cultured class tries--often devotes its whole life to this trying--to make better conditions for the less cultured one, and all honour and praise is due to self-denying work of the kind, but it is not enough. The truest, purest Christian socialism [Footnote: I use the word in its truest ancient sense.] requires that helper and helped meet on absolutely equal ground; that there is banished that indescribable stalking figure which follows close in the wake of most meetings between rich and poor in England, the Gentleman-hood (or Lady-hood, for I have seen that often quite as insistently in evidence) of the class which, so to speak, "_stoops_ to conquer," the limitations of the less fortunate classes, in its work for the people. I remember coming across the word "gentleman" interpreted in a far different sense in an old fifteenth-century book. Many words change their meaning with time, but this word has changed from its fifteenth-century interpretation more than any. The sentence ran thus: "Jesus Christ was the first Gentleman." Anything further from the original conception of its meaning as set forward in this sentence than our English idea of what is meant to-day by "gentleman" it would be difficult to find. For He went among the people as one of themselves, was born among them, and was educated as they were. There was no hint of patronage, no suggestion of any social demarcation. He Who was the world's Redeemer was yet a Socialist [Footnote: I cannot but add here that, in my opinion, the much- abused word "Socialist" has changed in character in the same way as the word "gentleman," and the modern interpretation is very far from being the true, admirable, original thing signified.] in the highest and best sense of the term. We have come far since those days, but we have not come beyond the need to deprive birth and riches of some of that arbitrary power by which they have assumed more authority than is their due in the matter of legislation, influence, disposal of land, and economic local conditions in the provinces. As regards decentralized government and the "immense importance of local liberties," I cannot do better than quote first from the preface written by Francis Newman to his lectures on _Political Economy_, when he issued them in a printed form in 1851:-- "Of the immense importance of local liberties, and their actual deficiencies among us, I became fully convinced during six years' residence in Manchester; but it is only from Mr. Toulmin Smith's works (the most important political work, as to me appears, which the nineteenth century has produced in England) that I have learnt the immense resources of the Common Law of England, and that nothing but the arbitrary encroachments of Parliament at this moment hinders a vigorous local legislation and local government under the fullest local freedom which can be desired."