sm aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general
principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another,
and that the two stand and fall together. But an admission yet more
important than this is as follows: So that nothing may be wanting to the
bitterness of the heroine's sublime martyrdom, the author represents her
daughter--and he does this with considerable skill--as developing from
her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive
sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the
mother's whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war.
"Herminia," says Mr. Allen, "had done her best" to indoctrinate the
child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; "but the
child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower
and vulgarer moral plane of her remoter ancestry. There is," he
proceeds, "no more silly and persistent error than the belief of parents
that they can influence to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and
impulses of their children. These things have their springs in the
bases of character; they are the flower of individuality; and they
cannot be altered after birth by the foolishness of preaching." Let us
read this passage, with the alteration of only a word or two, and it
forms an admirable criticism of the more recent speculations of the
party to which Mr. Allen belonged. There is no more silly and persistent
error on the part of socialists than the belief that they can influence
to any appreciable degree the moral ideas and impulses of the citizens
of any community, or that these things, which are the flower of
congenital individuality, can be altered after birth by the foolishness
of socialism.

But the arguments at the service of socialism are not exhausted yet.
Even if voting majorities should be unable to transform human nature,
that men of power shall become willing to exert their power only in
order that they may be deprived of it, there is a class of socialists
who declare that what is impossible with mere human democracy, will be
rendered possible by the divine influence of a rightly preached
Christianity. To Christian socialists, as such, I have as yet made no
special reference; nor will it be necessary now to be very prolix in our
dealings with them; but in their attitude and their equipment for the
task of effecting an economic revolution, they throw so strong a light
on th