ar importance to that date. But it is certain that both
English and American people have been in this last twenty-nine years
absorbed in constitutional agitations which go deep down into our
social system. We in England have passed from one constitutional
struggle to another, and we are now in the most acute stage of all this
period. Parliamentary reform, continental changes, colonial wars,
military preparations, Home Rule, have absorbed the public mind and
stunned it with cataracts of stormy debate. We are all politicians,
all party-men now.

There is upon us also, both in England and in America, a social ferment
that goes deeper than any mere constitutional struggle. It is the
vague, profound, multiform, and mysterious upheaval that is loosely
called Socialism--not Socialism in any definite formula, but the
universal yearning of the millions for power, consideration, material
improvement, and social equality. The very vagueness, universality,
and unbounded scope of the claim they make constitute its power. All
orders and classes are concerned in it: all minds of whatever type are
affected by it: every political, social, or industrial axiom has to be
reconsidered in the light of it: it appeals to all men and it enters
into life at every corner and pore. We are like men under the glamour
of some great change impending. The spell of a new order holds us
undecided and expectant. There is something in the air, and that
something is a vague and indescribable sense that a new time is coming.
Men felt it in France, and indeed all over Europe, from 1780 till 1790.
It was an uncertain and rather pleasing state of expectancy. It did
not check activity, nor enjoyment, nor science. But it diverted the
profounder minds from the higher forms of imaginative work.

There is no reason to assume that Socialism or the ideals of Socialism
are at all hostile to literature or even imaginative poetry, provided
they are not too close, not actually causing direct agitation. But
when men are debating bills in heated meetings, they do not often see
these questions in the halo of romance. Rousseau's _Heloise_ and
Goldsmith's _Vicar of Wakefield_ were quite a generation before the
Revolution, at a time when franchise and agrarian politics had hardly
begun. The poetry and the romance of a great social reformation are
never visible to men in the midst of it, who are ready to tear each
other's eyes out in the name of Eight-Hours Bills