This is so clearly evident that to any one who believes self-seeking is the ruling motive, the only possible motive in mankind, it seems incredible that your class ever will do anything than oppose to the last the advancement of Socialism. You will fight for what you have, and the Have-nots will fight to take it away. Therefore it is that the Socialists of the Social Democratic Federation preach a class war; to my mind a lurid, violent and distasteful prospect. We shall have to get out of the miseries and disorder of to-day, they think, if not by way of chateau-burning and tumbrils, at least by a mitigated equivalent of that. But I am not of that opinion. I have a lurking belief that you are not altogether eaten up by the claims of your own magnificence. While there are no doubt a number of people in your class who would fight like rats in a corner against, let us say, the feeding of poor people's starving children or the recovery of the land by the State to which it once belonged, I believe there is enough of nobility in your class as a whole to considerably damp their resistance. Because you have silver mirrors and silver hairbrushes, it does not follow that you have not a conscience. I am no believer in the theory that to be a _sans-culotte_ is to be morally impeccable, or that a man loses his soul because he possesses thirty pairs of trousers beautifully folded by a valet. I cherish the belief that your very refinement will turn--I have seen it in one or two fine minds visibly turning--against the social conditions that made it possible. All this space, all this splendour has its traceable connection with the insufficiencies and miseries from which you are so remote. Once that realization comes to you the world changes. In certain lights, correlated with that, your magnificence can look, you will discover--forgive the word!--a little _vulgar_.... Once you have seen that you will continue to see it. The _nouveau riche_ of the new Plutocratic type comes thrusting among you, demonstrating that sometimes quite obtrusively. You begin by feeling sorry for his servants and then apologetic to your own. You cannot "go it" as the rich Americans and the rich South Africans, or prosperous book-makers or rich music-hall proprietors, "go it," their silver and ivory and diamonds throw light on your own. And among other things you discover you are not nearly so dependent on the numerous men in livery, the spaces and enrichments, for your pride and comfort, as these upstart people.