CHAPTER XIII.
SOCIALISM.
The rest of 1883 passed in the usual way of hard work; the Affirmation Bill was rejected, and the agitation for Constitutional right grew steadily; the Liberal Press was won over, and Mr.Bradlaugh was beginning to earn golden opinions on all sides for his courage, his tenacity, and his self-control.

A successful International Congress at Amsterdam took some of us over to the Northern Venice, where a most successful gathering was held.

To me, personally, the year has a special interest, as being the one in which my attention was called, though only partially, to the Socialist movement.

I had heard Louise Michelle lecture in the early spring; a brief controversy in the _National Reformer_ had interested me, but I had not yet concerned myself with the economic basis of Socialism; I had realised that the land should be public property, but had not gone into the deeper economic causes of poverty, though the question was pressing with ever-increasing force on heart and brain.

Of Socialist teaching I knew nothing, having studied only the older English Economists in my younger days.