ately at first hand; he has made the acquaintance of
many of its leaders upon both sides of the Atlantic, joined numerous
organizations, attended and held meetings, experimented in Socialist
politics. From these inquiries he has emerged with certain very
definite conclusions as to the trend and needs of social development,
and these he is now rendering in this book. He calls himself a
Socialist, but he is by no means a fanatical or uncritical adherent.
To him Socialism presents itself as a very noble but a very human and
fallible system of ideas and motives, a system that grows and
develops. He regards its spirit, its intimate substance as the most
hopeful thing in human affairs at the present time, but he does also
find it shares with all mundane concerns the qualities of inadequacy
and error. It suffers from the common penalty of noble propositions;
it is hampered by the insufficiency of its supporters and advocates,
and by the superficial tarnish that necessarily falls in our
atmosphere of greed and conflict darkest upon the brightest things. In
spite of these admissions of failure and unworthiness in himself and
those about him, he remains a Socialist.

In discussing Socialism with very various sorts of people he has
necessarily had, time after time, to encounter and frame a reply to a
very simple seeming and a really very difficult question: "What is
Socialism?" It is almost like asking "What is Christianity?" or
demanding to be shown the atmosphere. It is not to be answered fully
by a formula or an epigram. Again and again the writer has been asked
for some book which would set out in untechnical language, frankly and
straightforwardly, what Socialism is and what it is not, and always he
has hesitated in his reply. Many good books there are upon this
subject, clear and well written, but none that seem to tell the whole
story as he knows it; no book that gives not only the outline but the
spirit, answers the main objections, clears up the chief ambiguities,
covers all the ground; no book that one can put into the hands of
inquiring youth and say: "There! that will tell you precisely the
broad facts you want to know." Some day, no doubt, such a book will
come. In the meanwhile he has ventured to put forth this temporary
substitute, his own account of the faith that is in him.[1]

[1] As I pass these proofs I am reminded that Mr. J. R.
MacDonald has in the press _Socialism_ (Jacks, Edinburgh)--a