It gives a hundred-weight of coal and five pounds of beef once a year to a family whose head could earn a hundred such doles if Christian justice allowed him fair wage for the work he performs.

It plunders the workers of the wealth they make, and then flings back at them a thousandth part of their own product as 'charity.' It builds hospitals for the poor whom it has poisoned in filthy courts and alleys, and workhouses for the worn-out creatures from whom it has wrung every energy, every hope, every joy.

Miss Cobbe summons us to admire Christian civilisation, and we see idlers flaunting in the robes woven by the toilers, a glittering tinselled super-structure founded on the tears, the strugglings, the grey, hopeless misery of the poor." This first month of January, 1885, brought on me the first attack for my Socialistic tendencies, from the pen of Mr.W.P.Ball, who wrote to the _Reformer_ complaining of my paragraph, quoted above, in which I had advocated rate-supported meals for Board School children.

A brief controversy thus arose, in which I supported my opinion, waiving the question as to my being "at heart a Socialist." In truth, I dreaded to make the plunge of publicly allying myself with the advocates of Socialism, because of the attitude of bitter hostility they had adopted towards Mr.Bradlaugh.On his strong, tenacious nature, nurtured on self-reliant individualism, the arguments of the younger generation made no impression.

He could not change his methods because a new tendency was rising to the surface, and he did not see how different was the Socialism of our day to the Socialist dreams of the past--noble ideals of a future not immediately realisable in truth, but to be worked towards and rendered possible in the days to come.