A series of articles in Our Corner on the “Redistribution of Political Power,” on the “Evolution of Society,” on “Modern Socialism,” made my position clear.  “Over against those who laud the present state of Society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life than that of being first in the race for wealth, most successful in the scramble for gold.  Be it ours to declare steadfastly that health, comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more desirable than breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to earn them.  Be it ours to maintain that the greatness of a nation depends not on the number of its great proprietors, on the wealth of its great capitalists, or the splendour of its great nobles, but on the absence of poverty among its people, on the education and refinement of its masses, on the universality of enjoyment in life....  Enough for each of work, of leisure, of joy; too little for none, too much for none—­such is the Social ideal.  Better to strive after it worthily and fail, than to die without striving for it at all.”

Then I differentiated the methods of the Socialist and the Radical Individualist, pleading for union among those who formed the wings of the army of Labour, and urging union of all workers against the idlers.  For the weakness of the people has ever been in their divisions, in the readiness of each section to turn its weapons against other sections instead of against the common foe.  All privileged classes, when they are attacked, sink their differences and present a serried front to their assailants; the people alone fight with each other, while the battle between themselves and the privileged is raging.

I strove, as so many others were striving, to sound in the ears of the thoughtless and the careless the cry of the sufferings of the poor, endeavouring to make articulate their misery.  Thus in a description of Edinburgh slums came the following:  “I saw in a ‘house’ which was made by boarding up part of a passage, which had no window, and in which it was necessary to burn an oil lamp all day, thus adding to the burden of the rent, a family of three—­man, wife, and child—­whose lot was hardly ‘of their own making.’  The man was tall and bronzed, but he was dying of heart disease; he could not do hard work, and he was too clumsy for light work; so he sat there, after two days’ fruitless search, patiently nursing his miserable, scrofulous baby in his dim and narrow den.  The cases of individual hopeless suffering are heartbreaking.  In one room lay a dying child, dying of low fever brought on by want of food.  ‘It hae no faither,’ sobbed the mother; and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left to the mother