for personal liberty, and, outside their families, with absolutely no social sentiment except love.  Meanwhile, man, having fought and won his fight for this personal liberty, only to find himself a more abject slave than before, is turning with loathing from his egotist’s dream of independence to the collective interests of society, with the welfare of which he now perceives his own happiness to be inextricably bound up.  But man in this phase (would that all had reached it!) has not yet leisure to write or read novels.  In noveldom woman still sets the moral standard, and to her the males, who are in full revolt against the acceptance of the infatuation of a pair of lovers as the highest manifestation of the social instinct, and against the restriction of the affections within the narrow circle of blood relationship, and of the political sympathies within frontiers, are to her what she calls heartless brutes.  That is exactly what I have been called by readers of your novel; and that, indeed, is exactly what I am, judged by the fictitious and feminine standard of morality.  Hence some critics have been able plausibly to pretend to take the book as a satire on Socialism.  It may, for what I know, have been so intended by you.  Whether or no, I am sorry you made a novel of my story, for the effect has been almost as if you had misrepresented me from beginning to end.

At the same time, I acknowledge that you have stated the facts, on the whole, with scrupulous fairness.  You have, indeed, flattered me very strongly by representing me as constantly thinking of and for other people, whereas the rest think of themselves alone, but on the other hand you have contradictorily called me “unsocial,” which is certainly the last adjective I should have expected to find in the neighborhood of my name.  I deny, it is true, that what is now called “society” is society in any real sense, and my best wish for it is that it may dissolve too rapidly to make it worth the while of those who are “not in society” to facilitate its dissolution by violently pounding it into small pieces.  But no reader of “An Unsocial Socialist” needs to be told how, by the exercise of a certain considerate tact (which on the outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact), I have contrived to maintain genial terms with men and women of all classes, even those whose opinions and political conduct seemed to me most dangerous.

However, I do not here propose to go fully into my own position, lest I should seem tedious, and be accused, not for the first time, of a propensity to lecture—­a reproach which comes naturally enough from persons whose conceptions are never too wide to be expressed within the limits of a sixpenny telegram.  I shall confine myself to correcting a few misapprehensions which have, I am told, arisen among readers who from inveterate habit cannot bring the persons and events of a novel into any relation with the actual conditions of life.