and open way; and let both unite to deliver a groaning world from the bondage of riches. English experience shows that this can be done; and this idea is to a very great degree the _idée mère_ of the Fabian Society, whose members have no higher ambition than to mingle freely with the workmen and share in the common life. By this means the hatred and suspicion felt by the French and German workmen towards any one who wears a black coat is eliminated, and both labor and culture gain in breadth, knowledge and sympathy, and the cause of rational progress is rendered more secure. Walt Whitman has told us, in “Leaves of Grass,” how he went “freely with powerful, uneducated persons,”--a gospel which Mr. John Addington Symonds, in his essay on Whitman, tells us, saved him from being a prig. And this gospel of free intercourse with the so-called “common people,” who are neither saints nor great sinners, but real men, more real than the conventional middle-class man can ever afford to be, is the healthiest, best advice which I can give to cultivated men. THE FABIAN ESSAYS. PREFACE. The essays in this volume were prepared last year as a course of lectures for delivery before mixed audiences in London and the provinces. They have been revised for publication, but not recast. The matter is put, not as an author would put it to a student, but as a speaker with only an hour at his disposal has to put it to an audience. Country readers may accept the book as a sample of the propaganda carried on by volunteer lecturers in the workmen’s clubs and political associations of London.[1] Metropolitan readers will have the advantage of making themselves independent of the press critic by getting face to face with the writers, stripping the veil of print from their personality, cross-examining, criticising, calling them to account amid surroundings which inspire no awe, and before the most patient of audiences. For any Sunday paper which contains a lecture list will shew where some, if not all, of the seven essayists may be heard for nothing; and on all such occasions questions and discussion form part of the procedure.