In 1884 a more definite call to consider 299 these teachings was to come, and I may perhaps open the record of 1884 with the words of greeting spoken by me to our readers in the first number of the _Reformer_ for that year: "What tests 1884 may have for our courage, what strains on our endurance, what trials of our loyalty, none can tell.

But this we know--that every test of courage successfully met, every strain of endurance steadily borne, every trial of loyalty nobly surmounted, leaves courage braver, endurance stronger, loyalty truer, than each was before.

And therefore, for our own and for the world's sake, I will not wish you, friends, an 1884 in which there shall be no toil and no battling; but I will wish you, each and all, the hero's heart and the hero's patience, in the struggle for the world's raising that will endure through the coming year." On February 3rd I came for the first time across a paper called _Justice_, in which Mr.Bradlaugh was attacked, and which gave an account of a meeting of the Democratic Federation--not yet the Social Democratic--in which a man had, apparently unrebuked, said that "all means were justifiable to attain" working-class ends.

I protested strongly against the advocacy of criminal means, declaring that those who urged the use of such means were the worst foes of social progress.

A few weeks later the _Echo_ repeated a speech of Mr.
Hyndman's in which a "bloodier revolution" than that of France was prophesied, and the extinction of "book-learning" seemed coupled with the success of Socialism, and this again I commented on.