That tall, grave, reverend-looking party who has just entered is the socialist leader, James D’Arcy. Humanity in the abstract is all he lives and works for. No concrete embodiment of the mammal, genus Homo, was ever the better in the smallest degree for knowing him, many specimens were very much the worse; but that is neither here nor there. He never wrote “humanity” with a little h, and always spelled “man” with a big M. What more could be expected of him? His was the work of a reformer, a leader of progress; petty details were for petty men. James D’Arcy had to live for the age, and live well too. It was such an unworthy, priest-ridden age withal, and “so dressed up in the tattered shreds of creeds outworn” (as he loved to express it at a Sunday morning Progress Club Lecture to “boot finishers” down Hoxton way), that the age ought to consider itself honoured by giving its best to support him in his journey through it right comfortably, or it would not even be worthy to be spelled by him with a capital A. And, as the age did want to be so distinguished from still more besotted and priest-ridden times, it rose to the occasion, and Mr. D’Arcy lived in clover. He entered the room accompanied by a little, unwholesome, saturnine, beetle-browed friend, Professor Melton. Tho professor looked as if he agreed with Isabella the Catholic, who set a penalty on bathing after the conquest of the Moors in Spain. Mr. Melton was lecturer on physiology at the Institute of Natural Science, and his laboratory was close by. It was seldom he permitted himself much relaxation, but felt it incumbent on him to aid in every scheme for liberating the minds of young people from reverence for the sacredness of days or devotion to religious exercises. So he had consented to promote the interests of this little society by his occasional presence. He was soon the centre of a group of talkers, and his talk was on the extinction of pauperism. “In a renovated society,” he said, “it will be recognised that there is no greater sin than almsgiving. By relieving distressed persons, by giving bread to the hungry, you defeat Nature, thwart her efforts to limit the too great increase of the race, and allow the recipient to make the fatal error that he can live without work.” “Would you deny assistance to the aged and the sick?” asked a lady. “I would abolish the Poor Laws, which establish the right of an asylum to old and infirm people, who actually often live for twenty years in the union at an expense to the country of say £250.” “Would you refuse to help them altogether?” “I would. By that means people would be made more provident, and would invest their savings when young to keep them when old.” “Then you would leave them to starve?”