Alas! universal happiness on these idealistic lines of compulsion and greed is like an echo. It answers your call but does not come. Socialism makes no progress in saving men; it has eyes to see man’s misery, but no hands to lift him out of it. The longer I live the more I am convinced that this great and vital problem of social regeneration is to be engineered only by slow gradations and with infinite patience and gentleness. Society is composed of dense masses and millions of frail, erring human beings, and to schedule a sudden inrush of perfect laws on the statute-book will not breed an improved strain of perfect citizens who can live up to the pose of perfection. You cannot legislate selfishness and weakness and greediness and vice out of human nature quickly, as you wring dirty water out of a wet sponge; neither can you pump purity and patience and brotherly love into humanity by Act of Parliament, and out of such shoddy material weave an ideal State in one round of the clock. Perfect laws are scarce as perfect men. Laws will grow better as we grow better--gradually. Laws and men act and react upon one another in mystic collusion. The great incoming tide of righteousness which shall fill all things will fill them. You cannot complete and furnish the top floor of the Palace of Humanity before you have laid the foundation solidly and deep on the rock of righteousness. Labour has not yet won its charter of rights because it has neglected to perform its role of duties. Labour has to look the social problem squarely in the face with both eyes open. At present it only opens one eye--the eye which sees magnifically its rights. The other eye is shut which should observe its duties. The eye of Labour that should see its duties is sealed in darkness. The scales of Justice must balance truly before mankind is happy ever more. Free labour is as necessary a commodity as free sunshine in a well-balanced State. If a man does his work well and does not require so much beer and tobacco and time for football as another man, he should be free to dispose of his labour as he chooses, without being picketed or bludgeoned by lewd fellows of the baser sort. Until there prevail an all-round correct idea of work, legislation will be a dead letter. God has not made one sun to shine on wages and another on capital, nor has He made two varieties of justice. He is God over all of us, and His law is impartial justice. Capital is not immaculate. It sits the great god incarnate on its high gold throne, ruling men with sovereign power and using men as a means to wealth. Its vestments are of purple and fine linen. Costly raiment to wear, but unseemly smirched with the mud of gutter complots and stained red with blood sweated from the poor. Capital wants washing thoroughly from its iniquity and purging with hyssop before it is fragrant and can discourse virtue to the working classes.