If a celestial intelligence were now to look down from heaven on the earth with the power of observing every fact about all human beings at once, he might ask, as the newspaper editors are asking as I write, what that Socialism is which influences so many lives?  He might answer himself with a definition which could be clumsily translated as ’a movement towards greater social equality, depending for its force upon three main factors, the growing political power of the working classes, the growing social sympathy of many members of all classes, and the belief, based on the growing authority of scientific method, that social arrangements can be transformed by means of conscious and deliberate contrivance.’  He would see men trying to forward this movement by proposals as to taxation, wages, and regulative or collective administration; some of which proposals would prove to be successfully adapted to the facts of human existence and some would in the end be abandoned, either because no nation could be persuaded to try them or because when tried they failed.  But he would also see that this definition of a many-sided and ever-varying movement drawn by abstraction from innumerable socialistic proposals and desires is not a description of ‘Socialism’ as it exists for the greater number of its supporters.  The need of something which one may love and for which one may work has created for thousands of working men a personified ‘Socialism,’ a winged goddess with stern eyes and drawn sword to be the hope of the world and the protector of those that suffer.  The need of some engine of thought which one may use with absolute faith and certainty has also created another Socialism, not a personification, but a final and authoritative creed.  Such a creed appeared in England in 1884, and William Morris took it down in his beautiful handwriting from Mr. Hyndman’s lectures.  It was the revelation which made a little dimly educated working man say to me three years later, with tears of genuine humility in his eyes, ’How strange it is that this glorious truth has been hidden from all the clever and learned men of the world and shown to me.’

Meanwhile Socialism is always a word, a symbol used in common speech and writing.  A hundred years hence it may have gone the way of its predecessors—­Leveller, Saint-Simonism, Communism, Chartism—­and may survive only in histories of a movement which has since undergone other transformations and borne other names.  It may, on the other hand, remain, as the Republic has remained in France, to be the title on coins and public buildings of a movement which after many disappointments and disillusionments has succeeded in establishing itself as a government.