"----As good you sought To spare me the Piazza's slippery stone Or keep me to the unchoked canals alone, As hinder Life the evil with the good Which make up Living rightly understood." Still, though vague as to what the good for the whole people might be, there was no vagueness in his mind as to the people's right to possess the power to bring about their own happiness. Yet given the right principles, he would not have the attempt made to put them into practice all at once. His final attitude toward the problem of the best methods for bettering human conditions in the poem is, strictly speaking, that of the opportunist working a step toward his ideal rather than that of the revolutionist who would gain it by one leap. Sordello should realize that "God has conceded two lights to a man-- One, of men's whole work, man's first Step to the plan's completeness." Man's part is to take this first step, leaving the ultimate ideal to be worked out, as time goes, on by successive men. To reach at one bound the ideal would be to regard one's self as a god. Some such theory of action as this is the one which guides the Fabian socialist working in England to-day. Nothing is to be done to subvert the present order of society, but every opportunity is to be made the most of which will tend to the betterment of the conditions of the masses, until by degrees the socialist régime will become possible. Sordello was too much of the idealist to seize the opportunity when it came to him of helping the people by means of the Ghibelline power suddenly conferred upon him, and so he failed. This opportunist doctrine is one especially congenial to the English temperament and certainly has its practical advantages, if it is not so inspiring as the headlong idealism of a Pym, which just as surely has its disadvantages in the danger that the ideal will be ahead of humanity's power of seizing it and living it, and will therefore run the risk of being overturned by a reaction to the low plane of the past; especially does this danger become apparent when the way to the attainment of the ideal is paved with violence. While Browning was writing "Sordello," the preparation of which included a short trip to Italy, the Chartist agitation was going on in England. It may well, at that time, have been considered to demand an ideal beyond possibility of attainment, which was proved by its final utter annihilation. The workingmen's association led by Mr. Duncombe was responsible for a program in the form of a parliamentary petition which asked for six things. These were: universal suffrage, or the right of voting by every male of twenty-one years of age; vote by ballot; annual Parliaments; abolition of the property qualification for members of Parliament; members of Parliament to be paid for their services; equal electoral districts.