egan to examine their arguments. I must confess that my deep
attachment to him led me into injustice to his Socialist foes in those
early days, and often made me ascribe to them calculated malignity
instead of hasty and prejudiced assertion. Added to this, their
uncurbed violence in discussion, their constant interruptions during
the speeches of opponents, their reckless inaccuracy in matters of
fact, were all bars standing in the way of the thoughtful. When I came
to know them better, I found that the bulk of their speakers were very
young men, overworked and underpaid, who spent their scanty leisure in
efforts to learn, to educate themselves, to train themselves, and I
learned to pardon faults which grew out of the bitter sense of
injustice, and which were due largely to the terrible pressure of our
system on characters not yet strong enough--how few are strong
enough!--to bear grinding injustice without loss of balance and of
impartiality. None save those who have worked with them know how much
of real nobility, of heroic self-sacrifice, of constant self-denial,
of brotherly affection, there is among the Social Democrats.

At this time also I met George Bernard Shaw, one of the most brilliant
of Socialist writers and most provoking of men; a man with a perfect
genius for "aggravating" the enthusiastically earnest, and with a
passion for representing himself as a scoundrel. On my first
experience of him on the platform at South Place Institute he
described himself as a "loafer," and I gave an angry snarl at him in
the _Reformer_, for a loafer was my detestation, and behold! I found
that he was very poor, because he was a writer with principles and
preferred starving his body to starving his conscience; that he gave
time and earnest work to the spreading of Socialism, spending night
after night in workmen's clubs; and that "a loafer" was only an
amiable way of describing himself because he did not carry a hod. Of
course I had to apologise for my sharp criticism as doing him a
serious injustice, but privately felt somewhat injured at having been
entrapped into such a blunder. Meanwhile I was more and more turning
aside from politics and devoting myself to the social condition of the
people I find myself, in June, protesting against Sir John Lubbock's
Bill which fixed a twelve-hour day as the limit of a "young person's"
toil. "A 'day' of twelve hours is brutal," I wrote; "if the law fixes
twelve hours as a 'fair day' tha