All this has been very helpful and at times a little embarrassing to me.  It has given me an opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into the distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain snows coming home partially incarnate in girls and young men.  It has made me look into individualized human aspirations, human impatience, human vanity and a certain human need of fellowship, at close quarters.  It has illuminated subtle and fine traits; it has displayed nobilities, and it has brought out aspects of human absurdity to which only the pencil of Mr. George Morrow could do adequate justice.  The thing I have had to explain most generally is that my New Republicans and Samurai are but figures of suggestion, figures to think over and use in planning disciplines, but by no means copies to follow.  I have had to go over again, as though it had never been raised before in any previous writings, the difference between the spirit and the letter.

These responses have on the whole confirmed my main idea that there is a real need, a need that many people, and especially adolescent people, feel very strongly, for some sort of constructive brotherhood of a closer type than mere political association, to co-ordinate and partly guide their loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life—­but they have also convinced me that no wide and comprehensive organization can supply that want.

My New Republicans were presented as in many respects harsh and overbearing people, “a sort of outspoken secret society” for the organization of the world.  They were not so much an ideal order as the Samurai of the later book, being rather deduced as a possible outcome of certain forces and tendencies in contemporary life (A.D. 1900) than, as literary people say, “created.”  They were to be drawn from among engineers, doctors, scientific business organizers and the like, and I found that it is to energetic young men of the more responsible classes that this particular ideal appeals.  Their organization was quite informal, a common purpose held them together.

Most of the people who have written to me to call themselves New Republicans are I find also Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I suppose that among the prominent political figures of to-day the nearest approach to my New Republicans is Lord Milner and the Socialist-Unionists of his group.  It is a type harshly constructive, inclined to an unscrupulous pose and slipping readily into a Kiplingesque brutality.

The Samurai on the other hand were more picturesque figures, with a much more elaborated organization.

I may perhaps recapitulate the points about that Order here.

In the “Modern Utopia” the visitor from earth remarks:—­