One of the most remarkable chapters in _Walden_ is that on “Higher Laws,” in which the ideal of humaneness is insisted on as an essential part of Simplification. How often, from the lack of such principle, in the efforts to lead the simple life, has simplicity itself become little more than sentimentality! Who but a savage, for example, would include the keeping and killing of pigs as a feature of a model homestead? Yet in that establishment of which I have spoken, where the avowed aim was to be “natural,” the pig-killing was a festive event. “Father sticks ’em, brother cleans ’em,” was the description vouchsafed by a charming young “land-girl” (to use a later-invented term), who dwelt with delight upon these unsavoury divisions of labour in her Blithedale Romance. Well might Tolstoy use this pig-killing process in illustration of his argument that, in any advance toward civilization, a disuse of butchery must be “the first step.” Socialism was at that time in its early and romantic stage, when the menace of the Social Democratic Federation was becoming a terror to the well-to-do, and when many a dignitary of Church and State shared Dr. Warre’s belief that to “blow us up” was the diabolical desire of the incendiaries who denounced Capitalism. Doubtless it was the novelty of the attack that made it seem so terrible; for Chartism had been largely forgotten, and Secularism had been filling up the interval as the national bogey. Certainly in that period of the ’eighties the leading socialist figures seemed more ominous and sinister than do any in the Labour movement of to-day. To William Morris, indeed, as being a poet of wide renown, a sort of licence was accorded to speak as bluntly as he chose; but Hyndman, Burns, Bax and H. H. Champion were names of dark import to the “bourgeois” of that date. Mr. Hyndman’s repeated prophecies of a Revolution were none the less disturbing because they were always unfulfilled; Mr. Burns was dreaded as a demagogue who had been imprisoned owing to his defiance of law and order, Mr. Champion, as a retired army officer, who might possibly turn his military knowledge to deadly account. To one who knew those reformers personally, and their fearless labours in an unpopular cause, it is strange to recall the storm of obloquy which they then had to face; to them and others of like mettle is due in large measure such progress as has since been made in the betterment of the conditions of Labour. Their weakness was that they could not agree among themselves (reformers seldom can); hence the internal ruptures that wrecked the influence of the S.D.F. Round Champion in particular the discord raged, until he was ostracized by his former colleagues; yet no juster word was ever said of him than a remark made to me, years afterwards, by Mr. John Burns--that if he were ever in a tight place at a tiger-hunt there was no one whom he would so gladly have at his side as H. H. C.