usand five hundred
pounds. Subscriptions received from working-men, twenty-two pounds seven
and ten pence halfpenny. The British workmen showed their sense of my
efforts to emancipate them by accusing me of making a good thing out of
the Association for my own pocket, and by mobbing and stoning me twice.
I now help them only when they show some disposition to help themselves.
I occupy myself partly in working out a scheme for the reorganization of
industry, and partly in attacking my own class, women and all, as I am
attacking you."

"There is little use in attacking us, I fear," said Sir Charles.

"Great use," said Trefusis confidently. "You have a very different
opinion of our boasted civilization now from that which you held when I
broke your wall down and invited those Land Nationalization zealots to
march across your pleasure ground. You have seen in my album something
you had not seen an hour ago, and you are consequently not quite the
same man you were an hour ago. My pictures stick in the mind longer than
your scratchy etchings, or the leaden things in which you fancy you see
tender harmonies in gray. Erskine's next drama may be about liberty,
but its Patriot Martyrs will have something better to do than spout
balderdash against figure-head kings who in all their lives never
secretly plotted as much dastardly meanness, greed, cruelty, and
tyranny as is openly voted for in London by every half-yearly meeting
of dividend-consuming vermin whose miserable wage-slaves drudge sixteen
hours out of the twenty-four."

"What is going to be the end of it all?" said Sir Charles, a little
dazed.

"Socialism or Smash. Socialism if the race has at last evolved the
faculty of coordinating the functions of a society too crowded and
complex to be worked any longer on the old haphazard private-property
system. Unless we reorganize our society socialistically--humanly a most
arduous and magnificent enterprise, economically a most simple and sound
one--Free Trade by itself will ruin England, and I will tell you exactly
how. When my father made his fortune we had the start of all other
nations in the organization of our industry and in our access to iron
and coal. Other nations bought our products for less than they must have
spent to raise them at home, and yet for so much more than they cost
us, that profits rolled in Atlantic waves upon our capitalists. When
the workers, by their trades-unions, demanded a share of the luck in