Dear lady: have you ever read St Augustine? If you have, you will remember that he had to admit that the early Christians were a very mixed lot, and that some of them were more addicted to blackening their wives’ eyes for tempting them, and wrecking the temples of the pagans, than to carrying out the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount. Indeed you must have noticed that we modern Christians are still a very mixed lot, and that it is necessary to hang a certain number of us every year for our country’s good. Now I will be as frank as St Augustine, and admit that the professed Socialists are also a very mixed lot, and that if joining them meant inviting them indiscriminately to tea I should strongly advise you not to do it, as they are just like other people, which means that some of them steal spoons when they get the chance. The nice ones are very nice; the general run are no worse than their neighbors; and the undesirable ones include some of the most thoroughpaced rascals you could meet anywhere. But what better can you expect from any political party you could join? You are, I hope, on the side of the angels; but you cannot join them until you die; and in the meantime you must put up with mere Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Protestants, Catholics, Dissenters, and other groups of mortal women and men, very mixed lots all of them, so that when you join them you have to pick your company just as carefully as if they had no labels and were entire strangers to you. Carlyle lumped them all as mostly fools; and who can deny that, on the whole, they deserve it?