general account of the movement. From Mr. Kirkup's _An
Enquiry into Socialism_ and from _Fabian Essays_ (the Fabian
Society, London) a good idea of the general Socialist
position may also be obtained.

Socialism, then, as he understands it, is a great intellectual
process, a development of desires and ideas that takes the form of a
project--a project for the reshaping of human society upon new and
better lines. That in the ampler proposition is what Socialism claims
to be. This book seeks to expand and establish that proposition, and
to define the principles upon which the Socialist believes this
reconstruction of society should go. The particulars and justification
of this project and this claim, it will be the business of this book
to discuss just as plainly as the writer can.

Sec. 2.

Now, because the Socialist seeks the reshaping of human society, it
does not follow that he denies it to be even now a very wonderful and
admirable spectacle. Nor does he deny that for many people life is
even now a very good thing....

For his own part, though the writer is neither a very strong nor a
very healthy nor a very successful person, though he finds much
unattainable and much to regret, yet life presents itself to him more
and more with every year as a spectacle of inexhaustible interest, of
unfolding and intensifying beauty, and as a splendid field for high
attempts and stimulating desires. Yet none the less is it a spectacle
shot strangely with pain, with mysterious insufficiencies and
cruelties, with pitfalls into anger and regret, with aspects
unaccountably sad. Its most exalted moments are most fraught for him
with the appeal for endeavour, with the urgency of unsatisfied wants.
These shadows and pains and instabilities do not, to his sense at
least, darken the whole prospect; it may be indeed that they intensify
its splendours to his perceptions; yet all these evil and ugly aspects
of life come to him with an effect of challenge, as something not to
be ignored but passionately disputed, as an imperative call for
whatever effort and courage lurks in his composition. Life and the
world are fine, but not as an abiding place; as an arena--yes, an
arena gorgeously curtained with sea and sky, mountains and broad
prospects, decorated with all the delicate magnificence of leaf
tracery and flower petal and feather, soft fur and the shining wonder
of living skin, musical with thunder and the sin