But I would not be unfair, and I counted many friends among the Socialists of my town and time whose best ideals one could gladly share. They were immensely intelligent, or immensely informed; they had made a fairly valid indictment against society as it is organized, or disorganized. But like Mr. H. G. Wells, who calls himself a Socialist, these exceptions, in Mr. Wells’s words, were by no means fanatical or uncritical adherents. To them as to him Socialism was a noble, and yet a very human and fallible system of ideas. To them, as, again to him, it was an intellectual process, a project for the reshaping of human society upon new and better lines--the good will of the race struggling to make things better. This broad and tolerant view was the one to which they held, though they seemed too closely to identify all the good will in the race, operating, as I believe it to be, in many ways and through many agencies, as Socialism, and the pontifical Socialism taught in our town, at least, was so explicitly a class hatred that most of the time it was anything in the world rather than good will. Anyone with a good heart could be a Socialist on Mr. Wells’s terms, if it were not his inevitable fate to be assured by the orthodox custodians of the party faith, the high priests who alone could enter the holy of holies and bear forth, as occasion required, the ark of the covenant, that Mr. Wells’s Socialism is no Socialism at all and that he is no man to consult or accept. My friends among them were like him in the condemnation they had to hear from the machine, or, perhaps I should say, the governing or directing committee--whatever the euphemism that cloaks the familiar phenomenon with them--they too were said to be no Socialists at all; they were mere “intellectuals” or “sentimentalists,” or easily fell into some other of the categories the Socialists have provided for every manifestation of life. They have doubtless rendered society a service by their minute classification; which seems complete if they would only recognize the order of the sectarian mind, and since the orthodox among them afford so typical an example, include themselves in it. I am not sure that it is not quite as distinct a species as the capitalist class itself, at least it causes as much trouble in the world as the Socialists say the capitalist class creates. Socialists, at least of the impossibilist wing, evangelists, prohibitionists, Puritans, policemen and most of the rest of the reformers are endowed with this order of mind. While they all form subdivisions of a distinct intellectual class of humanity these are generally the same. That is, they are, all of them, always under all circumstances, right. All of these classes, fundamentally, follow the same sequences of thought. They differ of course in minor details, but they always meet on that narrow strip of ground upon which they have erected their inflexible