nality--the very type that one most desires to propagate.

These are, of course, very crude and elementary objections to the
socialistic scheme; all that I say is that until these difficulties seem
more capable of solution, I cannot throw myself with any interest into
the speculation; I cannot continue in the path of logical deduction,
while the postulates and axioms remain so unsound.

What then can a man who has resources that he cannot wisely dispose of,
and happiness that he cannot impart to others, but yet who would only
too gladly share his gladness with the world, do to advance the cause
of the general weal? Must he plunge into activities for which he has no
aptitude or inclination, and which have as their aim objects for which
he does not think that the world is ripe? Every one will remember the
figure of Mrs. Pardiggle in Bleak House, that raw-boned lady who enjoyed
hard work, and did not know what it was to be tired, who went about
rating inefficient people, and "boned" her children's pocket-money for
charitable objects. It seems to me that many of the people who work at
social reforms do so because, like Mrs. Pardiggle, they enjoy hard work
and love ordering other people about. In a society wisely and rationally
organised, there would be no room for Mrs. Pardiggle at all; the
question is whether things must first pass through the Pardiggle stage.
I do not in my heart believe it. Mrs. Pardiggle seems to me to be not
part of the cure of the disease, but rather one of the ugliest of its
symptoms. I think that she is on the wrong tack altogether, and leading
other people astray. I do know some would-be social reformers, whom I
respect and commiserate with all my heart, who see what is amiss, and
have no idea how to mend it, and who lose themselves, like Hamlet, in a
sort of hopeless melancholy about it all, with a deep-seated desire to
give others a kind of happiness which they ought to desire, but which,
as a matter of fact, they do not desire. Such men are often those upon
whom early youth broke, like a fresh wave, with an incomparable sense of
rapture, in the thought of all the beauty and loveliness of nature and
art; and who lived for a little in a Paradise of delicious experiences
and fine emotions, believing that there must be some strange mistake,
and that every one must in reality desire what seemed so utterly
desirable; and then, as life went on, there fell upon these the shadow
of the harsh facts of lif