ate workers and underlings
possible, that buys your dresses, your jewels, your motorcars, your
splendid furnishings and equipments, will for the most part be public
property, yielding revenue to some national or municipal treasury. You
will have to give up much of that. There is no way out of it, your way
to Socialism is through "the needle's eye." From your rare class and
from your class alone does Socialism require a real material
sacrifice. You must indeed give up much coarse pride. There is no help
for it, you must face that if you face Socialism at all. You must come
down to a simpler and, in many material aspects, less distinguished
way of living.

This is so clearly evident that to any one who believes self-seeking
is the ruling motive, the only possible motive in mankind, it seems
incredible that your class ever will do anything than oppose to the
last the advancement of Socialism. You will fight for what you have,
and the Have-nots will fight to take it away. Therefore it is that the
Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation preach a class war; to
my mind a lurid, violent and distasteful prospect. We shall have to
get out of the miseries and disorder of to-day, they think, if not by
way of chateau-burning and tumbrils, at least by a mitigated
equivalent of that. But I am not of that opinion. I have a lurking
belief that you are not altogether eaten up by the claims of your own
magnificence. While there are no doubt a number of people in your
class who would fight like rats in a corner against, let us say, the
feeding of poor people's starving children or the recovery of the land
by the State to which it once belonged, I believe there is enough of
nobility in your class as a whole to considerably damp their
resistance. Because you have silver mirrors and silver hairbrushes, it
does not follow that you have not a conscience. I am no believer in
the theory that to be a _sans-culotte_ is to be morally impeccable, or
that a man loses his soul because he possesses thirty pairs of
trousers beautifully folded by a valet. I cherish the belief that your
very refinement will turn--I have seen it in one or two fine minds
visibly turning--against the social conditions that made it possible.
All this space, all this splendour has its traceable connection with
the insufficiencies and miseries from which you are so remote. Once
that realization comes to you the world changes. In certain lights,
correlated with that, your