ical economy, and
contributions to philosophy. Those were the days of dreams.

[Illustration: LIFE IN BETHNAL GREEN]

One afternoon he came to me with quivering sides, and told me that an
idea for a little shilling book had occurred to him. It was that a
Radical Prime Minister and a Conservative working man should change into
each other by supernatural means, and the working man be confronted with
the problem of governing, while the Prime Minister should be as
comically out of place in the East End environment. He thought it would
make a funny 'Arabian Nights' sort of burlesque. And so it would have
done; but, unfortunately, I saw subtler possibilities of political
satire in it, nothing less than a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole
system of Party Government. I insisted the story must be real, not
supernatural, the Prime Minister must be a Tory, weary of office, and it
must be an ultra-Radical atheistic artisan bearing a marvellous
resemblance to him who directs (and with complete success) the
Conservative Administration. To add to the mischief, owing to my
collaborator's evenings being largely taken up by other work,
seven-eighths of the book came to be written by me, though the leading
ideas were, of course, threshed out and the whole revised in common, and
thus it became a vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of twenty-one,
whose literary faculty had furthermore been pent up for years by the
potential censorship of a committee. The book, instead of being a
shilling skit, grew to a ten-and-sixpenny (for that was the unfortunate
price of publication) political treatise of over sixty long chapters and
500 closely printed pages. I drew all the characters as seriously and
complexly as if the fundamental conception were a matter of history; the
outgoing Premier became an elaborate study of a nineteenth-century
Hamlet; the Bethnal Green life amid which he came to live was presented
with photographic fulness and my old trick of realism; the governmental
manoeuvres were described with infinite detail; numerous real
personages were introduced under nominal disguises; and subsequent
history was curiously anticipated in some of the Female Franchise and
Home Rule episodes. Worst of all, so super-subtle was the satire, that
it was never actually stated straight out that the Premier had changed
places with the Radical working man, so that the door might be left open
for satirically suggested alternative explanations of the m