--were not so much ventilated as tossed about in an
impassioned gale.

Much of this earlier Socialist literature was like Cabet's book,
actually Utopian in form; a still larger proportion was Utopian in
spirit; its appeal was imaginative, and it aimed to be a plan of a new
state as definite and detailed as the plan for the building of a
house. It has been the fashion with a number of later Socialist
writers and speakers, mind-struck with that blessed word "evolution,"
confusing "scientific," a popular epithet to which they aspired, with
"unimaginative," to sneer at the Utopian method, to make a sort of
ideal of a leaden practicality, but it does not follow because the
Utopias produced and the experiments attempted were in many aspects
unreasonable and absurd that the method itself is an unsound one. At a
certain phase of every creative effort you must cease to study the
thing that is, and plan the thing that is not. The early Socialisms
were only premature plans and hasty working models that failed to
work.

And it must be remembered when we consider Socialism's early
extravagancies, that any idea or system of ideas which challenges the
existing system is necessarily, in relation to that system, outcast.
Mediocre men go soberly on the highroads, but saints and scoundrels
meet in the gaols. If A and B rebel against the Government, they are
apt, although they rebel for widely different reasons, to be classed
together; they are apt indeed to be thrown together and tempted to
sink even quite essential differences in making common cause against
the enemy. So that from its very beginning Socialism was mixed up--to
this day it remains mixed up--with other movements of revolt and
criticism, with which it has no very natural connection. There is, for
example, the unfortunate entanglement between the Socialist theory and
that repudiation of any but subjective sexual limitations which is
called "free love," and there is that still more unfortunate
association of its rebellion against orthodox economic theories, with
rebellion against this or that system of religious teaching. Several
of the early Socialist communities, again, rebelled against ordinary
clothing, and their women made short hair and bloomers the outward and
visible associations of the communistic idea. In Holyoake's _History
of Co-operation_ it is stated that one early experiment was known to
its neighbours as "the grass-eating Atheists of Ham Common." I have
done