tly
willing to use this power for the benefit of their kind generally; but
this is no more a sign that they would be willing to allow it to be
forcibly taken from them than the fact that a man is willing to give a
shilling to a beggar in the street is a sign that he would allow the
beggar to steal it out of his waistcoat-pocket.

So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power
as affects the material circumstances of mankind, these differences in
power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily
assert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society;
and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by
a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now
repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish,
which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months'
experience. An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found
in an unlikely place--namely, a work written some years ago by a
socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least
a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning
powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in
general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning
futile. The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist,
who was also an accomplished naturalist--the late Mr. Grant Allen. It is
called _The Woman Who Did_.

The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of
marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman's
degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly
respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living
with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the
humiliation of any legal bond. She accomplishes her purpose, and has a
daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so
disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother
at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of
such an embarrassing parent. In the author's view she is a martyr, and a
model for immediate imitation. Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its
main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a
number of his incidental observations. He is, for example, constantly
insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which
sociali