Of Lord Beaconsfield's visions this is not the place to speak, I am concerned here only with the growth and the defects of my own; and as to the general theory of things which is dramatized in _The Old Order Changes_, its merits and its defects seem to me to be these. As for its merits, if compared with my earlier works, _Is Life Worth Living?_ and _A Romance of the Nineteenth Century_--in which no cognizance is taken of social politics whatever--_The Old Order Changes_ represents a great extension of thought, social problems being brought to the fore as an essential part of the religious. If compared with _Social Equality_, it represents an extension of thought likewise, in that it shows (as _Social Equality_ does not) how these two parts are connected. It is, however, in two ways deficient. At the time when the book was written, the extremist party in England, though comprising many militant Socialists, was for practical purposes composed mainly of men who were known as extreme Radicals. A prominent representative of this class war was Bright. Another at that time was Mr. Joseph Chamberlain. Instead of attacking all wealth, like Socialists, most of them were business men who spent their lives in pursuit of it. They denounced it in one form only--namely, land, and land only as the inheritance of aristocratic owners. The extraordinary inconsistency of attitude by which these men were characterized created an animus against them in the minds of many--I myself being one--which, though far from being undeserved, was not sufficiently discriminating. As I pointed out in _Social Equality_--and the same argument was repeated in _The Old Order Changes_--the great modern manufacturer, whatever he may think about old landed families, represents the forces on which the increasing wealth of the modern world depends. And yet in that novel I was more than once betrayed into so far joining the Socialists as to partially accept or repeat their denunciations of the modern manufacturers as persons owing all their wealth to the plunder of those employed by them. This extreme view is, indeed, corrected more than once by the priest; but it is nevertheless insinuated in certain passages in which the writer, by attributing them to the hero, seems to make it his own. It was not till I had carried my statistical studies farther that I was able to reduce the charge hurled by Socialists against the modern employers to what are their true and their relatively small dimensions. Meanwhile I felt that in _The Old Order Changes_, as a synthesis of my previous writings, I had made my profession of faith as clearly as I then could; and not long after its publication I betook myself for a mental holiday to a country where I hoped to discover that modern problems were unknown. CHAPTER XII CYPRUS, FLORENCE, HUNGARY