It was even as he said. At the level of the first landing was a restaurant, with a strikingly fine portrait of Burns near the entrance. My curiosity was at a high pitch when I reached the second landing. It was ill-lighted, and it opened first into an almost dark store-room, in whose deep recesses were great stacks of chairs. But a single step to the right brought one to the wide-open door of Waverley Hall and a company of Socialists in full session. A man sat beside the door with a small table before him, on which in neat array were some attractive paper editions for sale. My eye fell in passing upon “The Fabian Essays,” and Thorold Rogers’s “Six Centuries of Work and Wages,” and an English version of Schäffle’s “Quintessence of Socialism.” “May I go in?” I asked of the man. “Oh, certainly,” he replied. “Walk right in, and take any vacant seat you choose.” I thanked him, and walked up a central aisle with rows of seats on either side, where sat from two or three hundred men and a few women. By the time that I had found a seat half way to the daïs, at the far end of the hall, where sat the chairman of the meeting, I was already deeply interested in the speech of a man who stood facing the company from the side, with his back against the wall. Slender and of medium height, with sandy hair slightly touched with gray, with an expression of ready alertness on his intelligent face, he was speaking fluently in good, well articulated English, and with deep conviction his evident inspiration. “What we want is education,” he was saying; “an education which will enlighten the capitalistic class as well as our own. We serve no useful end in denouncing the capitalists. They, like us, are simply a product of the competitive system, and individually many of them are good and generous men. But we shall be furthering the cause of Socialism in trying to show them their share of the evils under which we all live. How that, for example, owing to the present organization of society, in spite of all the safeguards which entrench private property, not even a capitalist can feel assured that his children or grandchildren may not be beggars upon the streets.” Such views, it seemed to me, at least suggested some catholicity of mind in “the Peddler,” as the speaker afterward declared himself to be. When he took his seat several men were on their feet at once, appealing to the chair, and I saw that the meeting was well in hand, for the chairman instantly singled out one for the privilege of the floor, addressing him politely by name, prefixing, however, the title “Comrade,” much as “Citizen” was used in the French Revolution and after.