good for to-morrow's
big race; for Johnnie, quite innocently, likes to have a shilling on all
the classics--the Lincoln, the Cambridgeshire, the Caesarewitch, the
Gold Cup, City and Sub., the Oaks and the Derby, and so on.

After his meal he shaves and puts on a collar. Sometimes he will take
the missus to the pictures, or, if it is Saturday, he will go marketing
with her in Poplar, or in the summer for a moonlight sail on the Thames
steamers. Other nights he attends his slate club, or his union, or drops
in at one or other of the cheery bars on the Island, to meet his pals
and talk shop. The Isle of Dogs, I may tell you, is a happy
hunting-ground for all those unhappy creatures who can find no congenial
society in their own circles: I mean superior Socialists, Christian
workers, Oxford and Cambridge settlement workers, and the immature
intellectuals. There are literally dozens and dozens of churches and
chapels on the Island, and dozens of halls and meeting-places where
lectures are given. The former do not capture Johnnie, but the latter
do, and he will often wash and brush up of an evening to hear some
young boy from Oxford deliver a thoroughly uninformed exposition of Karl
Marx or Nietzsche. The Island is particularly happy in being so
frequently patronized by those half-baked ladies and gentlemen, the
Fabians, who have all the vices of the middle classes, and--what is more
terrible--all the virtues of the middle classes.

The majority of Socialists, if you observe, are young people of the
well-to-do middle classes. They embrace the blue-serge god, not from any
conviction, not from any sense of comradeship with their overworked and
underpaid fellows, but because Socialism gives them an excuse for escape
from their petty home life and pettier etiquettes. As Socialists they
can have a good time, they can go where they choose, do as they choose,
and come home at what hour they choose without fearing the wrath of that
curious figure whom they name The Pater. They have merely to explain
that they are Socialists, and their set say, "Oh ... Socialists ... yes,
of course." Socialism opens to them the golden gates of that Paradise,
Bohemia. The freedom of the city is thus presented to them; and they
have found it so convenient and so inexpensive that they have adopted
Socialism in their thousands. But observe them in the company of the
horny-handed, the roughshod, and the ill-spoken; they are either ill at
ease or frankly