I recall one long and scurrilous article by a Member of Parliament, urging rebellious natives in South Africa to take heart of grace and pursue with ever-increasing vigour their attacks upon the small and isolated white populace which upheld British rule in that part of the Continent. I remember a long and venomous letter from another Member of Parliament (a strong advocate of the State payment of members) defending in the most ardently sympathetic manner both the action and the sentiments of a municipal official who had torn down and destroyed the Union Jack upon an occasion of public ceremony. We called this sort of thing British freedom in those chaotic days; and when our Continental rivals were not jeering at the grotesqueness of it, they were lauding this particular form of madness to the skies, as well they might, seeing that our insensate profligacy and incontinence meant their gain. The cause of a foreigner, good, bad, or indifferent--that was the cause Clement Blaine most loved to champion in his journal. An attack upon anything British, though the author of it might be the basest creature ever outlawed from any community--that was certain of ready and eager hospitality in the columns of _The Mass_. I can conceive of no infamy which that journal was not ready to condone, no offence it would not seek to justify--save and except the crime of patriotism, loyalty, avowed love of Britain. And this obscene, mad-dog policy, so difficult even to imagine at this time, was by curious devious ways identified with Socialism. _The Mass_ was called a Socialist organ. The fact may have been a libel upon Socialism, if not upon Socialists; but so it was. Be it said that at Cambridge I had rather surprised the evangelical section of my college (Corpus Christi) by the part I played in founding a short-lived institution called the Anonymous Society, the choicest spirits in which affected canvas shirts and abstention from the use of neckties. As Socialists, we invited the waiters of the college to a soiree, at which a judicious blend of revolutionary economics and bitter beer was relied upon to provide a flow of reasonable and inexpensive entertainment. The society lapsed after a time, chiefly owing, if I remember rightly, to an insufficiency of funds for refreshments. But I had remained rather a person to be reckoned with at the Union.