It is the same with his treatment of people.  He has a hard and shrewd judgment of character, and a polite contempt for weakness of every kind.  He is a Radical by conviction, with a strong sense of equal rights.  Socialism he thinks unpractical, and he is interested in movements rather than in men.

But he seldom or never lets one into his confidence about people.  If he respects and values a man he says so frankly, but keeps silence about the people of whom he does not approve.  On one of the few occasions in which I had a peep into the interior of his mind, I was surprised to find that he had a strong class-feeling.  He had an obvious contempt for what may be called the upper class, and gave me to understand that he thought their sense of superiority a very false one.  He thought of them simply as the people, so to speak, in possession, but entirely lacking in moral purpose and ideal.  I said something about the agreeable, sympathetic courtesy of well-bred people, and he made it plain that he regarded it as a sort of expensive and useless product.  He had, I found, a different kind of contempt for the lower classes, regarding them as thriftless and unenterprising.  In fact, the professional middle class seemed to him to have a monopoly of the virtues—­common-sense, simplicity, respectability.

Two things for which he has no kind of sympathy are art and music, which appear to him to be a kind of harmless and elegant trifling.  I am afraid that what irritates me in his treatment of these subjects is his cool and sensible indifference to them.  He never expresses the least opposition to them, but merely treats them as purely negligible things.  He is not exactly complacent, because there is no touch of vanity or egotism about him; and then his attitude is impossible to assail, because there is no assumption whatever of superiority about it.  He merely knows that he is right, and he has no interest whatever in convincing other people; when they know better, when they get rid of their emotional prejudices, they will feel, he is sure, as he does.

In discussing matters he is not at all a doctrinaire; he deals with any objections that one makes courteously and frankly, and even covers his opponent’s retreat with a polite quoting of possible precedents.  Without being a well-bred man, he is so entirely unpretentious that he could hold his own in any company.  He would sit next a commercial traveller and talk to him pleasantly, just as he would sit next the King, if it fell to his lot to do so, and talk without any embarrassment.

I find it hard to say why it is that a man who is so admirable in his conduct of life and in his relations with others inspires me at times with so strange a mixture of anger and terror.  I am angry because I feel that he takes no account of many of the best things in the world; I am frightened because he is so extraordinarily strong and complete.  If he were to be given absolute and despotic power, he would