was bound to believe in Socialism, but not in sandals, free love,
bookbinding, and immediate disarmament. But he also added that, while he
liked their hardness, he disliked their moderation. In other words, when
he discovered, or believed that he discovered, that their intellectual
hardness was combined with moral hardness, or rather moral deadness, he
felt all the intellectual ice melted by a moral flame. He had, so to
speak, a reaction of emotional realism, in which he saw, as suddenly as
simple men can see simple truths, the potterers of Social Reform as the
plotters of the Servile State. He was himself, above all things, a
democrat as well as a Socialist; and in that intellectual sect he began
to feel as if he were the only Socialist who was also a democrat. His
dogmatic, democratic conviction would alone illustrate the falsity of
the contrast between logic and life. The idea of human equality existed
with extraordinary clarity in his brain, precisely because it existed
with extraordinary simplicity in his character. His popular sympathies,
unlike so many popular sentiments, could really survive any intimacy
with the populace; they followed the poor not only at public meetings
but to public houses. He was literally the only man I ever knew who was
not only never a snob, but apparently never tempted to be a snob. The
fact is almost more important than his wonderful lack of fear; for such
good causes, when they cannot be lost by fear, are often lost by favour.

Thus he came to suspect that Socialism was merely social reform, and
that social reform was merely slavery. But the point still is that
though his attitude to it was now one of revolt, it was anything but a
mere revulsion of feeling. He did, indeed, fall back on fundamental
things, on a fury at the oppression of the poor, on a pity for slaves,
and especially for contented slaves. But it is the mark of his type of
mind that he did not abandon Socialism without a rational case against
it, and a rational system to oppose to it. The theory he substituted
for Socialism is that which may for convenience be called
Distributivism; the theory that private property is proper to every
private citizen. This is no place for its exposition; but it will be
evident that such a conversion brings the convert into touch with much
older traditions of human freedom, as expressed in the family or the
guild. And it was about the same time that, having for some time held an
Anglo-Cat