So long as differences in personal power exist, especially in such power as affects the material circumstances of mankind, these differences in power, let governments take what form they please, will necessarily assert and embody themselves in the very structure of human society; and socialists are only able to obscure this fact from anybody either by a childish theory of modern production which they themselves are now repudiating, or else by a psychology even more laboriously childish, which would at once be exposed were it tested by so much as six months’ experience.  An interesting admission of the truth of this may be found in an unlikely place—­namely, a work written some years ago by a socialist of considerable talent, which shows how the errors of at least a number of socialists are due, not to any defect in their reasoning powers, as such, but to a want of balanced knowledge of human nature in general, a want which in certain respects renders their reasoning futile.  The work to which I refer is a work by a socialistic novelist, who was also an accomplished naturalist—­the late Mr. Grant Allen.  It is called The Woman Who Did.

The immediate object of the writer was to exhibit the institution of marriage as the cause of what he was pleased to regard as woman’s degradation and slavery; and his heroine is a young lady of highly respectable parentage, who proposes to regenerate womanhood by living with, and having children by, a man, without submitting to the humiliation of any legal bond.  She accomplishes her purpose, and has a daughter, whose position, under our false civilisation, becomes so disagreeable in consequence of her illegitimate birth, that the mother at last commits suicide, in order to deliver her from the presence of such an embarrassing parent.  In the author’s view she is a martyr, and a model for immediate imitation.  Ludicrous, however, as the book is in its main scheme and in its object, the author shows great acuteness in a number of his incidental observations.  He is, for example, constantly insisting on the fact that the institution of private property, which socialism aims at revolutionising, is merely one embodiment of a general principle of individualism of which marriage and the family are another, and that the two stand and fall together.  But an admission yet more important than this is as follows:  So that nothing may be wanting to the bitterness of the heroine’s sublime martyrdom, the author represents her daughter—­and he does this with considerable skill—­as developing from her earliest childhood all those tastes and prejudices (an instinctive sympathy with those ordinary motives and standards) against which the mother’s whole life, and her education of her daughter, had been at war.  “Herminia,” says Mr. Allen, “had done her best” to indoctrinate the child with the pure milk of the emancipating social gospel; “but the child herself seemed to hark back, of internal congruity, to the lower