If Socialism meant the ruling of the people by the people, Wilde disliked it, as a new form of an old tyranny. He took it simply as an hypothesis of free food for everybody and the abolition of property. Rich and poor alike, he supposed, were to sell all they had and give ... to the state. He was interested solely in the development of personality, which, he thought, was hindered by the existence of private property, whether possessed or not possessed, a plus or a minus quantity. "Socialism itself," he says, "will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism," an individualism now difficult and rare, because it consists in the free development of personality that property, plus or minus, makes almost impossible except in special cases. That seems to me to be a very different Socialism from that of the people who, accepting greedily the sops thrown to Cerberus in the course of the essay, are willing to accept the whole as a manifesto of social revolution. Wilde keeps aloof from rich and poor alike, and, throughout a long paper, more carelessly written than most of his, is simply speculating upon what art can gain by social reform, and of what kind that reform must be, if art is not to be left in a worse case than before it. The essay is like notes from half a dozen charming, and, at that time, daring talks, thrown together, and loosely brought into some sort of unity by a frail connecting thread. In its airy distance from practical politics, nothing could be more dissimilar than _The Soul of Man_ from the two letters to The Daily Chronicle. While he lived in it, Wilde had been able to disguise, at least sometimes, his lack of independence from society. When society put him in prison he was face to face with that unpleasing fact. From being the subject of ironical discussion, society and its reform became most powerful and insistent realities. The poor were no longer people whose unlovely woe he did not like to remember, but men whom he had met, men from whom he had received kindness when he, like them, was "in trouble." Reform was no longer a vague idea with possibilities at once dangerous and delightful, but concrete, and with an immediate end. It was concerned not with the development of individuality, but with saving from disaster one poor man who had disobeyed regulations in giving a biscuit to a starving child, and many poor men from sleeping unnecessarily in an atmosphere of decaying excreta. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was poetry and propaganda; the two letters scarcely troubled about anything but their urgent purpose, though Wilde was incapable of writing sentences that should not be dignified and urbane. A beggar had been allowed into the Palace of Art, and would not be denied. * * * * *