But whether the inscription on the Union flag should be read Tory ...

But whether the inscription on the Union flag should be read Tory Democracy or Socialism depended mainly on the point of view of the beholder, who might perhaps in some lights read it as Birmingham, in others Fabianism. Anyone who set himself to collect all occurrences of the word Socialism in the Victorian age would probably conclude that it might be taken, or made to mean everything which a respectable man saw reason to disapprove of or to fear: Macaulay detected Socialism in Words-worth's Prelude.

From France it had brought with it associations, alarming and unsavoury, with subversion, plunder, and sex, which were strengthened by the spectacle of 1848, the National Workshops and the swift revulsion to despotism; and, though the Commune of 1871 had no more necessary affinity with Communism than it had with the Book of Common Prayer, the desolation of Paris, the massacres and the reprisals, gave both names a terrifying significance, which was not unfelt by the electors who returned the Conservatives in 1874. The industrial legislation of 1875, the extension of the franchise in 188, and the Local Government Act of 1888, made it certain that, whatever the driving force might be, the channels within which English Socialism would run would be insular and traditional: the Trade Union, the Municipality, the Parliamentary Committee. It was certain also that in the circumstances of that time the driving force would be in large degree religious: not only because the officials of the Trade Unions were often religious men, chapel leaders, and preachers, trained in the administrative habits of Methodism, equally accustomed to declamation and conference, but because the higher intelligence of the movement was impregnated with all those ideas, which descending from Coleridge, Arnold, and the Tractarians, had enriched the humanitarianism of the eighteenth century and the Evangelicals with a reverence for historical and social relations in themselves.

Even an anxious mind in the eighties might, on a fair review of persons and possibilities, have consoled itself that a revolution led by Morris and Cunninghame Graham, would certainly be picturesque: looking towards Gore and Dolling and the Christian Social Union, that it would very likely be High Church. That it would be Utilitarian, both in scope and method might also safely be assumed, because the Philosophic Radicals had created

a way of thought to which

every administrator instinctively conformed; a body of practice so extensive and solid that it left little room for any invasion of Utopian concepts.

True, the central idea of their administrative philosophy, the Local Authority for all purposes, had been blurred by special legislation, the creation of sleepy rural School Boards and obstructive urban Health Boards. But time was enforcing its wisdom.

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