Anyone,--only, unfortunately, so few of the leading intellectuals are in this position,--but anyone, who has learnt to know the modern labour movement where it was carried on by the workers themselves, knows how remarkable a feature it is in it, and how fraught with significance, that a certain trend of thought has laid intense hold on the souls of large numbers of men. What makes it at the present moment hard to adopt any line as regards the social conundrums that present themselves, is that there is so little possibility of an understanding between the different classes. It is so hard for the middle-class to-day to put themselves into the soul of the worker,--so hard for them to understand how the worker's still fresh, unexhausted intelligence opened to receive a work such as that of Karl Marx,--which, in its whole mode of conception, no matter how one regards its substance, measures the requirements of human thought by such a lofty standard. One man may agree with Karl Marx's intellectual system,--another may refute it; and the arguments on either side may appear equally good. In some points it was revised, after the death of Marx and his friend Engels, by those who came later and saw social life under a different aspect from these leaders. I am not proposing to discuss the substance of the Marxian system. It is not this that seems to me the significant thing in the modern working-class movement. The thing that to me seems significant above all others is, that it should be a fact, that the most powerful impulse at work in the labour world is a thought-system. One may go so far as to put it thus:--No practical movement, no movement that was altogether a movement of practical life, making the most matter-of-fact demands of every-day humanity, has ever before rested so almost entirely on a basis of thought alone, as the present working-class movement does. Indeed it is in a way the first movement of its kind to take up its stand entirely on a scientific basis. One must however see this fact in its proper light. If one considers everything that the modern worker has consciously to say about his own views and purposes and sentiments, it does not seem to one, from a deeper observation of life, to be by any means the thing of main importance. What impresses itself as of real importance is, that what in the other classes is an appendage of one single branch of the soul's life,--the thought-basis, from which life takes its tone,--has been made by proletarian feeling into the thing on which the whole man turns. What has thus become an inward reality in the worker is, however, a reality that he cannot acknowledge. He is deterred from acknowledging it, because thought-life has been handed down to him as ideology. He builds up his life in reality upon thoughts; yet feels thoughts to be unreal ideology. This is a fact that one must clearly recognise in the human evolution of recent years, together