t law will largely govern custom. I
declare that a 'legal day' should be eight hours on five days in the
week and not more than five hours on the sixth. If the labour is of an
exhausting character these hours are too long." On every side now the
Socialist controversy grew, and I listened, read, and thought much,
but said little. The inclusion of John Robertson in the staff of the
_Reformer_ brought a highly intellectual Socialist into closer touch
with us, and slowly I found that the case for Socialism was
intellectually complete and ethically beautiful. The trend of my
thought was shown by urging the feeding of Board School children,
breaking down under the combination of education and starvation, and I
asked, "Why should people be pauperised by a rate-supported meal, and
not pauperised by, state-supported police, drainage, road-mending,
street-lighting, &c? "Socialism in its splendid ideal appealed to my
heart, while the economic soundness of its basis convinced my head.
All my life was turned towards the progress of the people, the helping
of man, and it leaped forward to meet the stronger hope, the lofty
ideal of social brotherhood, the rendering possible to all of freer
life; so long had I been striving thitherward, and here there opened
up a path to the yearned-for goal! How strong were the feelings
surging in my heart may be seen in a brief extract from an article
published second week of January, 1885: "Christian charity? We know
its work. It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef
once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if
Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs. It
plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at
them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds
hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and
alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has
wrung every energy, every hope, every joy. Miss Cobbe summons us to
admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the
robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure
founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of
the poor."

This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for
my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr. W.P. Ball, who wrote
to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which
I had advocated rate-supported mea