l." By mistakes Morris meant vexatious restrictions
and compromises--"If any man puts me into a labour squad, I will lie on
my back and kick." That phrase very much expresses our idea of
revolutionary tactics: we all intended to lie upon our back and kick.
D----, pale and sedentary, did not dislike labour squads and we all hated
him with the left side of our heads, while admiring him immensely with the
right side. He alone was invited to entertain Mrs Morris, having many
tales of his Irish uncles, more especially of one particular uncle who had
tried to commit suicide by shutting his head into a carpet-bag. At that
time he was an obscure man, known only for a witty speaker at street
corners and in Park demonstrations. He had, with an assumed truculence and
fury, cold logic, an invariable gentleness, an unruffled courtesy, and yet
could never close a speech without being denounced by a journeyman hatter,
with an Italian name. Converted to socialism by D----, and to anarchism by
himself, with swinging arm and uplifted voice, this man put, and perhaps,
exaggerated our scruple about Parliament. "I lack," said D----, "the bump
of reverence"; whereon the wild man shouted: "You 'ave a 'ole." There are
moments when looking back I somewhat confuse my own figure with that of
the hatter, image of our hysteria, for I too became violent with the
violent solemnity of a religious devotee. I can even remember sitting
behind D---- and saying some rude thing or other over his shoulder.

I don't remember why I gave it up but I did quite suddenly and the push
may have come from a young workman who was educating himself between
Morris and Karl Marx. He had planned a history of the Navy, and when I had
spoken of the battleships of Nelson's day had said, "O, that was the
decadence of the battleship," but if his naval interests were mediaeval,
his ideas about religion were pure Karl Marx, and we were soon in
perpetual argument. Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost
everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my
nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance
of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and
yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What
was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right,
when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness,
like the cooling of the sun, or it