So much for things as they are. The Revolution will, of course, not change our present bourgeois people—except that it will scare them thoroughly, and make them teachable. But it will bring to the front an enormous class of people to whom life is a new and wondrous thing; and their children also will grow up in a different world, and with a different ideal; and so a generation from now there will be a new art public. The people who compose it will not have been forced to consider money the only thing in life, the sole test of excellence and power; they will not have been brought up on the motto, “Do others or they will do you.” They will have been brought up in a world in which no man is able to “do” another man, and in which all men stand as equals as regards money. They will have been brought up in a world in which work and a decent life are the right and duty of every man, and are taken for granted with every man; in which influence, reputation, and command are given for other things than money. If it be true that faith, hope, and charity are greater things than wealth, it is perhaps not altogether Utopian to suppose that these will be the things that the new public will honour and will contrive to promote. The best way in which one can be sure about this is to study the writers who are shaping the ideals of Socialism—such men as Whitman and Thoreau, Ruskin and William Morris, Kropotkin and Carpenter and Gorky. Above all I wish that I could be the cause of the reader’s looking into one book, in which one of the master-spirits of our time has made an attempt to picture this beautiful world that is to be. When I met Mr. H. G. Wells last year, I had not read any of his books; so he sent me a copy of his “Modern Utopia,” graciously inscribing it: “To the most hopeful of Socialists, from the next most hopeful!” Afterward, I was asked by _Life_ to name the book which had given me the most pleasure during the last year, and I named this one. It is, in my opinion, one of the great works of our literature; it is worthy to be placed with the visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More. It has three great virtues which are rarely, if ever, found in combination. In the first place, it is characterised by a nobility and loftiness of spirit which makes its reading a religious exercise. In the second place, it is the work of an engineer, a man with the modern sense of reality and acquainted with the whole field of scientific achievement. In the third place, it is written in a a literary style which makes the reading of each paragraph a delight in itself. It is a book to love and to cherish; one leaves it, refreshed and strengthened, to wait with patience and cheerfulness the hour of the Great Change. CHAPTER VIII THE COÖPERATIVE HOME