hile it was
anything. Revolution does not imply violence. On the contrary,
violence is the abortion of revolution. Do I, for instance, look like
a Marat or a Danton? I ask you, candidly!"

He certainly did not. On the contrary, with his short squat figure,
pointed beard and spectacles, he presented a curious blend of the
middle-class Englishman and the German savant. There was a burst of
laughter at his question, in which he joined himself. But when he
resumed it was in a more serious tone and somewhat in the manner of a
lecturer. It was indeed, at that time, very largely by lectures that
he carried on his propaganda.

"No," he said, "socialism may roar; but, in England at any rate, it
roars as gently as any sucking-dove. Revolution I admit is the goal;
but the process is substitution. We propose to transform society
almost without anyone knowing it; to work from the foundation upwards
without unduly disturbing the superstructure. By a mere adjustment of
rates and taxes we shall redistribute property; by an extension of the
powers of local bodies we shall nationalize industry. But in all this
there need be no shock, no abrupt transition. On the contrary, it is
essential to our scheme that there should not be. We are men of
science and we realize that the whole structure of society rests upon
habit. With the new organization must therefore grow the new habit
that is to support it. To precipitate organic change is merely to
court reaction. That is the lesson of all revolution; and it is one
which English socialists, at any rate, have learnt. We think,
moreover, that capitalist society is, by its own momentum, travelling
towards the goal which we desire. Every consolidation of business upon
a grand scale implies the development of precisely those talents of
organization without which the socialistic state could not come into
being or maintain itself; while at the same time the substitution of
monopoly for competition removes the only check upon the power of
capital to exploit society, and brings home to every citizen in his
tenderest point--his pocket--the necessity for that public control from
which he might otherwise be inclined to shrink. Capitalist society is
thus preparing its own euthanasia; and we socialists ought to be
regarded not as assassins of the old order, but as midwives to deliver
it of the child with which it is in travail.

"That child will be a society not of liberty but of regulat