words,
that your chivalry should get you even bothered about it. I am truly
sorry and ask pardon--of you, but not of old Sun and Soapsuds, I can
tell you.

Another very hasty line about the way I shall, if necessary,
answer; about which I feel pretty confident. I should say it is
absurd to have libel actions about Controversies, instead of about
quarrels. It would mean every Capitalist being prosecuted for saying
that Socialism is robbery and every Socialist for saying property is
theft. By great luck, the example lies at the threshold of the
passage quoted. The worst I said of Port Sunlight was that it was a
slave-compound. Why, that was the very phrase about which half the
governing class argued with the other half a few years ago! Are all
who called the Chinese slaves to be sued by all who didn't? Am I
prosecuted for a terminology . . . enough, you know the rest. Go on
with the passage and you will see the luck continues. Abrupt, brief,
and perhaps abbreviated as my platform answer was, it really does
contain all the safeguards against imputing cruelty or human crime to
poor Lever. It defines slavery as the imposition of the master's
private morality; as in the matter of the pubs. It expressly suggests
it does not imply cruelty: for it goes out of its way to say that
such slaves may be better off under such slavery. So they were,
physically, both in Athens and Carolina. It then says that a merely
mystical thing, which I think is Christianity, makes me think this
slavery damnable, even if it is comfortable. I would defend all this,
as a lawful sociological comment, in any Court in civilisation.

I tell you my line of defence, to use discreetly and at your
discretion. If the other side are bent on fighting, I should reserve
the defence. If they seem open to reason, I should point out that it
is on our side.

His old schoolfellow Salter was also his solicitor and a letter to
Wells shows in part the advice Salter gave.

DEAR WELLS,

I am asked to make a suggestion to you that looks like, and indeed
is, infernal impudence: but which a further examination will rob of
most of its terrors. Let not these terrors be redoubled when I say
that the request comes from my solicitor. It is a great lark; I am
writing for him when he ought to be writing for me.

In the forthcoming case of Lever v. Chesterton & Another, th