The first thing that a Socialist of the old school does, when brought face to face with a working class audience, is deliberately to insult it. I heard of one Socialist orator who began his address to an East End meeting with the sentence--“What are you? Dogs!” I suggest that this is not the way to placate the unbeliever or to allay the suspicion with which his conservative instincts lead him to regard a new idea. Moreover it is not true. The working man knows perfectly well that he and his class are not “dogs”; and he rightly concludes that a man so profoundly ignorant of his condition is not the man to improve it. However, having collectively and individually insulted those whom he seeks to convert, the preacher launches joyously into the abysses and whirlpools of German philosophy and economics, calls his hearers “proletarians” (to their intense astonishment), tells them that they are being robbed of “surplus value,” discusses abstruse matters concerning the relations between “exchange value” and “labour power,” and generally leads them through mazes of foreign scientific jargon from which they eventually emerge gasping for breath. Now I submit that this is an absurd way of going to work. Not so did Cobden and his allies act, when they set out to convert the middle classes to the dogmas of Adam Smith. They had a systematic theory of economics as elaborate as that of the Marxian, but they did not pelt miscellaneous popular gatherings with its technicalities. They crystallised it into one simple, effective and intelligible phrase,--“To buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the dearest.” I will not disguise my personal conviction that this maxim is of and from the Devil. But (perhaps for that reason) it is lucid and unmistakeable and makes a definite and persuasive appeal to the instincts and prejudices of the commercial classes. I fear I cannot say as much for the crystallizations favoured by Socialist propagandists. “The Abolition of the Wages System” and “Production for Use and not for Profit” convey to the workman, I imagine, no clearer meaning than they convey to me.