uld have been better if he had been a little more shocked, not in
a conventional way, but at the hideous lapses and failures of even
generous and frank people. He is too hard and confident to be an
apostle. He does not lead the flock like a shepherd, but helps them
along, like Father-o'-Flynn, with his stick. I would have gone to
Conolly, the hero of the book, to get me out of a difficulty, but I
could not have confided to him what I really held sacred. Moreover the
view of money, as the one essential world-force, so frankly confessed
in the book, puzzled me. I do not think that money is ever more than a
weapon in the hands of a man, or a convenient screening wall, and the
New Man ought to have neither weapons nor walls, except his vigour and
serenity of spirit. Again the New Man is too fond of saying what
he thinks, and doing what he chooses; and, in the new earth, that
independent instinct will surely be tempered by a sense, every bit as
instinctive, of the rights of other people. But I suppose Mr. Shaw's
point is that if you cannot mend the world, you had better make it serve
you, as in its folly and debility it will, if you bully it enough. I
suppose that Mr. Shaw would say that the brutality of his hero is the
shadow thrown on him by the vileness of the world, and that if we were
all alike courageous and industrious and good-humoured, that shadow
would disappear.

And this, I suppose, is after all the secret; that the world is not
going to be mended from without, but is mending itself from within;
and thus that the best kind of socialism is really the highest
individualism, in which a man leaves legislation to follow and express,
as it assuredly does, the growth of emotion, and sets himself, in his
own corner, to be as quiet and disinterested and kindly as he can,
choosing what is honest and pure, and rejecting what is base and vile;
and this is after all the socialism of Christ; only we are all in such
a hurry, and think it more effective to clap a ruffian into gaol than
to suffer his violence--the result of which process is to make men
sympathise with the ruffian--while, if we endure his violence, we touch
a spring in the hearts of ruffian and spectators alike, which is more
fruitful of good than the criminal's infuriated seclusion, and his just
quarrel with the world. Of course the real way is that we should each
of us abandon our own desires for private ease and convenience, in the
light of the hope that those