ot advancing this as an argument against Socialism;
once again, nothing is further from my mind. There are great truths in
Socialism, or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it;
and if it came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one
should make it welcome. But if it is to come, we may as well have some
notion of what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our
new polity will be designed and administered (to put it courteously)
with something short of inspiration. It will be made, or will grow, in a
human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely change is
human nature. The Anarchists think otherwise, from which it is only
plain that they have not carried to the study of history the lamp of
human sympathy.

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
headmarks must we look for in the life? We chafe a good deal at that
excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs the
prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official. The
official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many of
us. I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable in any
other spirit than that of kindness. I still remember in my dreams the
eye-glass of a certain _attache_ at a certain embassy--an eye-glass that
was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked; and my next most
disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the
city of San Francisco. I lived in that city among working folk, and what
my neighbours accepted at the postman's hands--nay, what I took from him
myself--it is still distasteful to recall. The bourgeois, residing in
the upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this
peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps
about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend
of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus
imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most
faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours who must
drain it to the dregs. In every contact with authority, with their
employer, with the police, with the School Board officer, in the
hospital, or in the workhouse, they have equally the occasion to
appreciate the light-hearted civility of the man in office; and as an
experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say
it has but to be