman's lectures. It was the revelation which made a little dimly
educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine
humility in his eyes, 'How strange it is that this glorious truth has
been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown
to me.'

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and
writing. A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its
predecessors--Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism--and may
survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other
transformations and borne other names. It may, on the other hand,
remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins
and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and
disillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government.

But the use of a word in common speech is only the resultant of its use
by individual men and women, and particularly by those who accept it as
a party name. Each one of them, as long as the movement is really alive,
will find that while the word must be used, because otherwise the
movement will have no political existence, yet its use creates a
constant series of difficult problems in conduct. Any one who applies
the name to himself or others in a sense so markedly different from
common use as to make it certain or probable that he is creating a false
impression is rightly charged with want of ordinary veracity. And yet
there are cases where enormous practical results may depend upon keeping
wide the use of a word which is tending to be narrowed. The 'Modernist'
Roman Catholic who has studied the history of religion uses the term
'Catholic Church' to mean a society which has gone thr