ot "sticking to his guns."

My friends, Mr. G. K. Chesterton and Mr. Max Beerbohm, those brilliant
ornaments of our age, when they chance to write about Socialism,
confess this universal failing--albeit in a very different quality and
measure. They are not, it is true, distressed by that unwashed
coal-heaver who haunts the now private bed of the common
Anti-Socialist, nor have they any horrid vision of the fathers of the
community being approved by a select committee of the County
Council--no doubt wrapped in horse-cloths and led out by their
grooms--such as troubles the spurred and quivering soul of that
equestrian--I forget his name--the "brood-mare" gentleman who
denounced me in the _Pall Mall Gazette_; but their souls fly out in a
passion of protest against the hints of discipline and order the
advancement of Socialism reveals. Mr. G. K. Chesterton mocks valiantly
and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately
recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped,
meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for
laughing--not that he would want to laugh--and austere exercises in
several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's
conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid,
frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of
us short, inelegant men indeed, but for all that terribly resolute,
indefatigable, incessant, to capture him, to drag him off to a
mechanical Utopia and there to take his thumb-mark and his name,
number him distinctly in indelible ink, dress him in an unbecoming
uniform, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of neat round
lakes of blue lime water and vistas of white sanitary tiling....

The method of reasoning in all these cases is the same; it is to
assume that whatever the Socialist postulates as desirable is wanted
without limit or qualification, to imagine whatever proposal is chosen
for the controversy is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs,
and so to make a picture of the Socialist dream. This picture is
presented to the simple-minded person in doubt with "This is
Socialism. Surely! SURELY! you don't want this!"

And occasionally the poor, simple-minded person really is overcome by
these imagined terrors. He turns back to our dingy realities again, to
the good old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he
will never live to see the hateful day whe