Such is “Will Crooks” in his own home, addressing his own people, a natural orator commanding to the full the humour and pathos of work-a-day life, whose influence is directed towards wholesome things, with never an unworthy appeal. And such, in its essential soundness, in its perplexity before complicated issues, in its acceptance of all established things, even in its distrust of itself, its almost exaggerated willingness to receive guidance from others, is the million-peopled constituency who through this man has found voice--the Multitude which forms the people of England. The spread of “Socialism” amongst these, the voters who can decide elections, has been causing anxiety to many observers, especially to those who find a difficulty in discovering what function they would be called upon to fulfil in the Socialistic State. “Socialism,” however, up to the present, has been mainly a movement amongst the intellectuals and the Middle Classes: almost the male members of a type whose female representatives find the cause necessary to their energies and devotions in the agitation for women’s vote. The “Socialists” who assail each other so fiercely in queer, violent little newspapers, the writers of tracts, pamphlets, and appeals, the young men and women at the Universities who a generation ago would all have called themselves “Radicals,” and now all call themselves “Socialists,” are principally drawn from that “intellectual proletariat” which to-day is finding a growing gulf between possibility and desire. The stiff pictures of reconstructed worlds--a Bellamy’s “Utopia,” a Morris’s “Nowhere”--offer little attraction to the ordinary working man; whose idea of a Utopia is something far removed from these scenes of severe toil and voluntary or compulsory virtue. Mr. Wells has described, in brilliant, bitter sentences, the kind of Socialism thus propagated, and the classes to which it appeals. Academic, uncompromising Marxian Socialism appears as “the dusky largeness of a great meeting at the Queen’s Hall,” with the back of Mr. Hyndman’s head moving quickly, and the place “thick but by no means overcrowded with dingy, earnest people,” and in the chair “Lady Warwick, that remarkable intruder into the class conflict, a blonde lady, rather expensively dressed, so far as I could judge, about which the atmosphere of class consciousness seemed to thicken.” The impression was of “the gathering of village trades-people about the lady patroness. And at the end of the proceedings, after the red flag had been waved, after the ‘Red Flag’ had been sung by the choir and damply echoed by the audience, some one moved a vote of thanks to the Countess, in terms of familiar respect that completed the illusion.” And the Fabian Society, the laboratory in which intellectual Socialism is matured, with whose policy Mr. Wells is, on the whole, in agreement, appears to him incarnate in a “small, active, unpretending figure with