was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew
steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr. Bradlaugh was
beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his
tenacity, and his self-control. A successful International Congress at
Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most
successful gathering was held. To me, personally, the year has a
special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called,
though only partially, to the Socialist movement. I had heard Louise
Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the
_National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned
myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the
land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper
economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with
ever-increasing force on heart and brain. Of Socialist teaching I knew
nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my
younger days. In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these
teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with
the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number
of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our
courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty,
none can tell. But this we know--that every test of courage
successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every
trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance
stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before. And therefore, for our
own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in
which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you,
each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the
struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming
year."

On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called
_Justice_, in which Mr. Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an
account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social
Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all
means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends. I protested
strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those
who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social
progress. A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" th