he welfare
of which he now perceives his own happiness to be inextricably bound
up. But man in this phase (would that all had reached it!) has not yet
leisure to write or read novels. In noveldom woman still sets the moral
standard, and to her the males, who are in full revolt against the
acceptance of the infatuation of a pair of lovers as the highest
manifestation of the social instinct, and against the restriction of the
affections within the narrow circle of blood relationship, and of
the political sympathies within frontiers, are to her what she calls
heartless brutes. That is exactly what I have been called by readers
of your novel; and that, indeed, is exactly what I am, judged by the
fictitious and feminine standard of morality. Hence some critics
have been able plausibly to pretend to take the book as a satire on
Socialism. It may, for what I know, have been so intended by you.
Whether or no, I am sorry you made a novel of my story, for the effect
has been almost as if you had misrepresented me from beginning to end.

At the same time, I acknowledge that you have stated the facts, on the
whole, with scrupulous fairness. You have, indeed, flattered me very
strongly by representing me as constantly thinking of and for other
people, whereas the rest think of themselves alone, but on the other
hand you have contradictorily called me "unsocial," which is certainly
the last adjective I should have expected to find in the neighborhood
of my name. I deny, it is true, that what is now called "society"
is society in any real sense, and my best wish for it is that it may
dissolve too rapidly to make it worth the while of those who are "not
in society" to facilitate its dissolution by violently pounding it into
small pieces. But no reader of "An Unsocial Socialist" needs to be
told how, by the exercise of a certain considerate tact (which on the
outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact), I have contrived to
maintain genial terms with men and women of all classes, even those
whose opinions and political conduct seemed to me most dangerous.

However, I do not here propose to go fully into my own position, lest
I should seem tedious, and be accused, not for the first time, of a
propensity to lecture--a reproach which comes naturally enough from
persons whose conceptions are never too wide to be expressed within the
limits of a sixpenny telegram. I shall confine myself to correcting a
few misapprehensions which have, I am