regard to it, mentioned a curious incident. The
villain of the piece, Colonel Stapleton, was drawn by me from a certain
Lord ----, as to whom I had said to myself the first moment I met him:
"This man is the quintessence of selfishness. He is capable of anything
that would minister to his own pleasures." "The novel," said Lord
Houghton in his letter, "requires no apology. You have made only one
mistake in it. The conduct of the colonel in one way would have differed
from that which you ascribe to him. For instance," Lord Houghton
continued, "I once met Lord X. in Paris, and to my own knowledge what
Lord X. would have done on a similar occasion was so-and-so." Lord X.
was the very man from whom my picture of the colonel had been drawn.

Some years later I published another novel, _The Old Order Changes_, of
which the affection of a man for a woman is again one of the main
subjects, but it is there regarded from a widely different standpoint. I
shall speak of this book presently, but I may first mention that in the
interval between the two a new class of questions, of which at
Littlehampton and Oxford I had been but vaguely conscious, took complete
possession of my mind, and pushed for a time the interests which had
been previously engaging me into the background.

This change was due to the following causes, which partly produced, and
were partly produced by, one of the earlier outbreaks in this country of
what is now called "social unrest." The doctrines of Karl Marx, which
had long been obscurely fermenting in the minds of certain English
malcontents, now began for the first time in this country to be adopted
by a body of such men as the basis of an organized party--a party which
they ambitiously named "The Social Democratic Federation." The main
object of these persons was the confiscation of all private capital.
Another agitation had been initiated by Henry George, which in this
country was much more widely popular, and which had for its object the
confiscation not of private capital, but simply and solely of privately
owned land. Meanwhile Bright, who was certainly not a Socialist (for he
defended the rights of capital in many of their harshest forms), had
been attacking private landlordism on the ground not that it was in
itself an economic abuse, as George taught, but that in this country it
formed, under existing conditions, the basis of an aristocratic class.
Finally there was Ruskin, who had, since the days whe