e stretched his hand to Remenham, with a kind of pathos of
appeal that the other, though I think he did not altogether like it,
could hardly refuse to entertain. It was theatrical, it was
un-English, but somehow, it was successful. And the whole episode, the
closing words and the incomparable gesture, left me with a sense as
though a curtain had been drawn upon a phase of our history. Mendoza,
somehow, had shut out Remenham, even more than himself, from the field
on which the issues of the future were to be fought. And it was this
feeling that led me, really a little against my inclination, to select
as the next speaker the man who of all who, made up our company, in
opinions was the most opposed to Remenham, and in temperament to
Mendoza. My choice was Allison, more famous now than he was then, but
known even at that time as an unsparing critic of both parties. He
responded readily enough; and as he began a spell seemed to snap. The
night and the hour were forgotten, and we were back on the dusty field
of controversy.

"THIS is all very touching," he began, "but Mendoza is shaking hands
with the wrong person. He's much nearer to me than he is to Remenham,
and I don't at all despair of converting him. For he does at least
understand that the character of every society depends upon its law of
property; and he even seems to have a suspicion that the law, as we
have it, is not what you would call absolute perfection. It's true
that he shows no particular inclination to alter it. But that may
come; and I'm not without hope of seeing, before I die, a
Tory-Socialist party. Remenham's is a different case, and I fear
there's nothing to be made of him. He does, I believe, really think
that in some extraordinary way the law of property, like the Anglican
Church, is one of the dispensations of Providence; and that if he
removes all other restrictions, leaving that, he will have what he
calls a natural society. But Nature, as Mendoza has pointed out, is
anarchy. Civilization means restriction; and so does socialism. So
far from being anarchy, it is the very antithesis of it. Anarchy is
the goal of liberalism, if liberalism could ever be persuaded to be
logical. So the scarecrow of anarchy, at least, need not frighten away
any would-be convert to socialism. There remains, it is true, the
other scarecrow, revolution; and that, I admit, has more life in it.
Socialism is revolutionary; but so is liberalism, or was, w