ors to be seen and heard in
the vast open-air theatres of Greece. If he can no longer act the part
with sincerity he must either leave the stage or present himself in the
mask of another party.

Party leaders again have always to remember that the organisation which
they control is an entity with an existence in the memory and emotions
of the electors, independent of their own opinions and actions. This
does not mean that party leaders cannot be sincere. As individuals they
can indeed only preserve their political life by being in constant
readiness to lose it. Sometimes they must even risk the existence of
their party itself. When Sir Robert Peel was converted to Free Trade in
1845, he had to decide whether he and his friends should shatter the
Tory Party by leaving it, or should so transform its policy that it
might not be recognised, even in the half-conscious logic of habit and
association, as that entity for which men had voted and worked four
years before. In either case Peel was doing something other and more
serious than the expression of his individual opinion on a question of
the moment. And yet, if, recognising this, he had gone on advocating
corn duties for the sake of his party, his whole personal force as a
politician, and therefore even his party value, would have been lost.

If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the
earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at
once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what
that Socialism is which influences so many lives? He might answer
himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as 'a
movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon
three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes,
the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the
belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social
arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate
contrivance.' He would see men trying to forward this movement by
proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective
administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully
adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be
abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or
because when tried they failed. But he would also see that this
definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movem